guilt

The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time. Not only that, but maybe the basic message of original sin isn't "feel guilty all the time." Maybe it is more along these lines: "We all have a notion of what it means to be good, and we can't live up to it all the time.

I am against justice _ whenever it is carried out by a mob.

I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief.

It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

The law does not expect a man to be prepared to defend every act of his life which may be suddenly and without notice alleged against him.

Well, did he do it?"She always asked the irrelevant question. It didn't matter in terms of the strategy of the case whether the defendant "did it" or not. What mattered was the evidence against him -- the proof -- and if and how it could be neutralized. My job was to bury the proof, to color the proof a shade of gray. Gray was the color of reasonable doubt.

I couldn't quite understand how an ordinary man's good qualities could become crushing accusations against a guilty man.

In this sense every serious choice has a tragicomic dimension. For it is impossible to be a human being without choosing, and it is impossible to choose without value denials, and it is impossible to deny values without guilt. That is a very simple though, but it forms the core definition of guilt: an awareness of significant value loss for which I know myself to be responsible. Guilt is the self-knowing of moral loss.

The thoroughly guilty man has an advantage over all of us; he cannot be found more guilty of anything, since he has already found himself guilty of everything. This may sound like an absurdity - causing oneself extreme pain in order not to feel any number of little pains of lesser guilts and shames, but it has its own logic. A man more easily adapts to what he inflicts upon himself; as to his own judgement, he is already committed to it and willing to live with it.

Men like that _ when they know they won__ be found out _ they will do anything.

But when we make choices that are different than what our friends are doing, it might seem to them that we are questioning their choices - even if it has nothing to do with them.... And what is the sense in feeling guilty about making different choices than our mothers and the other women before us? Our mothers did the best they could with what they had available to them. Our choices, if different from theirs, are not a denouncement of theirs.

You should never have a relationship based on guilt over someone's poor choices.

It was a stark choice: shoes or food; beauty or sustenance; the sensible or the self-indulgent. "I'll take the shoes," she said firmly.

...Except when I was alone. I'd hate myself. It's how we feel about ourselves when we're alone that must guide our decisions.

People who own their lives do not feel guilty when they make choices about where they are going. They take other people into consideration, but when they make choices for the wishes of others, they are choosing out of love, not guilt; to advance a good, not to avoid a bad.

With every rise in choices, the expectations double up which puts people deeper down into the rubble.

I can learn to live with guilt. I don't care about being good.

On our Journey, we should not dwell on the guilt emerging because of dropping back to Ego-dominated state; instead, we should celebrate that we are in the state of the Presence!