Chapter Ten: Post One

I was genuinely surprised by what I found while researching this question. In searching for forgiveness on Google, 56,000,0000 results were found. This was the first term that I typed into the search engine and I thought that for sure it would yield the most results. It was the term that I could identify with the most, and I could easily rationalize why someone would try to seek out advice about how to forgive another person. The results produced by this term were many sites offering definitions for the term and many self-help and religious-affiliated sites. The second term, reconciliation, yielded only 52,300,000 results which I did not find surprising and most of these were definitions and stories from blogs, videos etc. What I did not expect, was that revenge would produce the most results at 264,000,000. This number is dramatically higher than the others, which I found to be disturbing. Why people would be posting so much more information about revenge, rather than about forgiveness is troubling and it makes me wonder if most peoples' gut reactions cause them to seek a resolution based on anger and aggression rather than compassion and self-healing principles. Most of the sites about revenge were involving definitions, videos, and a television show titled, "Revenge." Given that there are so many reasons people don't forgive one another, I guess that I can understand that forgiveness can be a difficult idea to reconcile; However, I just didn't think that revenge would be a more popular alternative.