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> He refuses to trust that loving God, and all that this entails, leaves any room for enjoying life
Everyone has their own version of God. For some it's simply Love or for others it's some hyper-intelligent being responsible for the big bang and creation. My personal theory is that it's not a bearded man in the sky, but nature's own intelligence, you know, the way nature seems intelligently designed, and in a way, perfect.
I will also add: God doesn't really care about humanity, with all its suffering and division. If God really cared, we would be living in a utopia, free of suffering. But then, what's the point? If we're all doped up on serotonin, or in a permanent MDMA like trance, what's the goal then? We need suffering IMHO to grow and prosper. Trees only grow because of wind and resistance.
As an atheist that left Protestantism due to arguments like this, I find the "we need suffering" a bit naive. Where do we draw the line with unfair suffering? Disease. Pain. Rape. Poverty. There are abject lows that some people start in then die young, or start in then never leave and die old. This type of suffering is largely needless and tragic, and any argument that tries to put meaning on it seems to fall apart to me.
Yeah, I'm an Orthodox Christian, but suffering & death are explicitly framed in the Bible as a totally unnecessary, true evil. Hence why the story begins and ends in a literal Paradise (unless one chooses otherwise). "The last *enemy* that shall be destroyed is death." 1 Corinthians 15:26
What? The bible, at least the new testament, is full of verses saying suffering comes along with Christianity.
Most suffering is unnecessary, that is true; there is, nonetheless, a level of suffering that drives me to improve myself to avoid it - and I suspect this may be universal.
All things in moderation.
Young children, for instance, can suffer terrible emotional distress when they do not get their way. One can be compassionate for that suffering while recognising they must go through it to learn and grow.
If suffering is the gap between our expectations and reality, necessary suffering is the amount required to calibrate our expectations sufficiently accurately.
Begs the question, what is "fair" suffering?
I don't think anyone argues that terrible suffering you described is a good thing, but rather that suffering is endemic to living. We don't get to decide how much happens to us, but we can work towards a world that minimizes avoidable extreme pain and injustice.
I meant it in the Buddhist sense of a lotus flower not being able to grow on a bed of marble, it needs its roots buried in dirty mud. Some amount of adversity is needed in order to grow and build character.
That doesn't make any sense. To a lotus, mud isn't adversity, it's its preferred growing environment. A bed of marble would be it's adversity, and as you pointed out there, it doesn't build character in a bed of marble.
I meant it in the Buddhist sense of a lotus flower not being able to grow on a bed of marble, it needs its roots buried in dirty mud. Some amount of adversity is needed in order to grow and build character.
Some people argue that suffering comes from other people's free will.
But there's also suffering caused by things other than people: earthquakes, volcano eruptions...
Buddhists and Stoics would argue suffering comes from wanting things to be in a way that they are not, not from that the things are in the way that they are.
I don't know if this is always true, but it does appear quite true that we spend a great deal more time worrying about misfortunes past and present than actually experiencing them as they happen.
There is the belief in karma and reincarnation that addresses this.
Karma and reincarnation applied to the existence of suffering in the present; a thin veneer over blaming the victim, the justification for oppressive caste systems and class discrimination
Why do you think life is less meaningful if we're not suffering? Why is suffering necessary for growth and prosperity? Where do you draw the line between suffering for suffering's sake, and suffering for growth?
And trees can totally grow without wind and resistance, take a look inside any greenhouse that's go one in it.
I meant it in the Buddhist sense of a lotus flower not being able to grow on a bed of marble, it needs its roots buried in dirty mud. Some amount of adversity is needed in order to grow and build character.
> If God really cared, we would be living in a utopia, free of suffering.
The Christian position is that God made a utopia. The world we are currently living is is abnormal - it has changed.
Well, who changed it? God? No, man did.
But if God really cared, wouldn't He have undone it? He could. The price would be that what we choose and what we do has no effect. That meaninglessness is a pretty high price for utopia.
But does He actually care enough to do anything? Yes. His "fixing" process involved His Son dying on the cross.
That's the Christian position. You may disagree with it. But "If God really cared, we would be living in a utopia, free of suffering" (and therefore either God doesn't exist or He doesn't care) is not the only consistent view of our present situation.
Seems like a cop out to me. God is also omniscient. Man did some things, but all within a predefined context that God created with complete ability to foresee how it would play out. Suppose we imagine that the story of Eden is real.
God has omniscience to know exactly what will happen. Even if you somehow claim that human free will overrides omniscience, which seems unlikely, an intelligent being could predict the outcome of the circumstances to varying degrees of precision.
The real Christian view, though not often admitted, seems to be that God doesn't really give a shit about earthly life because it's all irrelevant compared to eternal paradise in heaven. Jesus offering forgiveness makes it all good, because you get this infinitely more heavily weighted component to your infinite lifespan even if your earth life sucks. Which, hey, isn't wrong, given the premises.
This never really made sense to me. God created man. The level of curiosity, the level of self control, the level of obedience in man, these were all set by God. Either he had no idea that the levels he set would eventually lead man to sin, or else he had set man up to fail.
> Well, who changed it? God? No, man did.
Huh? Maybe we read a different Genesis. Yahweh cast out Adam and Eve so that they wouldn't eat from the Tree of Life and become like him and the other gods. The humans didn't change anything.
> The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden
Genesis 3:22
I meant it in the Buddhist sense of a lotus flower not being able to grow on a bed of marble, it needs its roots buried in dirty mud. Some amount of adversity is needed in order to grow and build character.
Great explanation.
> Everyone has their own version of God.
https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
[I]n the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
If you are already familiar with "This is Water" the below podcast of a philosopher and a psychologist about it might be of interest:
Oh get out of here with your suffering is noble nonsense. Take all your clothes off, give away all your money and live outside in a ditch if you like it so much.
If we instead are born and tube fed from a machine and allowed to just think non-stop of amazing things. is that a better version of life?
It's not that suffering is noble, it's that suffering is the default and we don't know why. And in the meantime the suffering causes growth. At least we hope.
A lot of suffering doesn't cause any growth whatsoever, especially the kind of suffering that ends in painful, horrifying death.
Challenges may cause growth, and I don't think anybody really wishes for an unchallenging, boring, uneventful life. But suffering? No, thanks.
> born and tube fed from a machine and allowed to just think non-stop
Sorry, are you trying to describe even worse suffering than the poverty the preceding comment described?
I meant it in the Buddhist sense of a lotus flower not being able to grow on a bed of marble, it needs its roots buried in dirty mud. Some amount of adversity is needed in order to grow and build character.
It is not that suffering is noble. It is that suffering is living.
And that rather than running from this reality, if one accepts it instead whole new worlds are opened up. For many is a happier way to walk through life.
Seems pagan Diogenes rather enjoyed that lifestyle.
You know, he never really seemed happy in those stories. Except maybe the time he trolled the academy with a "featherless biped".
Don't we put our children in bicycles, knowing that they'll fall and hurt themselves? Does that mean we don't care about our children? Of course not. How is it different if God gives us the ability to love and to hate, to cherish and to steal, to be selfless or to be selfish. We all get to choose a unified aspect that will make the world better or worse, for others. We can't force others to be better, only ourselves, but we can help others.
If we learn, as individuals, to be better people, under all circumstances, is that not the same as learning to ride a bike? And once we learn to ride our bike, perhaps there'll be other things to learn too.
This is kind of a privileged take. There are many people where struggle is survival, not an opportunity for growth.
Unless theres an equal playing field for all and everyone has means to overcome their suffering, then this "God" is nothing more than perverse and cruel, not some kind of benevolent parental figure encouraging us to edification.
I meant it in the Buddhist sense of a lotus flower not being able to grow on a bed of marble, it needs its roots buried in dirty mud. Some amount of adversity is needed in order to grow and build character.
Growth and prospect are anthropocentric values. The same goes for the point of life. Evolution does not have a point. And extending the meaning of the word "God" just to claim that everyone has their own God is just making words meaningless.
The only way for there to not be suffering is for us to not have free will.
well, we don't have free will, so why do we suffer?
We don't have predictable destined behavior either. Even if we think we're mules to brain chemistry, randomness is a thing.
"In his preface to Fear and Trembling (1843), Søren Kierkegaard (writing under the pseudonym, Johannes de silentio) says he hopes no one will read his book. Further, he predicts his wish will be granted because of the reading proclivities of his contemporaries, whose one requirement of a book is that it can be consumed during the afternoon nap."
LOL good thing he did not write it in the present day... Also, found this quote interesting
"In his recent and acclaimed book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, philosopher and literary critic Martin Hägglund challenges the details of Kierkegaard’s account head-on. He argues that while Fear and Trembling makes the single strongest case for the compatibility of religious faith and meaningful engagement with the world, the case ultimately fails."
I wonder if it's a case where different people feel different things. I've never felt something I could call "faith", but my brother has and does. Faith doesn't seem like something that you can fake or develop. In that case, pursuing faith-based religion sounds like a bad idea for me. Maybe that's something you can develop?
Nah you can both fake and develop it if that's what you're into. If you act as if something is true long enough eventually your brain will force you to believe it, or to stop those acts.
Plus anyway believers are neither inherently stupid nor possessing fundamentally different brain structures or anything that would enable a different set of experiences from everyone else. All honest believers are also nonbelievers to some extent or at different times. What actions you take in the face of that contradiction is basically what defines your belief these days, as much as your creed does.
> If you act as if something is true long enough eventually your brain will force you to believe it, or to stop those acts.
So there's a chance you won't ever believe in it? That sounds liek what I was saying.
> Plus anyway believers are neither inherently stupid nor possessing fundamentally different brain structures or anything that would enable a different set of experiences from everyone else.
That's the part I doubt. I'm not saying I am or they are smarter, I don't think it has anything to do with intelligence. I just think people can have widely different personal experiences, and some people lack faith. There are a few mentions of this, either being called "dark night of the soul" or "spiritual dryness": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Night_of_the_Soul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_dryness.
> All honest believers are also nonbelievers to some extent or at different times. What actions you take in the face of that contradiction is basically what defines your belief these days, as much as your creed does.
That's true when you consider people from an external perspective. I was asking about internal experiences.
This essay also left lots of room for a non-religious person to adopt the same kind of non-ownership mindset. Maybe we should infer that this kind of happiness is something that could be cultivated without religious faith.
I don't know about non religious, but this part:
> This means, against Hägglund, that the person best positioned to love and enjoy life is precisely the one who has made peace with its loss. In the language of Fear and Trembling, Abraham can’t really love Isaac until he is prepared to give him up.
reminds me a lot of the concept of impermanence in Buddhism.
Like courage, faking it in order to act in the face of its absence is actually the genuine article.
This doesn't sound true and doesn't seem to reflect the experience of the people around me.