How Jerks Buy Licenses For Transgressions
In Sevilla and some places nearby in southern Spain, every year in the spring, the Semana Santa is celebrated. There are fraternities affiliated with every church. During that week, every fraternity performs a procession, that can last up to 14 hours. On a heavy float, the main figure from the church is carried by men underneath. Other men march, with a costume and a hood covering their faces, barefoot, carrying one or several heavy wooden crosses over their shoulders and very expensive huge candles.
They pretend to do penance for their sins. In reality, they buy the license for more transgressions in the future. During the previous year, they may have cheated on their wives or beaten them, they may have gambled or spent money on alcohol, while the family was lacking the funds for a decent life, they may have indulged in other serious moral transgressions.
They experience their 14 hours of marching through the city as an act of undoing all the harm and hurting, they have done during an entire year. Afterwards they feel free with a clean slate to restart doing the same or other transgressions again. They feel free to do so, because they know, that a year later, they will annihilate their transgressions again.
They also consider it a duty of the victims of the transgressions to forgive them as if they had never been illtreated and wronged, and many of the victims themselves are brainwashed by their religion to comply.
It is a weird thinking. Nobody of them would expect to be released by marching in a procession from financial debts when owing money to the bank. But they take it for granted, that the victims release them from all moral debts.
This is an extreme version of this kind of thinking. But it is not very different from the jerk, who cheats on his wife, and then buys her a diamond ring or a fur coat and believes, that this way he has compensated for the transgression, as if he had bought the right to be forgiven.
In my opinion, these men are jerks and wimps. They buy themselves the easy way out. Learning better self-control, learning how to resist temptations to hurt others would cost them much more effort, strain and unpleasant time than a procession once a year or an expensive gift.
In Sevilla and some places nearby in southern Spain, every year in the spring, the Semana Santa is celebrated. There are fraternities affiliated with every church. During that week, every fraternity performs a procession, that can last up to 14 hours. On a heavy float, the main figure from the church is carried by men underneath. Other men march, with a costume and a hood covering their faces, barefoot, carrying one or several heavy wooden crosses over their shoulders and very expensive huge candles.
They pretend to do penance for their sins. In reality, they buy the license for more transgressions in the future. During the previous year, they may have cheated on their wives or beaten them, they may have gambled or spent money on alcohol, while the family was lacking the funds for a decent life, they may have indulged in other serious moral transgressions.
They experience their 14 hours of marching through the city as an act of undoing all the harm and hurting, they have done during an entire year. Afterwards they feel free with a clean slate to restart doing the same or other transgressions again. They feel free to do so, because they know, that a year later, they will annihilate their transgressions again.
They also consider it a duty of the victims of the transgressions to forgive them as if they had never been illtreated and wronged, and many of the victims themselves are brainwashed by their religion to comply.
It is a weird thinking. Nobody of them would expect to be released by marching in a procession from financial debts when owing money to the bank. But they take it for granted, that the victims release them from all moral debts.
This is an extreme version of this kind of thinking. But it is not very different from the jerk, who cheats on his wife, and then buys her a diamond ring or a fur coat and believes, that this way he has compensated for the transgression, as if he had bought the right to be forgiven.
In my opinion, these men are jerks and wimps. They buy themselves the easy way out. Learning better self-control, learning how to resist temptations to hurt others would cost them much more effort, strain and unpleasant time than a procession once a year or an expensive gift.
