I guess it boils down to your beliefs about states' rights, if you don't believe in them than Lee was a traitor, if you do then he was loyal to his country at the time, the C.S.A.
Some crimes might just be deserving of hell no matter how truly you believe in Jesus Christ, perhaps because if you truly believed in Him, you would not be capable of committing the sinful acts.
Under that logic we're all doomed unless you discovered how to live a sinless life. What about the thief on the cross?
I don't know many people who still justify slavery but certainly their views were different back then.
Do you hate George Washington too?
George Washington recognized loyalty to one's country came before loyalty to one's state. Something Lee didn't see to understand.
People who like to twist another's words are usually losing the argument. I never once said anything evidencing a hatred of Lee. He was a man with the moral character of his time, he was a great general, honest in his personal dealings and loyal to the causes he believed in. What I said about him is that he is not worthy of honor. Respect, pity and magnanimity, yes, but not honor or emulation. He fought in the cause of evil. And that you don't recognize that he fought for evil means that you have not fully reconciled yourself with the loss by the south of the Civil War. That is very strange in the year 2006, and usually evidence of either a problem with race relations or of living in a fantasy world of chivalrous southern glory days that were extinguished when the ruthless Yankees exceeded their Constitutional mandate by preventing the free people of the south from leaving the Union.
Regardless of where you come out on states rights, Lee fought for evil. States rights were asserted in 1860 in order to preserve slavery, not for some grand general principle. They were asserted throughout the 1900s in order to preserve Jim Crow. As Barry Goldwater asserted, it is a shame that states' rights have been historically touted by villainous people in dastardly causes, because states' rights in theory are an important part of a federal system. It's when states' rights are used in order to betray the rights of citizens, to perpetuate a system that denies US citizens their rights as Americans, that states' rights come into disrepute. In other words, it's not the concept, but the practice of states' rights as a shield for unlawful treatment of fellow citizens that has been the problem.
The most damage to the federal system came not from the civil war, but from the Roosevelt era, when the commerce clause was expanded to mean anything the Congress wanted it to mean. The Civil War demonstrated that as a practical matter, states could not secede. It did not destroy the federal system, and after the war, states went back to doing the things they do, and the federal government went back to what it did, regulating railroads and shooting Indians. The nature of the relationship between states and the feds did not change substantially until the depression and Roosevelt's radical leftist response.
As I said in a prior post, which you apparently like to twist or ignore, I am understanding of people who were products of their time, including some of my forebears. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the southern gentry in general grew up in a world that had never known anything but slavery. It was accepted in the ancient world, the medieval world, in the renaissance and in the colonial period. It was done in the east, in China, Mongolia, Malaysia and India, and in the west, in Europe, Africa and Arabia. From time immemorial, a conquered people were sold into slavery, if they were not killed outright. It is not unusual or condemnatory that people from the south who prospered or who were born into prosperous families had slaves. But....by 1850 and after, though, once the slavery debate had become well known in educated and relatively modern lands, people in the south needed to start examining their souls and their consciences and thinking a little harder about it.
Part of the glory of the English-speaking peoples is that they were the first to recognize slavery as universally immoral, and to work for its abolition worldwide. That movement was in its infancy in the late 1700s, but became widespread in the 1800s, and it became clear by the middle of that century that slavery was not compatible with a modern, thinking society. Had southerners been willing to phase out slavery over 30 or even 50 years, there probably could have been some kind of compromise that would have prevented war. But they were not--no one was going to tell them to get rid of their slavery! And with the expansion into the west, they were not going to allow new states that were not slaveholding into the Union, because then, in 30 or 50 years, they'd be outvoted, and would lose the institution then!
So they got out while the gittin' was good, while they were still close enough in size to the rest of the Union that they couldn't be outvoted and that they couldn't be conquered--so they thought.
The war was fought entirely to protect slavery, and states' rights were the vehicle to protect slavery, and you apparently regret that slavery was ended. Too bad for you. I am glad that you are among a tiny, tiny percentage of Americans who wish the south had won the civil war, or that the north had let the south secede.
It really bothers you that I think that Lee might have some explaining to do in the hereafter, doesn't it?
Jesus forgave a petty thief who was beside him on the cross. He did not forgive a mass murderer, so it remains unknown and unknowable whether there are crimes that are unforgivable, no matter your view of Jesus as Lord and Messiah. Most denominations believe that faith alone is enough, but not all. I don't profess to know the answer to that one but personally, I hope that child molesters, mass murderers, Islamofascists and the guy who cooked his girlfriend don't get to go to heaven by making a profession of faith. I'll do my best in this life and hope I come out all right. I will try to be as honorable as Lee in my personal dealings, and also try to use whatever talents I have to advance good in this world, instead of slavery or oppression or some other immoral object.