{"id":167,"date":"2010-04-29T04:02:58","date_gmt":"2010-04-29T04:02:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/livingarguments.com\/?p=167"},"modified":"2010-04-29T04:02:58","modified_gmt":"2010-04-29T04:02:58","slug":"repentance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/livingarguments.com\/?p=167","title":{"rendered":"Repentance"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently bought a Kindle.\u00a0 That Kindle paid for itself with one International Herald Tribune article<\/a>.\u00a0 The article was about a man named As’ad Shaftari.\u00a0 He was an intelligence officer in a Christian militia during Lebanon’s\u00a0 Civil War (1975-1990).\u00a0 He is still feared in parts of the Muslim community for the torture and killings that was carried out on his orders and the lives he ended personally.\u00a0 This is how Shaftari describes his mindset during that time:<\/p>\n

At the end of the week I would go to church, after killing and torturing, to confess, but it was futile. I didn\u2019t see killing Palestinians as a sin.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ten years ago, Shaftari’s outlook changed.\u00a0 He published a sincere and complete apology for his war crimes, and has continued to repeat that apology to this day.<\/p>\n

I’ve read the article about As’ad Shaftari a half dozen times already.\u00a0 I’ve also been composing this single post for over an hour as I contemplate what I’ve read.\u00a0 My life experience doesn’t give me the ability to fathom the atrocities committed in Lebanon.\u00a0 Nor can I truly quantify the change that must have taken place in Shaftari’s character.\u00a0 All I can say is that for the last ten years, his actions have been those of repentance.\u00a0 How is it that this man, who has committed the greatest of crimes in the eyes of men, can repent; yet, so many of us fail to do so in the “small” evils that we commit against each other?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently bought a Kindle.\u00a0 That Kindle paid for itself with one International Herald Tribune article.\u00a0 The article was about a man named As’ad Shaftari.\u00a0 He was an intelligence officer in a Christian militia during Lebanon’s\u00a0 Civil War (1975-1990).\u00a0 He is still feared in parts of the Muslim community for the torture and killings that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-living-arguments","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/livingarguments.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/livingarguments.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/livingarguments.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/livingarguments.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/livingarguments.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/livingarguments.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":170,"href":"https:\/\/livingarguments.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions\/170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/livingarguments.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/livingarguments.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/livingarguments.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}