CC ponders what murder must look like from God's perspective

This started as two responses to Peacebang'sreally good thread on Universalism and God's forgiveness.

I suspect that when you deal with humanity on the scale that God does, murder seems less significant. Things that don't seem especially significant are easier to forgive.

I was never much of one for a personal God, though.

One has to assume that God on a regular basis sees every sort of awfulness humanity can think of and a few varieties that can only be left to nature.

According to the census bureau's international database, some 154,483 people die every day. Likely the majority of these individuals die in a way that would upset any reasonable person who really understood each story. (Many die of starvation, many are killed in pointless wars, many die of disease treatable in other parts of the world, many die alone and ignored by the families they built, many get preventable diseases they didn't understand how to prevent, many die in stupid accidents, many die of quiet suicide caused by addictions they developed because they were abused or otherwise treated badly, many commit suicide directly. And yes, many are murdered.)

In the context of all these deaths, murder doesn't seem like an outlier in terms of shitty ways to die.

Is is possible that one of the things that makes God God is God's ability to care for each and every one of those people as individuals and want justice for everyone?

Yes, but I for one have trouble conceiving of it.

But then, I'm most assuredly not God.

If I had to guess, though, I'd say that in God's ultimate ability to take the long view, God sees the probably fairly forgivable roots of every murder.

Murderers become murderers through some combination of circumstance and being born that way.(Presumably God does not "make" a sociopath any more directly than God "makes" a tornado. But nobody expects a tornado to ask forgiveness.)

CC