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Thoughts 2/9/2005 February 9, 2005

Posted by Kelsey Martineau in Philosophy.
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Have you ever wanted to go back and change something? Change something that you think you’ve done wrong in the past? Think back to a situation, that you may regret, and if you could change it, would you? Should you is a better question. Changing that situation would alter so much. Changing it would in essence make you less aware of your surroundings, less aware of what you should and shouldn’t do in the future. So in a way, the situation that you would like to change, would happen inevitably, because if you went back and changed it, who is to say that you wouldn’t make the same mistake again, because your memories of that situation would be lost. We all have things that we wish we would have done differently. Things that we wish we wouldn’t have said or done, and we say that we would give up so much to go back and correct it. This comes back to the issue of regret. Well if you stop and think about it, to regret something you did, is better to regret something you didn’t do. Altering what you did in the past would do nothing but alter your position now, so would you really want that? Would you want to be less of a person than you are today for one small mistake that you made in the past?

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1. Rusty - February 11, 2005

What if it weren’t a ’small’ mistake? Regret, when it is properly in context, is a God given Grace. How could I ever repent of wrongdoing, if I did not have regret over ‘doing’ it? How could I ask forgiveness for mistreating you, if I never felt that what I did was wrong? Now, saying that, I do believe that regret, when taken out of this godly contect, can indeed be crippling. But of course regret at this point has ceased to be merely ‘feeling sorry’ for the past, and has become despairing. And as I heard in “Anne of Green Gables”: To despair is to turn your back on God.