(2022-10-07, 02:54 PM)tim Wrote: [ -> ]Good post ! I think that is likely true when you actually arrive here and realise what a tough place it is compared to the perfection one had just willingly (?) abandoned. I suspect it makes sense up there.
Nbtruthman quite understandably wants an answer as to why there is so much suffering?
I don't see how there can't be suffering. One of the very most emotive problems is children getting cancer. Terrible. But why are they contracting it. Maybe it's something we're responsible for, not "god", as Stephen Fry likes to scream. Okay, god, please make it impossible for children to get cancer.
Done. Now what about all the rest of the dire events that happen to children. How about we get rid of bodies of water and "god" flattened the mountains for us lest a child falls off the side of one at the seaside? I'm being facetious to make the point. How could suffering be eradicated ? Has anyone got a blueprint for a guaranteed life without any pain ?
And if reincarnation is true and I believe it is, what are children exactly ? They are returning spirits that have been through all this many times before. I'm not advocating that we should live our lives thinking like that. Not for a minute.
We must always regard children the way we do because the game we are playing (or maybe playing) requires it. It would be absurd and plain wrong to start talking and treating them like 'adults' in a child's body.
The only way I have been able to make any sense of mankind's suffering is to invoke a form of theodicity, an elaborate rationalization of the problem. From my short piece already posted:
The basic approach is to combine various arguments that mankind’s suffering is an inevitable accompaniment of our greatest blessings and benefits, the result of a vast number of intricate tradeoffs in the design or our Reality. Tradeoffs made absolutely necessary by there being countless areas where some of the original “design requirements” conflict with others due to the immutable absolute laws of logic. So that there inevitably had to be a “give and take”.
Why pain, suffering and evil? Main points:
(1) There is the observed regularity of natural law. The basic laws of physics appear to be cleverly designed to create conditions suitable for human life and development. It can be surmised that this intricate fine-tuned design is inherently a series of tradeoffs and balances, allowing and fostering human existence but also inevitably allowing “natural evil” to regularly occur. In other words, the best solution to the overall “system requirements” (which include furnishing manifold opportunities for humans to experience and achieve) inherently includes natural effects that cause suffering to human beings. This regularity has very many advantages to mankind, making science possible, for instance. Hence natural immutable laws of physics and derived chemistry and so-on that inevitably result in natural disasters and disease, for instance. I know - this seems a stretch, but try to design a system and an evolutionary process (however this evolution really happens) while at the same time preventing effects inimical to human beings (like natural disasters and disease).
This points out that there may be logical and fundamental limitations to God’s creativity. Maybe even He can’t 100% satisfy all the requirements simultaneously. Maybe He doesn’t have (or choose to have) complete control over nature and over the free will of humans, because that would interfere with the essential requirements for creative and fulfilling human life. After all, human achievement requires imperfection and adverse conditions to exist as a natural part of human life.
(2) There is the obvious need for human free will as one of the most important “design requirements”. This inevitably leads to vast amounts of suffering caused by evil acts of humans to each other. Unfortunately, there is no way to get around that one, except to make humans “zombies” or robots, which would defeat the whole purpose of human existence.
(3) Some suffering is necessary to enable us to experience life in its fullest and to achieve the most. Often it is through suffering that we experience the deepest love of family and friends. “The man who has never experienced any setbacks or disappointments invariably is a shallow person, while one who has suffered is usually better able to empathize with others. Some of the closest and most beautiful relationships occur between people who have suffered similar sorrows.”
Sure, God or angels could always step in to prevent the many evils that creep in with this highly optimized, tradeoff-applied, scheme, but such a corrective process applied from outside the system would subvert most of the advantages of the "design requirements" mentioned above. The powers that be evidently decided that this cost in the value of the human experience would be too great.
Of course, all of this partial rationalization is still not really entirely satisfactory from the human standpoint, but in my view the souls and other spirits and God itself disagree. We can complain, but of course that doesn't get us anywhere. This sort of rationalization seems to me to be the only plausible way I can think of to
"reconcile what happens in this world with the observed light/order/love in the next" (Sci's words).