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Comment by legrande | Hacker News Reader

> He refuses to trust that loving God, and all that this entails, leaves any room for enjoying life

Everyone has their own version of God. For some it's simply Love or for others it's some hyper-intelligent being responsible for the big bang and creation. My personal theory is that it's not a bearded man in the sky, but nature's own intelligence, you know, the way nature seems intelligently designed, and in a way, perfect.

I will also add: God doesn't really care about humanity, with all its suffering and division. If God really cared, we would be living in a utopia, free of suffering. But then, what's the point? If we're all doped up on serotonin, or in a permanent MDMA like trance, what's the goal then? We need suffering IMHO to grow and prosper. Trees only grow because of wind and resistance.

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As an atheist that left Protestantism due to arguments like this, I find the "we need suffering" a bit naive. Where do we draw the line with unfair suffering? Disease. Pain. Rape. Poverty. There are abject lows that some people start in then die young, or start in then never leave and die old. This type of suffering is largely needless and tragic, and any argument that tries to put meaning on it seems to fall apart to me.

Some people argue that suffering comes from other people's free will.

But there's also suffering caused by things other than people: earthquakes, volcano eruptions...

Buddhists and Stoics would argue suffering comes from wanting things to be in a way that they are not, not from that the things are in the way that they are.

I don't know if this is always true, but it does appear quite true that we spend a great deal more time worrying about misfortunes past and present than actually experiencing them as they happen.

Kids that die young having lived a life of horrors, poverty and suffering don't mesh well with the Stoics viewpoint, nor with the "suffering must exist in order to experience joy" line of thought either.

There are people in this world who live short, unhappy lives entirely as a consequence of things outside their control. Even worse, there are people who live long unhappy lives, again outside their control.

No point of view that argues it's their own fault for wanting things to be otherwise, or that suffering is necessary for joy to exist, is ever going to be satisfying to me.

I mean the Stoics were no strangers to dying kids, dead kids were very much something that happened in the past. Kids surviving into adulthood by default is a consequence of modern medicine, and I'm not sure we're happier for it.

The modern notion that life is supposed to be in a certain way is a big factor. There's a narrative that we' supposed to get married in our twenties, have kids, retire after a long career (a journey ending in management), then die of a heart attack at 72.

A lot of people torment themselves by telling themselves that this is what their life should be.

I know the Stoics were aware of this; I just don't agree with their philosophy.

I think in this conversation we are conflating frustration ("my life isn't the way I would like") with suffering ("my child was ran over by a truck, I have brain cancer, my brother is dying of hunger in a ditch somewhere, I was tortured in a concentration camp, an earthquake killed everyone I loved"). The latter has little, if anything, to do with modern expectations of life. This kind of suffering has no greater meaning and is not necessary at all for joy to exist.

> The modern notion that life is supposed to be in a certain way is a big factor

The ancient Greeks and even older civilizations had all sort of expectations about how life should be. I don't buy at all that suffering is somehow the result of modern expectations.

We created some new forms of suffering and got rid of some older forms. And yet other forms are permanent, outside our control.

> "My child was ran over by a truck, I have brain cancer, my brother is dying of hunger in a ditch somewhere, I was tortured in a concentration camp, an earthquake killed everyone I loved"

Did you begin to suffer from these things when they happened, or when you were told they had happened? If, later, someone came and told you it was a mistake, it was someone else that had suffered all these misfortunes, wouldn't you at that point stop suffering?

If this is true, how can it be that these events in themselves are causing you to suffer?

I'm sorry, your line of thought annoys me. I'll bow out of this conversation before I say something I'll regret.

Good luck telling the parent of a child who died horribly "were you suffering before the doctors told you, or were the doctors themselves the cause of your suffering?".

I've no patience for this.

There is the subjective experience of suffering and the objective experience of suffering.

Pain, disease, death, grief, injury, etc. are all real.

It is usefull to calibrate the subjective to be as close as possible to the objective so that we do not inflict additional suffering on ourselves on top of the objective suffering already there.

Callibrating the subjective to ignore the objective suffering, to just want things to be the way they already are, is harmful because it causes more future exposure to objective suffering.

Aren't all experiences by definition subjective?

To add more color to the Buddhist view, this is often described as a pain/suffering distinction. In this view, pain is inevitable and out of our control, but suffering as the attendant mental phenomenon can be curbed with training.

This view is summarized in the doctrine of the two arrows [1]. When asked if he still felt pain, the Buddha said he was struck by the first arrow called pain, but not by the second arrow called suffering.

[1] https://tricycle.org/magazine/second-arrow/

Similar in stoicism. It's not that with training physical pain no longer hurts, or that it's reasonable to expect people to curb every little nigh-involuntary in-the-moment emotional reaction to every situation, but that a great deal of ongoing suffering is in fact a choice to dwell on something unpleasant—so that much of how the world or others "make" us feel is something that's actually under our control.

It's most obvious when watching kids deal with the world—oh my god, the suffering they subject themselves to for little or no actual reason is incredible, and they find it so hard to get out of the habit of harming themselves in that way—but most adults do the same thing all the time, too.

Yeah, I'm an Orthodox Christian, but suffering & death are explicitly framed in the Bible as a totally unnecessary, true evil. Hence why the story begins and ends in a literal Paradise (unless one chooses otherwise). "The last *enemy* that shall be destroyed is death." 1 Corinthians 15:26

What? The bible, at least the new testament, is full of verses saying suffering comes along with Christianity.

There is the belief in karma and reincarnation that addresses this.

Karma and reincarnation applied to the existence of suffering in the present; a thin veneer over blaming the victim, the justification for oppressive caste systems and class discrimination

Most suffering is unnecessary, that is true; there is, nonetheless, a level of suffering that drives me to improve myself to avoid it - and I suspect this may be universal.

All things in moderation.

Young children, for instance, can suffer terrible emotional distress when they do not get their way. One can be compassionate for that suffering while recognising they must go through it to learn and grow.

If suffering is the gap between our expectations and reality, necessary suffering is the amount required to calibrate our expectations sufficiently accurately.

Begs the question, what is "fair" suffering?

I don't think anyone argues that terrible suffering you described is a good thing, but rather that suffering is endemic to living. We don't get to decide how much happens to us, but we can work towards a world that minimizes avoidable extreme pain and injustice.

I meant it in the Buddhist sense of a lotus flower not being able to grow on a bed of marble, it needs its roots buried in dirty mud. Some amount of adversity is needed in order to grow and build character.

That doesn't make any sense. To a lotus, mud isn't adversity, it's its preferred growing environment. A bed of marble would be it's adversity, and as you pointed out there, it doesn't build character in a bed of marble.

Why do you think life is less meaningful if we're not suffering? Why is suffering necessary for growth and prosperity? Where do you draw the line between suffering for suffering's sake, and suffering for growth?

And trees can totally grow without wind and resistance, take a look inside any greenhouse that's go one in it.

> If God really cared, we would be living in a utopia, free of suffering.

The Christian position is that God made a utopia. The world we are currently living is is abnormal - it has changed.

Well, who changed it? God? No, man did.

But if God really cared, wouldn't He have undone it? He could. The price would be that what we choose and what we do has no effect. That meaninglessness is a pretty high price for utopia.

But does He actually care enough to do anything? Yes. His "fixing" process involved His Son dying on the cross.

That's the Christian position. You may disagree with it. But "If God really cared, we would be living in a utopia, free of suffering" (and therefore either God doesn't exist or He doesn't care) is not the only consistent view of our present situation.

Great explanation.

Seems like a cop out to me. God is also omniscient. Man did some things, but all within a predefined context that God created with complete ability to foresee how it would play out. Suppose we imagine that the story of Eden is real.

God has omniscience to know exactly what will happen. Even if you somehow claim that human free will overrides omniscience, which seems unlikely, an intelligent being could predict the outcome of the circumstances to varying degrees of precision.

The real Christian view, though not often admitted, seems to be that God doesn't really give a shit about earthly life because it's all irrelevant compared to eternal paradise in heaven. Jesus offering forgiveness makes it all good, because you get this infinitely more heavily weighted component to your infinite lifespan even if your earth life sucks. Which, hey, isn't wrong, given the premises.

> Well, who changed it? God? No, man did.

Huh? Maybe we read a different Genesis. Yahweh cast out Adam and Eve so that they wouldn't eat from the Tree of Life and become like him and the other gods. The humans didn't change anything.

> The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden

Genesis 3:22

This never really made sense to me. God created man. The level of curiosity, the level of self control, the level of obedience in man, these were all set by God. Either he had no idea that the levels he set would eventually lead man to sin, or else he had set man up to fail.

> Everyone has their own version of God.

https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

[I]n the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

If you are already familiar with "This is Water" the below podcast of a philosopher and a psychologist about it might be of interest:

https://www.verybadwizards.com/227

Oh get out of here with your suffering is noble nonsense. Take all your clothes off, give away all your money and live outside in a ditch if you like it so much.

Seems pagan Diogenes rather enjoyed that lifestyle.

You know, he never really seemed happy in those stories. Except maybe the time he trolled the academy with a "featherless biped".

It is not that suffering is noble. It is that suffering is living.

And that rather than running from this reality, if one accepts it instead whole new worlds are opened up. For many is a happier way to walk through life.

To add, suffering also brings enjoyment.

The suffering of hunger makes a meal taste better.

The suffering of the hot sun makes a dip in the pool or a cool breeze enjoyable.

If we instead are born and tube fed from a machine and allowed to just think non-stop of amazing things. is that a better version of life?

It's not that suffering is noble, it's that suffering is the default and we don't know why. And in the meantime the suffering causes growth. At least we hope.

A lot of suffering doesn't cause any growth whatsoever, especially the kind of suffering that ends in painful, horrifying death.

Challenges may cause growth, and I don't think anybody really wishes for an unchallenging, boring, uneventful life. But suffering? No, thanks.

Disease often stunts growth and mental development, being orphaned at a young age (like myself and my sister were) was an irredeemable loss that made everything about my life harder and worse.

I've seen countless individuals raise friends and family rounds for ideas I was working on and as a result of my lack of connections or proximity to wealth the growth of my bootstrapped company was slower and worse without capital investment.

Better is better, worse is worse, romanticizing suffering is a form of stockholm syndrome often times, where people just can't come to terms with the fact that their lives are demonstrably worse for the malnourishment they've experienced.

These people arguing that suffering creates growth must have very benign views of suffering or have experienced suffering very limited in scope.

I think many have only experienced personal challenges and conflate it with loss and suffering.

Human psychology seems to think everything is a trade off, it's not true, some things are pure win and pure loss.

Suffering creates a personal internal response, often times a stoic or any psychologically positive response is beneficial to the individual because of its motivating effect (similar to how optimists tend to outperform pessimists), but let's not fool ourselves, the man with severe brain/body damage may do better with an optimistic perspective than pessimistic but they'll never code or procreate again and their local maxima is objectively worse.

Oh, fully agreed!

As an example see one of the replies to me from someone who seems to be arguing that

> "[...] the modern notion that life is supposed to be in a certain way is a big factor. There's a narrative that we' supposed to get married in our twenties, have kids, retire after a long career (a journey ending in management), then die of a heart attack at 72."

is somehow related or at least partially to blame for all human suffering.

While there is of course a lot to think and argue about modern life, the "rat race", the notion of "my career is my life" or equating academic/job achievement to happiness -- all of this merits debate and discussion, of course! -- the idea that this in any way, shape or form is in the same category of young children dying from horrible diseases, or the Holocaust (or any kind of genocide), or having a debilitating and permanent condition, or being tortured, is infuriating and frankly insulting.

I've no patience for people who would argue this.

> born and tube fed from a machine and allowed to just think non-stop

Sorry, are you trying to describe even worse suffering than the poverty the preceding comment described?

Don't we put our children in bicycles, knowing that they'll fall and hurt themselves? Does that mean we don't care about our children? Of course not. How is it different if God gives us the ability to love and to hate, to cherish and to steal, to be selfless or to be selfish. We all get to choose a unified aspect that will make the world better or worse, for others. We can't force others to be better, only ourselves, but we can help others.

If we learn, as individuals, to be better people, under all circumstances, is that not the same as learning to ride a bike? And once we learn to ride our bike, perhaps there'll be other things to learn too.

This is kind of a privileged take. There are many people where struggle is survival, not an opportunity for growth.

Unless theres an equal playing field for all and everyone has means to overcome their suffering, then this "God" is nothing more than perverse and cruel, not some kind of benevolent parental figure encouraging us to edification.

Growth and prospect are anthropocentric values. The same goes for the point of life. Evolution does not have a point. And extending the meaning of the word "God" just to claim that everyone has their own God is just making words meaningless.

The only way for there to not be suffering is for us to not have free will.

well, we don't have free will, so why do we suffer?

We don't have predictable destined behavior either. Even if we think we're mules to brain chemistry, randomness is a thing.

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