No, I completely understand why you would ask. But if the mere act of my posting ends up being something of a hijack until the questions about my title are settled, then I am doing a real disservice to the boards by having it.
Add a short sig line explaining it. All you’d really need is a link to the front page of the contest site, with the words “ABOUT MY NEW TITLE.”
I’ll wade in here and offer a friendly amendment to DiosaBellissima’s observations. The unexamined life is a life that is lazy; are people who say “everything happens for a reason” being lazy, spewing platitudes that may make others squirm or even homicidal because of the atrocities they have suffered “for no reason”. Or, are they saying that they acknowledge that life needs to be examined and that sometimes that examination can lead to something else? I believe that things happen for a purpose, not reason (that is, not reason in the sense of logical, reproducible, provable or causal). What is the purpose of things happening – to remind us that we should examine life, seek some appreciation of purpose for those events. We may find comfort personally in the attribution of a purpose to an event, or it may provide comfort to others if we point out a potential purpose to that event. Or, we may discover that the purpose of that event is to remind us that the world needs healing in so many ways. There is no reason for the horrific atrocities that people inflict on other people, there is no reason for the random badshit that comes our way, there is no reason why some sports teams prevail while their opponents lose on any particular day, and there is no reason for winning the lottery. The purpose for all of the badshit – Darfur, dickheaded presidents, hurricane Katrina, a southeast Asian tsunami, fatal airplane crashes, intimate partner violence, homicide, etc. etc – is to remind us that life is fragile, to remind us to put those who have suffered in our hearts, and to make us all aware that we should be trying to make the world a better place if we have any way to do so. The purpose for the good events in our lives – no matter how trivial they might be to an outside observer – is remind us of how fortunate we are sometimes, and to breathe deeply of that moment because it will steal us to the future badshit. Things happen to remind us that we are human, live in a human world, are fallible, not indestructible, and imperfect – and yet as ugly, imperfect, unpredictable, and uncomfortable as life can be, most of us would still chose it over the alternative. So, DiosaBellissima, continue to live the examined life!
I think the skeptics in the thread have been employing the wrong tools to analyze the question. Nevertheless, it is a difficult one.
- I think “meaning” (as in “meaning of life”), purpose (“God’s purpose”), etc., are things that we intuit pertain to That Which Is; they are neither entirely the products of reason nor observation. “Meaning” in this sense lies deep in the code of Reality, is pre-linguistic and preconceptual, and is thus very difficult to talk or even think about.
But because it is so deep in the code, nothing happens without its relavence being felt. From this the sentiment, “Everything has a purpose.”
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We intuit that karma pertains and we can observe it to a considerable extent: In genral, nice people have nice things happen to them and bad people piss others off and get their comeupponace. But of course there are plenty of exceptions. Why is this?
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Asking how God could arrange kara is a lot like asking how God could arrange gravity: B-but, He’d have to calculate the mass of every particle in the universe and all the interrelationships–i-it’s impossible!
Karma could be a force just like gravity; it certainly doesn’t require a Deity fooling with a slide rule.
- I see karma as a kind of charge that sticks to you like static electricity. There will be a tendency for you to discharge, but it may take awhile. And the charge is not just for good/bad but for all manner of circumstances and associations. So if you are “fated” to meet your wife, there will be a karmic charge on you or her or both of you that will tend to draw you together.
Those are just my ideas. Again, I think we intuit on a deep level that “meaning” and something like karma pertain to Reality, but our actual scientific knowledge of how it all works is in a very primitive state.
Exactly. The “reason” doesn’t always make sense.
I had an online conversation on this topic a few years back; a theist (and dear friend) opined:
“There are times when the universe seems inhospitable and lonely, when I feel alone and unknown. It is comforting to know/believe/perceive that someone knows my name, that I am fully known–not just who I am now but who I have been and who I will become.”
I replied: “I have a similar bit of reasoning with a very different conclusion: There are times when the universe seems inhospitable and lonely, when I feel alone and unknown. It is comforting to know/believe/perceive that this is not intentional.”
The “everything happens for a reason” view is more a coping mechanism than a delusion.
meh
Life can be tough, whatever helps people make it through.
My philosophy is this:
And the ones who died in those events? The children crippled, the babies orphaned? What were they reminded of, exactly?
I don’t see those things as conflicting explanations - one is the motivation, the other is the method.
I used to believe that things happened for a reason, that it was God’s plan, etc.
That belief allowed me to shrug and walk away from terrible things without lifting a finger to help. It happened for a reason, you see. “Gosh, it sucks that you’re poor and starving and disabled and your kids are dying, but golly, there’s a purpose behind it and who am I to interfere?”
Basically, it boiled down to, “God wants you to suffer.”
Now, I wouldn’t have said it that bluntly at the time. It’s only in hindsight that I recognize my beliefs for what they were. If God is omnipotent then if things happened God had to allow them and want them.
That view is utterly reprehensible to me now.
It seems like there is a leap of logic that was taken, though. If it was God’s plan that bad things happen to people, was it not God’s plan as well when people helped? Personally, I don’t believe that tragedies happen “for a reason,” but if you take, say, Katrina as an example, if you believe that God caused the bad thing to happen, what caused the people to do so much to help?
Too little too late. What does it matter why God would then send a tiny bit of help? Seriously, the help is pathetic in relation to the tragedy, so it doesn’t help at all to say, “Oh, God sent the helpers, too.”
In fact, it makes me fucking furious just thinking of such an attitude. “Oh, God just destroyed your city, but Brownie is on the job!” Woot.
Oh, don’t get me wrong…I’m not arguing that God causes bad things (or good, for that matter…I believe in a random universe). I’m just trying to understand your logic from your previous POV…was your logic that the people helping were actually working against God’s plan? I would think they would be part of the plan, IF God causes everything to happen for a reason.
They were irrelevant to the plan from my perspective. The individuals might have felt called to do something, in which case they were part of God’s plan for themselves. But the rest of us had no obligations since God could have stopped it if he wanted to but he didn’t. God could have assuaged the hurts if he wanted to but he didn’t.
Instead, he cut off people’s arms, then possibly sent other people to offer them Band-Aids and, so often, preach about his goodness.
Oh, and the people who happened to die, well, if they were good people they were in heaven and that’s not so bad is it? And if they were bad people they were in hell and well, they deserved that if it happened since God can’t make mistakes.
My way to hide from the problem of evil was to assume the ends justified the means. They don’t. They can’t. They never will. Once I finally recognized that, I realized that it was a lie I was telling myself for years in order to deny my own responsibility and my own capability. Before, I would have had to pit myself against God in order to change his plans. If you believe in an omnipotent deity, that simply doesn’t work.
My philosophy is that the creation of the universe, and every thing that has followed, is/was/will be a random event. You can struggle to make your lot in this life better, and in some cases, if a random event doesn’t wreck your house of cards, succeed. But, in the end, on the cosmic scale, all your effort amounts to nil.
Wow…no wonder you are no longer religious! I never heard of a religion that teaches that we have no obligations to our fellow man.
Interesting point. I think that the common answers woud be that God is “testing” people. He wants to see how they’ll react. He’s taking notes on their responses. If I give blood or donate a couple of bills to the recovery effort then I “passed the test,” and proved what a good person I am, because it’s all about me, you see.
I don’t think that people realize how self-centered this is, but I don’t think their reasoning comes from deep egocentrism so much as shallow thinking and a desire to stave off the implication that maybe no one is really in charge after all.
This is what I mean when I say that I’m not surprised that jsgoddess isn’t religious anymore…if this was how I thought about God, I wouldn’t want to believe in him, either.
In my opinion, that’s exactly what your religion teaches.
The very existence of an omnipotent god devalues every obligation for every person.
The problem of evil is completely insurmountable.