4 ms·
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? D
by spadros 5y ago
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.
- danuker 5y agoSome 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...
- marginalia_nu 5y agoBuddhists 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.
- the_af 5y agoKids 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.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoI 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.
- the_af 5y agoI 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.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago> "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?
- 5y ago
- alexvoda 5y agoThere 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.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoAren't all experiences by definition subjective?
- akprasad 5y agoTo 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/ https://tricycle.org/magazine/second-arrow/
- brimble 5y agoSimilar 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.
- cjameskeller 5y agoYeah, 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
- AlwaysRock 5y agoWhat? The bible, at least the new testament, is full of verses saying suffering comes along with Christianity.
- creamynebula 5y agoThere is the belief in karma and reincarnation that addresses this.
- tasha0663 5y agoKarma 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
- throwawayisay 5y ago
- danielheath 5y agoMost 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.
- slothtrop 5y agoBegs 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.
- legrande 5y agoI 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.
- malfist 5y agoThat 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.
- legrande 5y agoI 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.