Stupid 'Mysterious Ways'

Great Debates
21

Not sure if this is off topic but I feel like I have to address it.

The real meaning in this stuff can be very hard to explain because the Buddhist notions of “identity” and “Self” do not correspond well to Western notions. Without getting into a long sematics discussion, I’ll try and make a couple points:

  1. There’s a distinction between sensations and emotions. Pain is pain is pain, and you feel physical pain when you put your hand over a flame regardless of whether you are “enlightened” or not. Emotions follow from sensations. Or sometimes just pop up for no apparent reason, like thoughts. Buddhism seeks to alleviate suffering as it derives from the emotions. Although it is possible to actually train the mind to not register pain consciously, this sort of thing is not the objective of Buddhist mind training. If it is done, it is mostly an exercise in understanding that even one’s physical sensations are subjective because awareness can be controlled on a very fundamental level.

  2. One learns to overcome suffering not by suppressing emotions but by understanding them in the context of how the mind works. As a trivial example, you might come to understand that a painful memory is just a memory and perhaps has nothing to do with your current life situation, and in that way, while you don’t necessarily eliminate the memory you might A) alleviate some of the discomfort you feel emotionally when the memory arises, or at least B) learn to seperate your emotions when you remember from your current situation, so that you don’t act out.

C) As for bringing an end to feelings and emotions, again, the point is not to supress emotions but just to learn not to judge them or to let them control you. I have found that, over time, as I become more honest with myself and better at observing myself, rather than the emotions becoming numb, they become more and more intense, because there’s less other psychodrama going on between me and what I’m feeling. At the same time, however, you do gain some perspective on what the “value” of emotions is. “Boy I’m angry and I really need to do something about it” turns into “Boy I’m angry. This sure feels interesting. Oh well.”

Not that I’m Mr. Enlightened or anything, but I feel like this stuff is often very misunderstood.
Back to the topic:

Yeah, that’s that whole carrot-and-stick thing again. If you take that out of the equation, you really have to re-think your “relationship” with God.

22

AerynSun:

I think you have “G-d” confused with “Santa Claus.”

Benevolence must have context in which to have a meaning. The context of G-d’s benevolence is not that of (to paraphrase an old proverb) “giving a man a fish so he can live one day,” but that of “teaching a man to fish so he can live a long time.” Creating and guiding independent-thinking creatures toward righteousness requires some processes that, in the short term, do not appear to be benevolent. However, placed in the proper context, evil and suffering do serve a purpose.

And if that sounds too much like the “mysterious ways” argument, then I’m afraid I have nothing to offer that will satisfy you better. When you get down to specifics, there is much that we human beings do not know, and that is true even of the mysteries of the tangible world around us. To declare that such uncertainty is unacceptable regarding G-d is merely shutting one’s self off from a possible avenue of exploration.

23

From God’s point of view, your measly few decades of life is but the blink of an eye compared with your eternal afterlife. So what if you had an awful time for ninety years, get your attitude right and everything will be peachy forever.

Of course, get things wrong and everything will be awful forever, but that’s YOUR fault…

24

Oldscratch said:

They aren’t the only ones. Without realizing it, a number of non-Buddhist Americans have accepted the same thing when they buy into the likes of James Van Praagh.

Van Praagh pushes the notion of souls and reincarnation and the like, and says that if you have a disease, it is essentially your fault (or at least your soul’s fault from a past life). If a child dies of SIDS, it is the child’s fault, because the soul couldn’t handle living here any longer. Etc.

He preaches sweetness and light, but there really is a dark side to the beliefs he encourages (besides just the dark side to his claims of psychic power and the like).

25

Just to reiterate a point made earlier (by the OP), there can be rationalizations for the sufferings that people undergo. Many posters have done this. Free will, reincarnarion, suffering is really good, etc. But the ultimate question is, why did God make the rules in this manner? Why not make the world in a manner such that no suffering at all would be required for any reason? All the rationalizations seem to suggest that these laws of creation were inherently necessary, that God could not have made the world in a manner which involved less suffering. Apparently, to do so would violate some inherent natural law which is out of God’s scope (sort of like trying to make a world in which 1+1=3). I mentioned this in my previous post, but I wonder if there is a consensus on this.

26

Does a few decades of a bad attitute warrant an eternity of punishment? This idea has always puzzled me. In comparison to eternity, a few decades is merely an instant. Of course, many religions do not believe in eternal punishment.

27

this discussion is about the MYSTERIOUS WAYS that christiany has to resort to because of its SINGLE LIFE followed by HEAVEN or HELL paradigm. HELL being exceptionally stupid of course.

my first post was about REINCARNATION which eliminates the need for MYSTERIOUS WAYS. thought that was obvious.

                                              Dal Timgar
28

Hell is not stupid if you buy into the judgmental school of thought – you’re a sinner in God’s eyes unless you live a perfectly righteous life or retain Jesus to cop a plea for you. Any criminal justice system needs a prison for the unrehabilitated offenders, so to speak. :slight_smile:

I’m inclined to believe that reincarnation is one possible option that God uses in his work to bring all humans into harmony with his plan. But whether you buy that, the Hindu or Buddhist theories, or something New Age, you’re simply trading one set of problems for another.

What causes reincarnation? How does karma work? Who keeps the books? What laws govern the “Celestial Body-Reassignment Bureau”? Don’t forget that one of the prime tenets of Buddhism is that, although reincarnation is a significant part of their worldview, the goal of the Enlightened is to get off the wheel.

And of course reincarnation is still subject to the classic problem of all metaphysical concepts, that it cannot be effectively studied with an eye to proof or refutation. Although it’s theoretically more amenable to this than most, no clear proof that cannot be disputed is available. (David can, I believe, dig out the links to refutations of supposed proof that he gave me when I opened a thread about it some months ago.)

God’s “mysterious ways” are not retricted to the heaven/hell judgment scene, if I’m reading the OP and other similar questions right. It’s everything related to what he allegedly does and doesn’t do, in response to prayer, disasters, the whole nine yards. If, like me, you assume that he has a plan in place, it has more twists than the best O. Henryesque story you ever ran into.

29

Cheezit wrote:

Actually, with this line of thinking, God is already out of business. He, as The Watchmaker, made the watch, wound it, and is now letting it run out. If the “1” in the “12” falls off…so be it. If the watch starts to run fast or slow…so be it. If he “set everything into motion and now monitors it”, he is a “non-interventionist” (if that is a word), merely an observer. Hence, he is out of business. After creation, he no longer serves a purpose. Prayer, worship… what’s the point? He’s not going to do anything. The difference between this God and the imperfect, mortal parents in the OP is that the parents actually do something to try to prevent harm/suffering from being visited upon their creations (their children); this God doesn’t. If, on the other hand, he is an interventionist God, then, for some of us, he’s got some explaining to do. Intervening in this instance and not in that instance smacks of some sort of favoritism or preference. As Tevyeh(sp?) asked, "Lord who made the lion and the lamb / you decreed I should be what I am / would it spoil some vast eternal plan / If I were a wealthy man (or if my 16 yo cousin didn’t die in that fire, my 18 yo cousin didn’t get killed by that train…etc)
cmkeller wrote:

I am struggling to put this into words (and I’m not the brightest bulb on the tree, so bear with me), but the problem I have is one of scale or scope. If G-d is “teaching a man to fish”, then I suppose I see the utility of failure or some suffering (the mistakes I made in learning, say, how to be a tree surgeon made me a better tree surgeon). But then why snip a life short before that person has had the chance to avail themselves of the fishing lesson? If, on the other hand, G-d is teaching mankind to fish, His methods seem rather heavy-handed at times. He seems to be using some, or perhaps all, of us as tools to achieve His end, when if He is indeed all-powerful, He could have started out at that end. Is He loving us in the way a shepherd loves his flock, as opposed to his wife (no cracks about ways of loving sheep)? A shepherd cares and looks after his flock, but kills some of them to serve his ends; it is the flock rather than the individual sheep that is the object of his care. And if G-d cares not a whiff about me the individual, why should I care of my fellows, the individuals - am I to be held to a higher standard than the G-d who created me and all things? And as far a guiding us toward righteousness, I will concede that we may indeed need experience with what righteousness is not in order to discern the difference and hence strive for righteousness. Still, some of what befalls us seems in no way germane to the lesson at hand - the path toward righteousness. A newborn killed in a wreck on the way home from the hospital - what is the point of that? What purpose could that brief existence have held, what vital lesson, unteachable in any other way, is to be gained from that? That life sucks sometimes, to put it bluntly? That we need to cherish our existence and help our fellows along this road of life as it is too short? Again, that is a heavy-handed lesson. I can teach chain saw safety many ways, one of them being to run a saw into someone’s thigh - effective, but too extreme for me.
It seems to me G-d has a great gig - all the credit, no responsibility, no blame, no accountability.
Chaim, I have always admired and respected the insights you lend to this board. By questioning and probing, I mean no disrespect, nor do I belittle your beliefs. I visit this board to learn (hence staying below Satan’s post-count radar screen :slight_smile: )

30

Yes, cmkeller, you have merely restated the apologetic complained of in my OP.

Also, please note that if anyone is confusing God with Santa, it is the people who advance that argument, who claim that their god is all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful. Yet they cannot claim all three in the face of the Question of Evil.

My OP was addressing one “answer” given to the Question of Evil, which you state here as the necessity of teaching a man to fish instead of giving him a fish. What I’m saying is that there is no need to teach him to fish when you have the power to just as easily give everyone all the fish they can eat until the end of time.

For your argument to work, either God can’t have control of everything (so he needs to teach us to deal with something he can’t just change) or God is not all-good, because he has chosen to create suffering where he could have the same result (remember, he’s all-powerful) without the suffering.

And let me just say that while I don’t think anyone has presented any argument to correct the logical problem I’m complaining about, I have enjoyed reading all these responses - they are generally well-informed and well-written, and I’ve learned some things I wasn’t previously aware of.

31

I’d make a distinction here too. There’s a Buddhist mantra that, roughly translated, says “drive all blames into one”. The idea is to look at what’s going on internally when emotions arise, and learn something about yourself, rather than acting out, possibly propagating suffering. I think that making that carte-blanche assumption that everything is one’s own fault is not what is meant here. Besides, the concept of “fault” can be very flawed to begin with. Anyone who says that it’s a 4-year-olds “fault” that she was molested is misunderstanding what it means to “drive all blames into one”.

32

AerynSun:

But that wouldn’t make sense in context of the ultimate purpose of creation. For whatever reason (and there are religious books devoted to this subject, but it’s a bit heavy to go into here), G-d did not want to create automatons. G-d wanted to create beings who could choose goodness of their own free will.

The “teaching a man to fish” analogy was meant as a reference to G-d teaching people how to exercise their power of free choice. If, following the analogy, G-d “supplied an infinite amount of fish,” he’d be presenting people with a world that has no downside, no moral dilemmas, no reason to ever even consider the choice of evil. This would run contrary to the primary purpose, for which goodness chosen of free will is necessary.

This, of course, is the ultimate question on that. There are several answers that are standard to most religions on the issue, and I suspect that since they’re ultimately unprovable, they probably won’t satisfy your desire for “de-mystification” of G-d. The most common answer is that these children are but one step in the journey of a reincarnated soul.Another answer occasionally given is that some people are created not as subjects but merely as objects to affect other people. (Of course, in order to have the proper effect, they are indistinguishable from “subject” people until the moment it becomes clear that they are never given the opportunity for free choice.) But ultimately, how satisfactory any answers to such difficult questions are is governed by the degree to which one already believes in G-d.

In a way that’s true…as the ultimate power over all existence, who could ever call him to account? On the other hand, there is still the fact that he had a purpose in mind, and whether or not he manages to achieve it governs his sense of satisfaction with his handiwork…and many craftsmen are their own harshest critics.

Chaim Mattis Keller

33

There is no life in the atoms.

34

So, you ascribe to the philosophy that God is omnipotent, but not completely benevolent. And don’t tell me that suffering is somehow “benevolent” in God’s eyes - that’s just restating the original argument. He decided to create suffering where none was necessary. Maybe you think he had his reasons, but again, I say this destroys the idea that he is all-good.

35

AerynSun:

Would you describe “giving the greatest pleasure you can imagine” as benevolent?

If so, then would it be too much of a stretch for you to imagine that the greatest pleasure G-d was able to conceive was reward as a result of free-will choice?

Now, assuming that you’re okay with the above two: would you still describe the bestowal of that gift as benevolent even if the process of receiving the gift does not appear benevolent to the recipients?

This pretty much sums up the perspective necessary for the understanding of “G-d’s benevolence” according to the religious teachings I’ve been raised with.

Chaim Mattis Keller

36

does anyone here have any 1st hand information about God?

are we simply speculating about God on the basis of information recieved from other people with no 1st hand information about God?

so as a former agnostic i’ll suggest this as a starting point:

 if there is a God then he/she/it CANNOT BE STUPID!

so what is with all this dubious information flying around about God. i look at it in terms of social-psychology and RELIGIOUS POWER GAMES. most people have been taught from childhood to believe in some version of God, usually with attached religion. most people seem to go along with the program. from there you get varying degrees of complex RATIONALIZATION of why people believe what they do and why you should believe the same thing. LOL! religious leaders have played on this social-psychology for thousands of years. hence, RELIGIOUS POWER GAMES.

i ask if God is sufficiently intelligent to create everything from silicon atoms to colliding galaxies, why can’t he/she/it come up with a better way to run the meta-physical universe than having ETERNAL DAMNATION after less than 100 years of confusing life, no matter what the person has done. have to sort thru all the stupid religious trash people tell you, everybody should be an APATHEIST. don’t know, don’t give a damn, shutup and get away from me. ROFL!

the fact that reincarnation brings up more questions just shows that metaphysical research is just like scientific research. the more you learn the more you find out there is more stuff to figure out. sounds like God made a nice little puzzle for us to exercise our god-like minds against. so that is the purpose of the watch, for us to figure out. you got something better to do with your time? it’s a big complicated watch so you need multiple lifetimes.

                                              Dal Timgar
37

Chiam;
I’m not sure if I am reading/interpreting your post correctly. “Reward as a result of free-choice will” - are you saying G-d’s benevolence is manifested in bestowing a reward (eternal life/salvation/reincarnation/heaven whatever) as a result of living/acting with rightneousness when free-choice will would have allowed us to do otherwise? If I’ve not got it right, can you try again ?

Jake

38

Aeryn Sun: Maybe you just meant this as a rant. OK. But I figured it’s location in GD was to foster debate. Otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered to post because your rant is your rant and requires no justifications/comments. I detected a tome of “how can it be otherwise” in you post, though.

To quote your OP:

I originally posted not to illustrate how suffering is benevolent in God’s eyes (I’m assuming we can’t know how God sees things) but how humans can see it that way. I think some other posters also did. (I also think some other posters are trying to run to God’s defense, which is odd because the point of their posts seems to be that God doesn’t need defending, so why post?)

So, to summarize what I understand from your comments:

  1. There is no context within which you feel suffering is useful or good, for no other reason than that God didn’t have to create it. (You keep returning to this point as though it dismisses any possible value in suffering)

  2. Because God could have chosen not to create suffering, but did any way, there is no context within which he can be benevolent.

This seems like begging the question:

A) Suffering is useless because God didn’t have to create it.
B) God is malevolent because he didn’t have to create suffering.

Both simply assume “didn’t have to” and reject any justification smacking of “have to” as missing the point.

God didn’t have to create humans either. Philosophically speaking we can only guess at his reasons. Therefore, because A) he didn’t have to and B) we can’t know why he did, C) he shouldn’t have?

dal timgar, your first post mentions that some Christians believed in reincarnation. You didn’t bother to tie that into the topic until later, you just threw the fact out. Later you said that it de facto does away with the “mysterious ways” argument, without offering an explanation of how, in your view, it does. I think a lot of people might not agree with you, so it’s worth actually presentign an argument. Also you toss out statements like “HELL being exceptionally stupid of course” as though they were facts that we all agree on.

So who’s acting like the “pseudo-intellectuals with delusions of grandeur” now?

Then you say:

“get away from you?” What, did we force you to post here?

If you don’t give a damn, get lost.

39

Libertarian said:

There is if you put enough of 'em together in the right way.

40

Just a quick question for my own edification: Let’s say I build a great big bomb. Attached to this bomb, I put some kind of, I don’t know, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle Trigger. This trigger, based on some quantum something-or-other causing a particle to be emitted, or not, has a 50-50 chance of triggering the bomb. I don’t know for sure whether it will or won’t go off, I only know it COULD go off, and cannot personally affect or alter the outcome. Now let’s say I place the bomb in the middle of the local high school at noon.

If the trigger goes off, am I personally responsible for the deaths that ensue?