Justice or revenge

[Fido]

Originally Posted by xris

Wishful thinking comes to mind. You can have peace without justice, fear can create a peaceful community.

Traditionally, when something is taken from you, including the lives you prize, then honor is taken, and justice is the way honor is restored...

[xris]

Originally Posted by Fido

Traditionally, when something is taken from you, including the lives you prize, then honor is taken, and justice is the way honor is restored...

Honour is a strange word to use, it smacks of vendettas and mob rule.

[Fido]

Originally Posted by xris

Honour is a strange word to use, it smacks of vendettas and mob rule.

Honor is a strange, and even foreign word to use because where money is dear honor is cheap...But you cannot look at our past and understand human behavior even today in much of the world without reference to honor...Honor makes a whole different society, and honor makes a whole different economy... We can see in our government the trappings and displays of honor, the oaths, the forms, and formality, the distance, how did Nietzsche express it: The pathos of distance???
Look at our history as we have it, through ancient liturature, and you can see all of mankind on a quest for honor as we quest for money... Yet, people still live that way, and though honor societies cannot stand in the face of money societies they have worked for far longer than our money society could dream of, and all people everywhere have come out of them who are not still living in them...Honor is inextricably tied to justice, and no unjust man has honor... We presume of wealth that it has honor, though we never question how it was arrived at... For this reason, some poor people seek wealth no matter what its source, because they see that poverty is taken as dishonorable, and that wealth confers honor... Do we at least know that this is not true, that nothing but honorable wealth has honor???

You know, the beginning of the God Father has a good primer on honor...The mortician comes to the Don for revenge for his daughter because the court did not punish those who attacked her...He asks for death, and the Don refuses because his daughter was not killed... He invites the man under his protection, and orders justice for those guilty of injuring his own...The same was true in Ancient Athens...No one could bring a charge of murder unless they were related to the deceased, and no one could bring a charge of murder on behalf of a murdered slave...Honor reflects a certain relationship with ones community... That is the sense of the word rehabilitate... with the hab, of habitation being the essential word, because no one by choice lives with or near others who they do not trust...Trust is essential to honor and peace, and in fact, any relationship... Why do we have oaths at marriages??? Is it all formality???Try to have a marriage without honor, and you will find yourself out and looking in...The same is true of all societies; so we are fools to not think of honor more, and more highly of it...