C.S. Lewis, Why God allows pain
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Stumble ThisThis is a scene from the movie Shadowlands in which C.S. Lewis (played by Anthony Hopkins) gives a speech on why God allows pain.
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Hell, it even fits with most of his appearances in the bible. =p
Please give evidence for this.
Also, great movie. Hopkins rules.
To them there was so many things that made them happy. Hell just getting a few slices of bread on the weekend made them so excited they could hardly contain themselves.
Gratitude and happiness are closely linked. If your not grateful for the good things in life, you haven't been in want of those things. How can you describe the taste of salt if you've never had it? How can you describe how sugar tastes if you never eaten it?
Ying and Yang, all things have opposites, and to see that you need to experience both. pain and pleasure are no different.
If the sun exploded tomorrow and burned every man woman and child alive, the universe wouldnt care. It wouldnt, in a sense, even notice. Thats the truth, we arent hated, nor loved, by anyone but eachother, we have been given this tiny conscious glimpse of the world out of an event so random our brains fails to grasp how random it is. This is it, this is our life, our world. Lets live this one, and dont worry about the next.
To live a good life and be happy and make other people happy, to love my family, my friends, to make life better for others and to aquire an understanding about how we came to be, and how wonderfully mysterious and big, old, and mind boggling the universe is... To listen to beautiful music, drink beer on a sunny day, watch the sunset, the stars in the sky and ponder about life..
And ofcourse discussing with religious apologists on Videosift.
I do not understand how you could be happy when everything that you do in life will, in the end, not do anything for anyone. What you enjoy whispers that you have a soul, that you feel things that, logically, you shouldn't feel.
Gratitude and happiness are closely linked. If your not grateful for the good things in life, you haven't been in want of those things. How can you describe the taste of salt if you've never had it? How can you describe how sugar tastes if you never eaten it?
Ying and Yang, all things have opposites, and to see that you need to experience both. pain and pleasure are no different.
It's not about food, it's about appreciating the experiences of life that give it depth and meaning.
Good one gorgonheap...
If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
* Woody Allen
A God who cannot smile could not have created this humorous universe.
* Sri Aurobindo
Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.
* William Faulkner
Here's a quote dealing with the subject of the clip:
"We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the soundwaves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principle were carried out to its logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame them. All matter in the neighbourhood of a wicked man would be liable to undergo unpredictable alterations."
It will do stuff to real people living right now, what more motivation do you need?
Suppose that you are right, that somehow, our good deeds will be recognized by God, or Allah, and we are given what? Eternal life in Paradise?
OK, so now you are in paradise/heaven. What now? whats the purpose? You can spend 50 billion years stacking matches into neat little houses, and you've barely started. You have accomplished nothing. Whats the purpose? Why do anything good when you finally get there? As gorgonheap points out, what can you possibly enjoy "up there" if there is no pain? Is the only purpose to praise and serve your master, God?
And just because you find comfort in such an absurd fantasy, and perhaps you wish, above all else, that its true, that does not make it true What I say about cooling space rocks and the random nature of our beginnings, on the other hand, probably is. Perhaps you find that disturbing.. Well, personally I find cancer pretty disturbing. People still get cancer...
Most suffering in the world is by our own causing: wars, famine, greed, etc.. If God is to be said to respect free will, then he must allow this to occur.
The suffering that isn't caused by man becomes something else entirely if you look at it in the looooong view. As in, the eternal life promised to Christians in the Bible. Taking that view, death is not final and all suffering is fleeting. Looking at it in that way, one could see the human perspective as being almost infinitely shortsighted, and see the suffering on this mortal plane as serving some kind of greater goal; perhaps a species-wide learning experience.
I would also point out that without suffering, there is no fulfillment in life, and I don't just mean in the touchy-feely sense. Without hunger we do not feed, without the need for air we do not breathe, without death we do not procreate. Suffering puts bounds on our existence, and gives our existence meaning by giving us something to struggle against.
This viewpoint is hollow, and utterly dishonest.
A scrap of blue fabric may have no meaning or significance to me, but to someone else, it may be all that remains of a blanket their long-dead grandmother gave to them when they were a baby.
you could hold that scrap of fabric up to 1000 different people, and ask "what is the meaning of this fabric?" to all of them, there would be no meaning. To that one person, it means the world to them, as it is their only reminder of their beloved grandmother, and stirs memories and feelings of love in them.
Meaning and propose are defined by those who experience them. Does eating a sandwich have more or less meaning if there is some cosmic overseer out there?
Or put differently, consider music. Some people love country music, others hate it. No religion on the planet makes any references to country music. Does this mean that country music has no meaning or significance?
While I'm at it, here's some thoughts about the value of human life, in the atheist/humanist perspective. Whats my motivation for, say, saving a drowning child? To me, its just another primate, it will die one day anyway, and I wont get a reward, so why bother?
Well, apart from the obvious, innate feeling that letting kids die just feel very wrong, there is the sheer value of life, I think human lives are almost infinitely valuable, well, because I think my own is valuable.. I think of this life as a unique opportunity given, by fantastically amazing odds against, to us all.
This is it for me, this is my chance.
I may be a bit of "chemical scum" as some scientist charmingly put it, but I happen to be the kind thats woken up, able to reflect on my own existance, furthermore, and against even bigger odds, I am alive at a time when humans have begun to understand and discover some mind-boggling facts about this world, and even luckier, I live in a time and place where I am free to say and think what I want,
In short, this life is precious, it is unique. Given my understanding, I dont see any reasons why every other human should have the same opportunities as me. Wasting a human life, whether its your own or others, is the greatest crime we can inflict on eachother. I will only live once, I have every reason to make it a good one.
If I was to retort with the same token to you, Raifim, I might say the following:
Whats your motivation for life? why bother? God controls everything anyway, who cares what you do, and the sooner a child dies, the more chance it wont blow it before it goes to heaven, right? If you believe in the Christian doctrine, why be good at all? Jesus will forgive you for anything, right?
Of course, I know thats not the way you see it, but my point is that the religious view can be seen as equally pointless as the view that really admits its all basically pointless.
Does this mean that country music has no meaning or significance?
Yes. *runs*
What's your point? Even if one accepts your (incorrect) assumption that life without god is meaningless, it is irrelevant to the question of whether god, in fact, exists.
"God exists because it would kinda suck if he didn't" is not an argument.
Well, its hard for me to think of anything that could possibly give me "knowledge" that God existed, it would have to be some continuous, or repeatable set of verified miracles, like God doing something truly unexplainable, whilst at the same time leaving no doubt who did it. Something along the lines of speaking to a room full of people, where everybody hears the same thing, and also growing back an amputated leg on the spot. I guess a feat like that would be mere child's play to the omnipotent among us, but sinse its the kind of event we never see, it reinforces my suspicions that the God idea, is not just impossible by almost any definition, but also conspicuously without any manifestations in the real world.
Fortunately, I was in no way indoctrinated with ideas like this from early childhood, but if my life could be lived again, and I got the ol'Christian fear of hell/jesus is lord combo repeated to me from birth, I would perhaps have "the knowledge" that the pious claims.. I have always wondered if I have the strength and courage it would take to break free from that kind of indoctrination, and I have always marvelled and looked up to those who have done just that, and who pay a hard price for the right to intellectual honesty.
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