Not Sorry

 

Here are two of my reflections on National Sorry day and Sorry Week here in Australia, which I have posted elsewhere:

Firstly it is abusive:

“Telling someone they must say sorry for something someone else did, that they had no control or authority over, is spiritual and emotional abuse.

It's designed to keep a person down. Or a society down.

It's not Christian to support this perpetual sorriness. It's a twisted antichristian spin on Christian themes. Those who push it should be ashamed of themselves.”

Secondly, it really is abusive:

“There are married couples where one partner commits adultery and then repents and they manage to get over it, and move on and have a happy marriage. True forgiveness and reconciliation has happened in this situation. They have put the past behind them.

But there are marriages where adultery happens and they start to move on, the offending partner repents, and bends over backwards to grow and avoid the mistakes they made leading to their terrible sin. But the other spouse uses the sin as a perpetual weapon to dominate them, perpetually crush them, and continue to get revenge for the rest of their married lives. They use it to drive the offending spouse into the ground, breaking them. No amount of sorries is ever enough. This marriage either ends in a bitter partnership that saps both people of their dignity, or in one spouse running for the hills.

The architects of national sorry day have based it on this perverted twisted spin on sorry and reconciliation. And what's worse is they are using it to attempt to guilt people who never committed the sin.

To participate in this is shameful. And frankly it is more than a little abusive.”

I actually believe that many indigenous Australians were wronged by the colonial settler movement. Could you imagine what it was like for these very primitive indigenous peoples to encounter the, to them, highly advanced British settlers, and be powerless in the face of their advancing modern society?

A good example of how this would have felt is found in the story the War of the Worlds. In this story advanced aliens come and annihilate human civilisation. Human armies cannot stand up to their power. It is only because of the sheer luck of a virus that humanity is saved from extension. But for the indigenous Australians it was often the case that they were powerless to maintain their land and hunting grounds, and, on top of that, the viruses that existed in that day hit them even harder. This would create a profound personal and cultural shock.

But neither the indigenous people alive today are those who were wronged, nor are the modern European Australians responsible for what happened to them. These are historical wrongs that are long in the past. And that is even if you grant that it was all negative, which many people would debate anyway. I certainly would debate this, as would many others. 

It is not godly to keep bringing up the past and calling this reconciliation. It is the very opposite.