I’ve heard of similar arguments being made by Hindus with regards to karma. If someone is suffering or poor or diseased, then that’s because they must be working out bad karma from previous lives. This rationalization is even facile enough to work for children and babies. If a baby dies in a fire, well, that baby must have done something terrible in a past life. Believing in past lives opens up whole new avenues for justification and hand-waving.
Right, and as I said, if I held that opinion, then I would probably not be religious.
If you believe in a god that could help but doesn’t for any reason, then you believe in precisely the same god I did.
And, like I said, I wasn’t honest enough to admit it at the time, either. I would have been shocked to learn exactly what the upshot of my beliefs was. I was shocked to learn it. And then I decided that it was completely unacceptable, so I changed.
Oh, it didn’t have to be that they were bad people. Any number of times here on the Dope I’ve heard people handwave the problem of evil away by saying that gosh, God has to let you suffer so that you will learn, just like a parent has to let a kid touch a hot stove (no idea why the example always seems to be a hot stove) in order really to learn that it’s hot. Or a parent has to let a child fall if they are ever going to stand and walk.
See? God lets horrible things happen to you because he loves you! And if the horrible thing happens to include you being cut into a million pieces, well, then you’re in heaven! And if you’re too young to learn from the horrible thing, it must be something for your parents to learn. And suffering builds character, don’t forget that one. And God works in mysterious ways.
Well I kind kind of agree with this except that part where God is testing me. I believe he knows my heart, so testing would be futile. The test is for me, myself, but I don’t believe it’s all about me. I judge only myself, my actions. I don’t judge those who walk away nor those who require help. I do what I feel I must. Be sure that what I give to others is a gift from my heart, and as such, sometimes requires a sacrifice. Whether it be money or comfort or pain. It’s a toll that I’m willing to pay, to reconcile myself with myself and God. I just don’t believe that without His help I am the caliber of person who could give of myself in this way. Again, as I can’t judge others, what they do is what they do. I think we all do what we can . I just need a little courage and guidance to help me along. But as TND would say this really isn’t the time or place for such discussions. Maybe I’ll mosey over to GD and see who’s getting the fork there.
That’s not the part that’s different. I never have taken God’s omnipotence to mean that people aren’t obligated to help each other, and I disagree that this is the logical & correct conclusion.
That part I get…but my point is that what God does or doesn’t do (or whether or not he exists) should be irrelevant to what you and I do.
This is precisely the conclusion I came to. Belief in an afterlife and divine justice is only a rationalization for complacency. If life sucks, there must be something better waiting in the afterlife, so quit yer bitchin.
Fuck that. I only get this one life, so I’m gonna make it a good one.
Yes, and actually, I think that such a religion does make a certain sort of logical sense…it certainly would be comforting to believe that people deserve the bad things that happen to them…but I think that such a belief says more about the believer than it does about God.
I see it as a sort of ‘Water seeks its own level’ sort of thing. When you have an excess of a certain energy (I use energy loosely here since we are talking about metaphysical consciousness) you repel that energy. When you have a deficiency you attract it, like a chemical moving down its concentration gradient in a solution.
It seems to me that there is some sort of law of attraction that is mediated by conscious effort. In terms of chemistry there is an empirical attraction/repulsion between elements, that is altered by the presence of more elements adding to the level of complexity. Due to consciousness we are able to manipulate and facillitate certain physical reactions, by forcing chemicals into proximity through extraction, isolation and then mixing it with certain goals in mind after the testing of thousands years.
Consciousness in this is a mediating factor in physical reactions. It allows us to finesse the reactions that we in truth have no real control over. We cannot force covalent bonds where the possibility of such bonds does not exist, and yet we can arrange structures in such a way that we can work around the physical forces that are doing their own thing.
It is like reverse entropy. This is how I define life. It is the conscious willful organization. Now, as it goes, IMO, there are larger notions of mind. The best example of a mind that is larger than a human being but still perceptible is a corporation. The individual humans devote a certain amount of the attention they have via their nervous system in order to facillitate the processes that the corporation requires. Just like the process of summation in the contraction of muscles, we can have conflicting messages coming from within the overall entity. Say both your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system are firing at the same time, the one that first the most times will inevitably win the argument and choose the course of action.
Ultimately things happen for a reason in that the reason they happened is that the chain of events preceding them occurred in the only possible outcome that particular chain could have caused. Every experience that doesn’t kill us, for better or worse is a learning experience. So the reason, in a sense is that perspective to which we decide to prescribe meaning. Ultimately in the search for meaning, our subjective construction of our paradigm is the reality we live in. Some people choose to find meaning, and others do not see the same meaning that others choose.
Ultimately though, I choose to perceive the universe as one vast participatory mind. I have had too many experiences that are direct answers to questions asked, not to to find some meaning in this, though that is in the end a subjective decision of mine to bring meaning to my context.
That means that people are obligated to help one another but God, who’s supposed to be great, wise, good, kind, just, merciful, powerful, and the bee’s knees (in short, he’s supposed to be better than me), God isn’t obligated to do jack shit.
I judge people when they won’t lift a finger. I’m not going to make an exception for god/gods/God.
You’ve never done or not done anything based on your religious beliefs? And you think I’m the one who had the unusual religion?
I think that’s totally reasonable…I totally understand where you are coming from now.
Of course I have, but more in regards to my relationship with God, not with other people…I think religion is irrelevant in how we treat one another, or should be. I don’t believe we should help others because God wants us to…I believe we should help each other because it’s the right thing to do. But using God as an excuse for NOT helping? That’s a new one on me…at least as far as the Christian religion is concerned.
I’ve always thought this notion was a bit manipulative. The world is neither good nor bad. It is bad for the widow in Darfur, but that is not to say that widow never had anything good.
The idea that life can go poorly isn’t a good reason not to see the bright side of it either. That same widow in Darfur may have had some great experiences next to which our desensitized mediated consumer reality pales next to. One of the existential problems with spiritual seekers in western culture is that they end up seeking spiritual epiphany like a junkie seeking a fix. They want those pure sublime moments where they feel themselves as all one with the universe. A writer I know writes much about the African Evangelical movement in this sense, saying that they come closer to the authentic Christian experience because they are closer to the fear and trembling than we in the first world in our comfortable complacency.
The idea that horror ‘should’ be absent is purely subjective expectation. We have control over how we interpret our experience, but control over what form that experience takes is tenuous at best. Our expectations are quite often unfulfilled, which everyone from Sufis to Buddhists have warned about, expectation is the cause of suffering, and yet if we ever can affect change in our environments, we must expect outcomes in order to proact rather than react.
The way it is so often framed it is as though people are cruel for not choosing to see only the horror in life, as though we have some responsibility to be pessimistic and hopeless in solidarity for those who have it worse than we do. Some people have it horrible, and some have it good. Perhaps God is not omnibenevolent, perhaps God does not exist, but we do not have a responsibility to feel awful and abandon the quest for meaning in solidarity for the tragic. In my opinion we have a responsibility to do the opposite.
I did not say she never had anything good. I aid that the idea that things will certainly get better is foolish. For millions of people things go from bad to worse, and then they die horribly, without ever getting better.
Again, I said nothing of the sort.
I’m talking about what is *going *to happen, not what *has *happened. But, with respect to fond memories, you should educate yourself about the atrocities committed against female refugees in Somalia, then tell me that they should reflect on past great experiences.
OK.
I’m thinking that having your husband and children murdered and being gang raped and left to fend for yourself in a country ravaged by war, famine, and disease makes words like proact (?) seem a bit … effete.
I simply object to the blanket statement “Sure, things may be bad, bu they are certain to get better, because that is the way life works.” It demonstrably does not work that way.
Whatever. A quest for meaning that refuses to acknowledge reality is doomed to failure.
Sure, that happens, and some people have it good pretty much their whole life.
Fair enough.
You are doing right here exactly what I talked about. You are like, “Tell that to OMFG SHOCKING EXAMPLE OF HORRIBLE HORROR!”, as though I have some responsibility to the women of Somalia not to be optimistic. Things don’t ALWAYS turn out better, but they do often enough.
The same goes for internet pleas for sympathy for the plight of the indigenous people of wherever from the comfort of your technocracifier.
That’s fair enough.
The problem is that pessimists often justify their obsession with the darker side of things by saying, “I am just a realist.”, when often they are merely obsessive compulsive or at worst paranoid. Pessimists are not more likely to be correct than optimists. Yes, bad things happen, and sometimes they never get better, then you die. However, sometimes things are really good. Others, they are bad, and then they do get better. Sometimes they are really good and then they get worse. The range of human experience is broad despite the tugs on the heart strings for the plight of ‘random hypothetical person from Africa’.
It’s totally unreasonable, by definition actually. Reason doesn’t enter into it. It is an emotional response to an imagined anthropomorphic deity. If God doesn’t exist, she’s deluded, and if God does exist he is not held to the same standards as a human being.
One of the hardest things for theists to accept is that maybe God doesn’t see us as any more than dolls. An elaborate game of civlization. Sure he loves us in some abstract way that a game player loves the inhabitants of his game. Perhaps the suffering of individual humans isn’t as monumental as people wish it were.
I’m not sure that’s “by definition.” I think a person can choose to hold God to the same moral standard as a human being, if they want to. What they decide to believe if they feel that God doesn’t measure up is their own conclusion that they have to reach.
Sure, maybe he doesn’t, but that’s only one way to look at God, and one understanding of omnipotence.
How about Christians who don’t want to spend money on AIDS research because god hates fags?
Whoa. Time-delayed duplicate post.
Bad Christians. When you say “my” religion teaches such things, I can assure you, it doesn’t.
Agreed. I’m a strong believer in cause and effect. Nothing can happen without a cause. I suppose you could substitute “reason” for “cause,” but doing so tends to give it a religious/spiritual/supernatural etc (pick whichever one you like) meaning that I don’t think exists.