Where I think your logic is flawed is that, based on the premise that all people have some degree of "mental illness or dysfunction" (though if stress and anger made that list, perhaps the criteria for the sort of mental dysfunction that causes irrepressible changes in behavior is too broad), you seem to have made the assumption that mankind in general can't be held responsible for their actions.
I belong to a faith tradition (philosophical Taoism) that holds that personified deities such as the Christian God are human constructs created for social control. Thus discussions like this may be theological to some, but are sociological to me.
It seems to me that evolutionary biology teaches that traits passed down through generations have survival value and that cognitive and emotional processes are no exception. Thus it is reasonable to believe that regret, pain, anger, and so forth have had and continue to have survival value. They are manifested in continuums, and like any such continuum, extremes are likely to be dysfunctional. "One smart-ass can ruin your
chi for a whole day!"
I agree that in an ethical sense, we all are imperfect as an essential part of human nature, but diminished capacity or function sufficient to absolve anyone of responsibility for their own actions must be an extreme on that continuum.
Religion aside, I disagree strongly. I, personally, am able to decide right from wrong based on my moral code, and generally stick to those morals. I'm imperfect, of course, and there's been moments where opportunism and expediency, or even raw emotion, have caused me to compromise my own beliefs. These compromises, however, were never made in ignorance.
I'm not sure about the "ignorance" part, we make decisions under conditions of uncertainty, and thus the results expected and the results attained can be different. Do we judge actions by their intentions or by their results? It's a long running argument. But I understand and generally agree with your position. In ethics, the number of perfect teachers is identical to the number of perfect students.
Now, I'm a pretty smart guy by most accounts. I like to think that I'm far from the average in terms of my ability to honestly self-assess. Come on, though, I can't be the only guy out there that, when he does something fucked up, realizes he's doing something fucked up. If you're aware of the wrongness of your actions, regardless of which emotion or dysfunctional culture led you to them, you are 100% responsible for them.
I have no doubt that in Jellystone Park we are all "smarter than the average bear". As I have aged and observed more people, my estimate of the portion of the population that is self-aware of their own cognitive processes keeps diminishing. This is not a put down of people. More it is a realization of how much our lives are governed by rules of thumb, social conventions, habits, and so forth. It's a symptom of a deeper problem, how we experience reality. Our senses from before we are born strain to make sense of the world that is bombarding us with input. Our brains develop frameworks to organize this input and structure it. When we begin to communicate we exchange these frameworks with others, and discover ultimately that each person experiences their reality in a unique way. When almost everyone agrees on a part of a shared framework, that becomes the common reality which defines sanity. People who do not share that framework are considered mentally ill. But not everything is black or white. Americans are about equally divided on the existence of UFO's, alien encounters, and the existence of angels and devils. Which group defines sanity?
Making the blanket statement that God holding people responsible for their actions is somehow unjust is pretty silly on this basis. Assuming this is all true, for all you know he might have planned for those people too stricken by mental illness or not bright enough to account for their own actions and will hold them to much less stringent standards, if any at all.
Note that because I don't believe in a personified deity, I never encounter this problem. To me there is no Cosmic Hitman in the Sky dispensing a peculiar type of judgment that shockingly is based on my person sense of injustice. I don't even need an afterlife to allow such a God to balance out the divine scales in the next life if such God fails to do so in this life. The classical theological conundrums of the existence of evil, of suffering, and of death in a cosmos created by an all-powerful, all-knowing personified sentient God disappear. Without God-talk to distract me, I have more time to observe, contemplate, and meditate on how a wise person ought to live their life and treat other people.
