You’re speaking in terms of the parent getting fair treatment, not the child. The idea that the child should suffer a horrible life in order to make sure the parent is properly effected is pretty horrific. You seem to be holding the baby responsible for its conditions from birth.
The child in this case is the seed. The offshoot of the genetics of the parent. They are being planted in infertile soil, and what is reaped for the future generations is what has been sown.
In such viewing of causality in terms of this debate, I don’t think one can merely look at the effects upon a single individual, but at the health of the crop and its effect upon the health of subsequent crops.
This in my opinion supports the notion that everything happens for a reason. If the people didn’t smoke crack, their child wouldn’t be a crack baby. Therefore it taught them (or at least outside observers) some lesson about what happens when you smoke crack.
I think the problem with this debate and many of its kind of this board is that it takes a modernist purely individual approach as though there are no generational cycles that we contend with, as though we all are born into a hermetically sealed jar, and that any sort of religious notion should treat questions of morality as though there are not wider repercussions for the species as a whole.
That doesn’t even make any sense. It’s mighty white of me to want to see less crack babies and less famine, instead of more? Do Africans really think the solution to famine on their continent is more famine elsewhere? Can you cite a “mighty” black person who thinks there should be more crack babies instead of less?
Nor is it a coherent response to anything I said. But I guess coherence is of no importance when you just make up the rules of the universe off the top of your head to be whatever your theology needs at the moment. Unfortunately while such antics do allow you keep talking out responses, it doesn’t prevent them from looking ridiculous.
Now this, this REALLY makes no sense. The bad outcomes of behavior are the reasons that people wouldn’t want to engage in the causes. If there were no bad outcomes, the things wouldn’t be bad in the first place… and hence no lesson to be learned. The fact that effects have causes is not “support” for the notion that those causes have to have bad effects in the first place, or for people to be given to acting irresponsibly in the first place.
Likewise, it makes no sense to say that there need to be deadly tsunamis in order to help people learn about the effects of deadly tsunamis.
No one is arguing that crack babies are a good thing. Your righteous indignation is what is ‘mighty white’.
Your post wasn’t coherent. It was an irrational attack. When your basis is the notion that I am somehow arguing that crack babies are a good thing, how seriously should I take you really?
Here is how I read your post:
‘I may have been born into a nice family and situation, but that doesn’t mean I am callous and don’t care like you!’
That’s why I called you ‘mighty white’.
It is about the idea that a lesson CAN be learned from every situation. Certainly, “Everything happens for a reason.”, smacks as a pat answer putting the cart before the horse, but there is some sense in it in a crude folksy way.
That teaches people how to deal with larger forces beyond their control. You and others in this thread seem to have a sort of sense that the universe should center upon the individual doing the suffering at the moment, but the microcosm loses to the macrocosm all the time. Sometimes the wave kills you and sometimes you can surf it.
Here is my original post 89 where I answered the OP directly.
Everything happens for a reason and sometimes that reason is chance.
I’ve mentioned this before in the same context.
Thirty six airplanes are flying along in formation. All the planes were built to the same specifications and have the same performance as closely as such things can be controlled.
They are manned by crews who all went throught the same training and all are following the same procedures.
Each crew consists of 6 people with a random mixture of saints and sinners among them.
Suddenly an antiarcraft shell hit one plane which explodes.
And chances are the gunner who fired the shell wasn’t even aiming at that plane.
Why that particular plane and not one of the others?
Chance.
Yes, and sometimes chance is a very cruel thing.
However, the authors of that crap known as “The Secret” would have us believe that those who were in the plane that was hit and exploded must have attracted it to themselves because on some level they desired it.
Apparently, this applies to everyone, because “there are no exceptions.”
Why, why, why can’t these people realize that sometimes shit just happens and that’s all there is to it? Must everything be figured out and reasoned and navel-gazed to death?
Yes. To say that there must have been a reason even though we can never know what it was adds nothing to just saying they were unlucky. Wrong place, wrong time.
For the third time : What did the baby do? What act of free will did he commit? You have yet to attempt to answer this question.
Fine. If “suffering” were to be removed form the circumstances dealt us, how would free will be affected? Would none of our choices be freely made?
What choice does an infant, seconds old, have in terms of dealing with his suffering? Please, please, please try to answer this specific question with a specific answer.
Again, fine. It is **possible **to exercise free will while suffering. You have failed to explain why it is necessary.
Nonsense. This is a straw man. I said nothing about ultimate evil. I asked a simple question. If you would bother to answer it, we might have an argument. So far, all we have is you dancing around the issue.
Covenant.
It is agreement **between **two parties. I made no such agreement.
There is nothing to fulfill. See above.
Where in the rules of reality does the sun stop dead in the sky, do humans turn into salt, do virgins give birth, do bushes burn without being consumed?
You know, Hamish tells me of a man who was truly grateful for having contracted AIDS, precisely because it put him, as nothing else would have, on a path in which he would work long and hard to help young gay men not contract AIDS. Seen one way, he was striving to ensure that others would not have the same revelatory experience he did. Seen another way, it’s pure common sense. It’s just one of the paradoxes of life: we can often derive benefit from things that we would never want to see another person go through. It was unequivocally bad, and yet its sequelae were good. There’s nothing strange or bizarre about that, and those who don’t undergo those trials are by no means “deprived” of anything. Indeed, the bright can learn the lesson from others, without having to go through it themselves.
Please shit in a toilet, not in front of other people, like a circus animal.
Sorry, but you were basically arguing that it had an upside, remember: please don’t say one thing, and then lie and say you never said it on a messageboard where what you say is recorded. You said that preventing crack babies from being damaged would remove “The ability of the baby to deal with the lot that s/he drew.” That most certainly is arguing that there is something important that is lost in ones life if someone doesn’t get to be brain damaged. You additionally made an argument subsequent to that which fleshed out the idea.
And again, what the heck does that have to do with making racial accusations towards me? Are you saying that black people see crack babies as some sort of badge of honor? Are you aware that there are crack babies of all races? Are you going to start making sense anytime soon?
I guess, you should take me as seriously as you make all these assertions about reality and god and so forth. Are you arguing that you aren’t serious about what you say, and you basically have been tossing all sorts of random claims out just to get a reaction from people, without any thought to self-consistency or any intention of defending them?
That response still makes zero sense, even if that was what I said, which it wasn’t. You don’t even know what race I am, and as a matter of fact, I’m not in the least “white” in any case. My actual point, which was quite clear, and which you have ignored and evaded, was that thousands of people have lived and died without suffering from being crack babies, and their lives were just fine. The world doesn’t need to learn about dealing with being a crack baby IN PARTICULAR if no one is put in that position in the first place. The same goes with famine. Entire societies have lived without famine. Your point of view suggests that this is a bad thing. My point of view suggests that we can get along just fine without it: without anyone suffering any loss of free will or anything else. The ups and downs of life provide plenty of learning experiences on their own to help people learn to be productive and willful without killing and massively damaging anyone. You have failed over and over to explain how any of these things is necessary.
This doesn’t explain, at all, why every situation is necessary to learn lessons, or why anyone needs to learn lessons about bad things that should never happen to anyone in the first place. That’s just circular logic.
There are many other ways to learn that, and many other larger forces beyond people’s control that don’t indiscriminately kill hundreds of thousands at a blow. How in any sense does killing a baby enhance its free will?
Both of these responses, the one above and the linked one, are not in any sense answers to the OP or explanations of anything: as others have noted they both basically avoid the topic of why things are the way they are. You seem to have a real problem following arguments and staying on point.
Death. Moral sewage. Hope is a practical joke.
Sweet lord, dude. Did your doctor tell you to cut down on the Pepsi and cigarettes again?
sigh I answered it over and over, and didn’t dance at all. But, if you need it spelled out. It was born to crackheads. We are the fruit of our parents loins, part of them, that’s how it is. We suffer for their ignorance. That’s simply the way that it is.
You are reading something I didn’t say into this. I am not talking about ‘karmic punishment’. I am talking about cause and effect. The crack baby didn’t do something to ‘deserve’ something, but that doesn’t mean its existance on this Earth is meaningless. It is the meaning that we find in the life that provides the ‘reason’.
Suffering is a subjective interpretation of sensory data. When we suffer it tells us that something about our situation is not ideal. If it is ideal, then we do not suffer, we feel pleasure. To remove suffering is to remove the ability to make choices that enable one to learn how to live. It would remove the ability for self-determination.
The infant is born into suffering, all infants, the process of life is about learning to deal with that suffering. It is how we deal with it that defines who we are. Without it then there is no ‘reason’ for being. The infant is greater than simply the homeostatic system encased in fascia. It is the idea of the infant, the Doctors (or not) delivering it, its Mother, its Father, the length of its life, the place of its death, the plants/bacteria that it fertilizes when it shits. If a baby doesn’t make it past a few seconds then yes its choices are limited, and I do not know what kind of choices we make in those first few seconds.
Free Will is necessary, because without it we are not conscious beings, merely a sequenced reaction of chemicals. It is the ‘meaning’ that we apply to things that supplies the ‘reasons’ that things happen.
Fine, I rescind my straw man. I am not dancing around the issue, I am answering it as straight forward as I can.
I am not going to argue this point because I am not taking an entirely Judeo-Christian tact with this.
I cannot comment, I wasn’t there, I don’t know if any of it actually happened.
No, I said that God preventing Crack babies from being damaged would remove causality, and render our actions moot as effect would be divorced from cause.
Mighty White is an expression. I used it on you not knowing whether your were white or not. I was commenting upon your moral presumption, not on the race of crack babies.
No, I have an intention of defending them, but not if I decide that the person I am talking to is an idiot. You skirted that line, but haven’t yet fallen over the precipice.
The lesson is about planting your seed in fertile soil. At least the one I choose to focus on. Innumerable lessons can be drawn from the lives of crack babies.
The reason I gave your argument little respect is because my point of view DOES NOT suggest that suffering is some kind of virtue. Virtue comes with how we deal with suffering.
We learn from our mistakes often more than our successes. I will not forget where the Internal Iliac Artery is because I failed it on a test, after I ‘fixed’ my correct answer to an incorrect one. When I was studying the veins and arteries last night, I found that some of the ones I got correct I wasn’t as sure of as that one.
There is a lesson to be learned from every situation. That is the point. You have this presumption of what ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ happen to people that I do not share. I don’t think that humans ‘should’ live some benighted existance free of suffering, but I do see the alleviation of human suffering, by human hands as a virtuous goal. If we can’t hack it something else will evolve and wipe us out.
It doesn’t enhance its free will. You are taking a negative statement and making a positive corrolary. The positive corrolary does not follow. If God took away suffering there would be no free will to react to situations we are in. As long as we are alive we have free will. Dying doesn’t ‘enhance’ free will in any way, it ends life, and thus renders free will irrelevant. Free Will only matters to those currently alive.
Incorrect. I am not arguing the position you think I’m arguing. The OP asked why I might say, “Everything happens for a reason”, and I answered. I am sorry that I didn’t have a canned answer that you already know how to respond to, but it can’t be helped.
Thank hell for the disemboweled scruples of those who journalize their torture fantasies. Parasites who eat worms. The Great White Snark.
What is with all the random spewing of bullshit?
At this point, I defy anyone to find a reason for this thread.