Forgiveness: What about it?

[Stranger]

On what grounds and for what purpose should I bathe them in absolution? 

Excellent questions!
Purpose: to heal yourself.  You don't bathe them in absolution when you forgive.  You heal a rift within yourself.  Buddha said that anger is like holding a hot coal with the intent to throw it at someone - it burns you first.  

As spiritually evolving beings, our primary goal is to learn unconditional love.  The closer we can come to that goal, the closer we come to the bliss of the Creator, who, like the sun, "shines upon the just and the unjust alike."  So, if you want to achieve your soul's primary wish and aim, and to be happy - those are the purposes of forgiveness.

Now, on to grounds.  Ultimately, there is only one being in the Universe.  One conscious entity role-playing various forms.  The forms themselves have no life, no substance - they are thought forms; Ra calls them "husks".  One person is role-playing many roles, and there is only one person: the Creator.

From that perspective - the most clear and least distorted level of looking at the world - being angry at another makes as much sense as being angry at the actor playing a villain in a movie.  Not at the character - the character is just a figment of the imagination.  The actor is simply reading the lines he's meant to read.  So who is there to be angry at, to not forgive?  

Everything you see is simply perfect, blissful, untainted light, channeled into different forms that make it superficially appear as something else.  When we come to 3D, we agree to put on goggles that make a flat and artificial creation appear real.  Let's call them 3D goggles.  And so we begin to think that the movie is real, and get upset at the characters.  Ever get sucked in to a movie's plotline so much that you start to sympathize with the characters, who don't even exist?  Now, imagine that taken to the extreme: if you were born in a movie theater and could not remember a time before you were watching the movie.  That's very much what's happening here.  Plato's myth of the cave is an amazingly, brilliantly accurate metaphor for 3D.

What's the solution?  Reconnect with reality outside the movie theater; remember what is truly real, and what is merely an interesting and captivating story.  Outside of your local AMC, it's a mixed bag.  Outside of the 3D movie we're all watching, however, it's all everlasting bliss that lacks nothing.  And just as we can be in the movie theater and, at the same time, in the "real world", so are we simultaneously in 3D and in the True Reality that is perfect light.  Realizing this state while still in the 3D illusion is both the grounds and the purpose of forgiveness.