EICHMANN AND TRUE FORGIVENESS

My bartender is a true saint: He would never scare or shame away a good costumer, whatever sins he may have committed.
His daughter in the same spirit of reconciliation has sent his sister a polite invitation to an important family occasion of some kind of religious formality, which perhaps only God understands .
His sister however has answered him instead of his daughter, that as long as the latter does not ask for forgiveness for some kind of rather trivial pursuit, there can be no such reconciliation, not even in all formal politeness.

My bartender has answered that true forgiveness is always unconditioned. And he mentions a woman victim of the late German doctor Mengele, who many years later wrote his family a letter of forgiveness for their deceased relative. Yet she had lost her own twin sister due to his medical experiments - which she herself survived.

Now we don't know whether the two twins were on particularly good terms - and in case they were Siamese twins and besides mutually rather unforgiving, one might even assume that the surviving sister must have been quite grateful for her final liberation after all. In that case you may even forgive the loss of some organ of minor importance: especially if you are equipped with two of them.

This way of reasoning however does not include legs and hands, because in these particular cases the whole functional point after all is to have both symmetrical limbs. Whereas if you are so lucky to have two livers, you really could do as well with only one of them - except of course if you also happen to be a serious alcoholic with no life insurance.

My bartender's point is that unconditional forgiveness is a gift of spiritual freedom for both yourself and the person you forgive. Yes, but what if the sinner on purpose did something truly "unforgivable" and at the same time does not regret it at all?

Well, in that case you must be either Dalai Lama or Buddha to be able to forgive - but if you can, the spiritual gain will be so much greater. And we really should be Buddha - according to Buddha himself as well as my bartender.

Well, we will for sure work on that one. But what if the crime is not an event in the past, but is still going on as a permanently upheld state just like God's presumed continuous creative  preservation of the world, and with not the slightest sign of wanting to give himself and his victims at least a break?

That is a hard one. And one might even suggest that if we were at least allowed to exterminate our enemies once and for all, we would be fully able to forgive them with all our heart afterwards:
In the well known spirit of: "Let the dead ones rest in eternal peace - but between us the old fool really was an ass, though I admit that he had his good sides too.",