Easy divine forgiveness undermines moral improvement and enables aggressive impulses

Evidence

But while the reward of having guilt removed helps keep the authoritarian religious, wiping the slate clean so easily probably undermines the desire to improve; hence the deeds may well be repeated. And the resulting selfrighteousness plays a major role in authoritarian aggression. It disinhibits aggressive impulses. Though it may seem terribly inconsistent that feeling forgiven leads to attacking others, it makes sense when you put together the pieces of the authoritarian mind. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1912

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely counterintuitive causal chain: divine forgiveness, far from promoting virtue, disinhibits aggression by removing guilt while removing the pressure to change.
• XREF: connects to: Moral healing requires facing a community’s past sins directly — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the…, 176