6 ms·

I was waiting for the part that would make it clear what was being satirized, and it never came? I feel like I'm missing context?

scubbo 4y ago
My reading is that the very fact that it's so abstract and general is itself the point. What could the cult be? Politics? Religion? A particular professional mindset or focus? Many could fit. Apart from the reference to "promise of godly exaltation or gift in a theoretical afterlife" (which nod towards religion), you could apply a lot of this to many social groups.
- dmix 4y ago
  > One of the hallmark tactics of a cult is to isolate you from the rest of the world. They make you depend solely on others within the community for your every need, thus making it extremely difficult to leave. This line stood out to me and seems very apt in these days. For ex, how it's now normal to go after people's jobs directly via social media pressure tactics or business's revenue (and subsequently their employees jobs) via Visa/mastercard/paypal/ad buyers/etc, merely for stepping out of line from mainstream opinions... as Wikileaks and many others experienced. Making society more resilient to cult-like behaviour is always a good thing. Even when these tactics might benefit your pet beliefs, it's rarely worth the trade-offs and usually backfires. When the system you promote exclusively benefits a particular ideology or exclusive set of organizations that's usually a good indicator it's cultish.
  - tjr225 4y ago
  - Guthur 4y ago
    If you stand apart you will be preyed upon by those that do not. We are not designed or evolved or whatever to prowl alone, because it will always be in our nature to come together and some will exploit this. And so while you stand alone they will bring all their machinations to consume your very being. Would you really be that strong to stand alone against all those that would look to exploit you.
    - somenameforme 4y ago
      I think this is something else because reality tends to be the exact opposite. Instead it's small groups of well organized radicals using their organization to impact everybody else disproportionately. To stick with safe examples, look at the KKK. A quick search indicates they hit their peak popularity in the 1920s with some 4 million claimed members, which would be ~3% of society. But of course they had an outsized impact on America. So you end up with a scenario where 3% of people were dominating the zeitgeist of 97% through intimidation. And there's no particularly clear way to combat this. The internet has only made this worse. Now ever smaller groups can coordinate extremely effectively and instantaneously, while also simultaneously working to create the perception of far greater numbers than actually possessed.
      - Guthur 4y ago
        The enemy is never the one you see in front of your face. It's the voice behind you that's your true adversary. So stand side by side and block him out.
- rob74 4y ago
  Yup, the rest could apply to just about anything, but this brief phrase near the end makes it pretty clear that it's about religion. That, and phrases like "the cult has left noticeable marks on you". Somehow all atheists (or at least the militant kind) seem to believe religious people are all deeply scarred and twisted, no matter how "watered-down from its original form" their "cult" may be.
  - mmastrac 4y ago
    The clever part about this writing is that it's so vague it applies to everyone. If you squint one way it's the group you are in. If you look sideways it's the group you dislike. It's brilliantly subversive and makes you think.
    - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
      Yes - it's a Rorschach test.
  - causi 4y ago
    "the cult has left noticeable marks on you" Maybe they're talking about the child genital mutilation.
    - erklik 4y ago
      Then they're only talking about Abrahamic religions since largely, genital mutilation isn't a part of Hinduism, Buddhism etc.
  - tyingq 4y ago
    There's also "Feelings your cult has told you are of the devil."
eulo__ 4y ago
I think it's whatever you want it to be. Country, religion, politic, 9-5 work ethic, capitalism, family, etc etc Just a fun joke on the societal norms around you.
friend_and_foe 4y ago
I think the idea is to craft a cult sales pitch framed as a support system for cult members that want to leave. The premise of the article is, of course, that we are all in some type of cult.
- msla 4y ago
  > The premise of the article is, of course, that we are all in some type of cult. Which is precisely what a cult leader would want their victims to think: "Nobody is free, so stay in the group!"
  - Kamq 4y ago
    No, a cult leader would say that nobody outside the group is free. Only the group is free, and the freedom comes from the cult-leader in some way (flavor that last part to the kind of cult).
tbrownaw 4y ago
It feels a bit vintage. On a cloudless night, go to the last rest stop before Furnace Creek. There you will find...
cryptonector 4y ago
> what was being satirized It was everything.
rhacker 4y ago
Its just funny, it's basically saying your country/politics/church/society is a cult. And then it kind of invites you to join a different cult. So it's funny x 2
- lioeters 4y ago
  This is my take also, that society itself is a cult. They promise a theoretical "afterlife" of retirement after the age of 70, but until then we must suffer and work hard, usually to benefit someone else higher up the chain. They make you depend solely on others for your every need (food, housing, healthcare, etc.), making it extremely difficult to leave. But leave to where? There is no outside of this cult, other than the hell of homelessness. The only real way out, it seems, is to create another cult with more humane values. Or go it alone, or with a small group of friends.
  - mistermann 4y ago
    > The only real way out, it seems, is to create another cult with more humane values. Or go it alone, or with a small group of friends. Bad news, one institution has monopoly rights on that role: Democracy. And if you have a problem with Democracy, you probably have unwittingly become a member of a cult (far right, likely) and indoctrinated into believing conspiracy theories. Now: back to work, citizen.
the_gipsy 4y ago
I was betting on Twitter or any social media.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  I was going betting crypto myself.
  - shapefrog 4y ago
    Cult 3.0
ukj 4y ago
All of your unquestioned cultural norms and biases. Everything your parents, your family; your community and your society taught you. The heuristics that keep you navigating life without having to scrutinize every single choice from first principles.
- crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
  > The heuristics that keep you navigating life without having to scrutinize every single choice from first principles. Thanks for these words. Scrutinizing every single choice from first principles is exactly what i promote and what i find people are deeply resistant to, yet i haven't had this description of what's happening until now.
  - ukj 4y ago
    It is an unrealistic and unwise expectation to live one’s life that way. Decision fatigue will catch up with anyone who lives like that soon enough. Time is a finite resource. Don’t waste it on perfectionism.
    - crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
      This has not been my experience in the past 7 years of addiction recovery. It's been imperative in order to root out as many ways my personality evolved to support addiction and has led to realizing many unconventional ways I've been avoiding my emotions than what's identified by most recovery or 12-step groups. Also, I've made arguments like what you're making before i entered into recovery to explain why i wasn't trying to make comprehensive changes to my life and explain away learned helplessness around changing myself. My guess is what's viewed as decision fatigue could be unaddressed emotional issues, such as automated judgment/criticism, fear avoidance, normalized disempowerment narratives (which is related to cultivating a growth-oriented mindset, as opposed to one that says "this is just how i am and it can never be different"). Practicing radical acceptance and ignorance, as well as maintaining a playful attitude toward what I'm doing have been monumental to deeply examining myself. All this helps with perfectionism, which i also stopped practicing. Attempting to be thorough and comprehensive in the application of principles to one's life is not an effort in perfectionism; perfectionism is more about how one approaches doing such a thing. I think another term for what I'm referring to here is "monasticism." These days, I'm also caring for a 4-year old while trying to examine everything we do from a generational trauma perspective. I no longer believe in ego depletion and consider it to be justification for people getting tired of stuffing/processing emotions that arise in the course of things, and potentially needs they're not aware of going habitually unmet. This brings me to another monumental thing i think has helped me in living a principled and intentional life: learning nonviolent communication and developing an awareness of feelings and universal human needs. To my knowledge,there are no studies examining the impact of these practices on decision-making. I can say this: choosing actions/things based on what I think will meet my needs vs deny them is easy in a society where most decisions aren't oriented toward needs. There are learning challenges along the way, since there can often be no options present that effectively meet needs, so acceptance of the situation and creativity to come up with new options are both really important skills to develop. As an aside, ego depletion and decision fatigue seem to be concepts without a lot of reproducibility behind them, or with much smaller effect sizes than previously reported.
ZoomZoomZoom 4y ago
Read carefully and compare the related sentences. For example: > They make you depend solely on others within the community for your every need... Is followed by: > We have partnerships with organizations that can connect you to schooling, work, housing, and medical care...
- mmastrac 4y ago
  In my reading I don't think this is the point. The deprogramming doesn't force the individual to adopt any beliefs to access those services. I think the point of the article is for the reader to consider - no matter what they and their opponents believe - that all are in a cult. Perhaps I missed a meta level of satire with every cult starting out this way, however, but the point seems more about our existing cults.
  - brutusborn 4y ago
    I like your interpretation. One point of difference though, although the text doesn't mention forcing adherents to follow any beliefs, it also doesn't state that there are no conditions for the services.
- brutusborn 4y ago
  So cult == community? As a bit of a libertarian, this struck me as anti-Statist (i.e. modern secular states are basically cults)
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    Is there no libertarian community? In the sense of a group who think similarly and are suspicious and somewhat hostile to those who think differently?
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      My impression is that libertarian communities, similarly to Mensa, have more hostility between members than you might want to see in a well-functioning community. There are libertarian communities, but they are less community-like than the term would lead you to expect. That might be directly related to the kind of person who joins a libertarian community (as seems to be the case with Mensa), or it might be an artifact of the fact that women hate libertarianism.
stephen_g 4y ago
I think people are reading too far into it. It's just a joke... The point is that they're telling the subject of the story (in second person so it's addressed to "you") that you're in a cult and they're going to rehabilitate you - but as you read on, you might notice that the rehabilitation is describing, you guessed it, a cult! It's not actually making a comment that everybody is actually in institutions that are like cults or anything, that's just part of the (satirical) brainwashing that the cult is using to bring people in.
- jollyllama 4y ago
  Thanks. It was such a wordy rehash of cult deprogramming literature that I couldn't read through it.
phao 4y ago
Maybe this is one of those things like cold reading. IMO, the text may be seen as a piece of advertising for a fictional "de-programming" (like they call it) treatment from a cult. However, it's written for an abstract general kind of cult, described only in terms of what is common about several cults. It's not specific about anything. Just like well done cold reading: it's right, but unspecific. I believe the idea is that you identify some of the things you're doing in your life as a cult (guided by the general features given in the text) and pay more attention to them. The text, however, is vague enough to classify a lot of things as cults, even though you/I/we may believe these aren't.
giantg2 4y ago
I didn't get it at all.
vincnetas 4y ago
I'm pretty sure it's religion. You will experience unpleasant feelings here. Feelings your cult has told you are of the devil. Part of our program involves exposing you to the idea that there are very rarely easy answers in life. People suffer for no reason. You will suffer, and have suffered, for no reason. But people can also do great things for no reason, or rather unmotivated by some promise of godly exaltation or gift in a theoretical afterlife.
- gwd 4y ago
  It sounds like the problem thinking they're trying to address here is the idea, "I'm suffering because I've done something bad and am being punished by God." But if they think this kind of thinking is directly linked to religion, then it's just ignorance and bigotry. Consider the folloing quote: "Everything happens for a reason. Sometimes the reason is you're stupid and make bad decisions." The people I know who most strongly connect with that quote have all been (right-wing) atheists. By contrast, consider the following quotes: 'As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him."' (John 9:1-2) 'Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.' (James 1:2-4) 'In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.' (1 Peter 6-7) 'Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined—and everyone undergoes discipline—then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of spirits and live! They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.' (Hebrews 12:7-11) In other words, Christianity says that far from suffering always being a punishment from God for bad behavior, it is sometimes a gift from God to accomplish a greater purpose. So consider three hypothetical universes: 1. Nearly all your suffering is your fault; the result of God's wrath and/or the natural consequence of your own bad choices. 2. Most suffering is pointless. It has no meaning or benefit or blame; it just happens. 3. Suffering can be valuable. It is allowed by God because it achieves higher purposes; we as individuals , and the universe at large, are both better off because of the suffering. I agree with the authors, that universe #2 (if true) is better than universe #1. But universe #3 -- the universe actually described by Christianity -- is even better.

scubbo 4y ago

My reading is that the very fact that it's so abstract and general is itself the point. What could the cult be? Politics? Religion? A particular professional mindset or focus? Many could fit. Apart from the reference to "promise of godly exaltation or gift in a theoretical afterlife" (which nod towards religion), you could apply a lot of this to many social groups.

dmix 4y ago
> One of the hallmark tactics of a cult is to isolate you from the rest of the world. They make you depend solely on others within the community for your every need, thus making it extremely difficult to leave. This line stood out to me and seems very apt in these days. For ex, how it's now normal to go after people's jobs directly via social media pressure tactics or business's revenue (and subsequently their employees jobs) via Visa/mastercard/paypal/ad buyers/etc, merely for stepping out of line from mainstream opinions... as Wikileaks and many others experienced. Making society more resilient to cult-like behaviour is always a good thing. Even when these tactics might benefit your pet beliefs, it's rarely worth the trade-offs and usually backfires. When the system you promote exclusively benefits a particular ideology or exclusive set of organizations that's usually a good indicator it's cultish.
- tjr225 4y ago
- Guthur 4y ago
  If you stand apart you will be preyed upon by those that do not. We are not designed or evolved or whatever to prowl alone, because it will always be in our nature to come together and some will exploit this. And so while you stand alone they will bring all their machinations to consume your very being. Would you really be that strong to stand alone against all those that would look to exploit you.
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    I think this is something else because reality tends to be the exact opposite. Instead it's small groups of well organized radicals using their organization to impact everybody else disproportionately. To stick with safe examples, look at the KKK. A quick search indicates they hit their peak popularity in the 1920s with some 4 million claimed members, which would be ~3% of society. But of course they had an outsized impact on America. So you end up with a scenario where 3% of people were dominating the zeitgeist of 97% through intimidation. And there's no particularly clear way to combat this. The internet has only made this worse. Now ever smaller groups can coordinate extremely effectively and instantaneously, while also simultaneously working to create the perception of far greater numbers than actually possessed.
    - Guthur 4y ago
      The enemy is never the one you see in front of your face. It's the voice behind you that's your true adversary. So stand side by side and block him out.
rob74 4y ago
Yup, the rest could apply to just about anything, but this brief phrase near the end makes it pretty clear that it's about religion. That, and phrases like "the cult has left noticeable marks on you". Somehow all atheists (or at least the militant kind) seem to believe religious people are all deeply scarred and twisted, no matter how "watered-down from its original form" their "cult" may be.
- mmastrac 4y ago
  The clever part about this writing is that it's so vague it applies to everyone. If you squint one way it's the group you are in. If you look sideways it's the group you dislike. It's brilliantly subversive and makes you think.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    Yes - it's a Rorschach test.
- causi 4y ago
  "the cult has left noticeable marks on you" Maybe they're talking about the child genital mutilation.
  - erklik 4y ago
    Then they're only talking about Abrahamic religions since largely, genital mutilation isn't a part of Hinduism, Buddhism etc.
- tyingq 4y ago
  There's also "Feelings your cult has told you are of the devil."

eulo__ 4y ago

I think it's whatever you want it to be. Country, religion, politic, 9-5 work ethic, capitalism, family, etc etc Just a fun joke on the societal norms around you.

friend_and_foe 4y ago

I think the idea is to craft a cult sales pitch framed as a support system for cult members that want to leave. The premise of the article is, of course, that we are all in some type of cult.

msla 4y ago
> The premise of the article is, of course, that we are all in some type of cult. Which is precisely what a cult leader would want their victims to think: "Nobody is free, so stay in the group!"
- Kamq 4y ago
  No, a cult leader would say that nobody outside the group is free. Only the group is free, and the freedom comes from the cult-leader in some way (flavor that last part to the kind of cult).

tbrownaw 4y ago

It feels a bit vintage. On a cloudless night, go to the last rest stop before Furnace Creek. There you will find...

cryptonector 4y ago

> what was being satirized It was everything.

rhacker 4y ago

Its just funny, it's basically saying your country/politics/church/society is a cult. And then it kind of invites you to join a different cult. So it's funny x 2

lioeters 4y ago
This is my take also, that society itself is a cult. They promise a theoretical "afterlife" of retirement after the age of 70, but until then we must suffer and work hard, usually to benefit someone else higher up the chain. They make you depend solely on others for your every need (food, housing, healthcare, etc.), making it extremely difficult to leave. But leave to where? There is no outside of this cult, other than the hell of homelessness. The only real way out, it seems, is to create another cult with more humane values. Or go it alone, or with a small group of friends.
- mistermann 4y ago
  > The only real way out, it seems, is to create another cult with more humane values. Or go it alone, or with a small group of friends. Bad news, one institution has monopoly rights on that role: Democracy. And if you have a problem with Democracy, you probably have unwittingly become a member of a cult (far right, likely) and indoctrinated into believing conspiracy theories. Now: back to work, citizen.

the_gipsy 4y ago

I was betting on Twitter or any social media.

gonzo41 4y ago
I was going betting crypto myself.
- shapefrog 4y ago
  Cult 3.0

ukj 4y ago

All of your unquestioned cultural norms and biases. Everything your parents, your family; your community and your society taught you. The heuristics that keep you navigating life without having to scrutinize every single choice from first principles.

crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
> The heuristics that keep you navigating life without having to scrutinize every single choice from first principles. Thanks for these words. Scrutinizing every single choice from first principles is exactly what i promote and what i find people are deeply resistant to, yet i haven't had this description of what's happening until now.
- ukj 4y ago
  It is an unrealistic and unwise expectation to live one’s life that way. Decision fatigue will catch up with anyone who lives like that soon enough. Time is a finite resource. Don’t waste it on perfectionism.
  - crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
    This has not been my experience in the past 7 years of addiction recovery. It's been imperative in order to root out as many ways my personality evolved to support addiction and has led to realizing many unconventional ways I've been avoiding my emotions than what's identified by most recovery or 12-step groups. Also, I've made arguments like what you're making before i entered into recovery to explain why i wasn't trying to make comprehensive changes to my life and explain away learned helplessness around changing myself. My guess is what's viewed as decision fatigue could be unaddressed emotional issues, such as automated judgment/criticism, fear avoidance, normalized disempowerment narratives (which is related to cultivating a growth-oriented mindset, as opposed to one that says "this is just how i am and it can never be different"). Practicing radical acceptance and ignorance, as well as maintaining a playful attitude toward what I'm doing have been monumental to deeply examining myself. All this helps with perfectionism, which i also stopped practicing. Attempting to be thorough and comprehensive in the application of principles to one's life is not an effort in perfectionism; perfectionism is more about how one approaches doing such a thing. I think another term for what I'm referring to here is "monasticism." These days, I'm also caring for a 4-year old while trying to examine everything we do from a generational trauma perspective. I no longer believe in ego depletion and consider it to be justification for people getting tired of stuffing/processing emotions that arise in the course of things, and potentially needs they're not aware of going habitually unmet. This brings me to another monumental thing i think has helped me in living a principled and intentional life: learning nonviolent communication and developing an awareness of feelings and universal human needs. To my knowledge,there are no studies examining the impact of these practices on decision-making. I can say this: choosing actions/things based on what I think will meet my needs vs deny them is easy in a society where most decisions aren't oriented toward needs. There are learning challenges along the way, since there can often be no options present that effectively meet needs, so acceptance of the situation and creativity to come up with new options are both really important skills to develop. As an aside, ego depletion and decision fatigue seem to be concepts without a lot of reproducibility behind them, or with much smaller effect sizes than previously reported.

ZoomZoomZoom 4y ago

Read carefully and compare the related sentences. For example: > They make you depend solely on others within the community for your every need... Is followed by: > We have partnerships with organizations that can connect you to schooling, work, housing, and medical care...

mmastrac 4y ago
In my reading I don't think this is the point. The deprogramming doesn't force the individual to adopt any beliefs to access those services. I think the point of the article is for the reader to consider - no matter what they and their opponents believe - that all are in a cult. Perhaps I missed a meta level of satire with every cult starting out this way, however, but the point seems more about our existing cults.
- brutusborn 4y ago
  I like your interpretation. One point of difference though, although the text doesn't mention forcing adherents to follow any beliefs, it also doesn't state that there are no conditions for the services.
brutusborn 4y ago
So cult == community? As a bit of a libertarian, this struck me as anti-Statist (i.e. modern secular states are basically cults)
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  Is there no libertarian community? In the sense of a group who think similarly and are suspicious and somewhat hostile to those who think differently?
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    My impression is that libertarian communities, similarly to Mensa, have more hostility between members than you might want to see in a well-functioning community. There are libertarian communities, but they are less community-like than the term would lead you to expect. That might be directly related to the kind of person who joins a libertarian community (as seems to be the case with Mensa), or it might be an artifact of the fact that women hate libertarianism.

stephen_g 4y ago

I think people are reading too far into it. It's just a joke... The point is that they're telling the subject of the story (in second person so it's addressed to "you") that you're in a cult and they're going to rehabilitate you - but as you read on, you might notice that the rehabilitation is describing, you guessed it, a cult! It's not actually making a comment that everybody is actually in institutions that are like cults or anything, that's just part of the (satirical) brainwashing that the cult is using to bring people in.

jollyllama 4y ago
Thanks. It was such a wordy rehash of cult deprogramming literature that I couldn't read through it.

phao 4y ago

Maybe this is one of those things like cold reading. IMO, the text may be seen as a piece of advertising for a fictional "de-programming" (like they call it) treatment from a cult. However, it's written for an abstract general kind of cult, described only in terms of what is common about several cults. It's not specific about anything. Just like well done cold reading: it's right, but unspecific. I believe the idea is that you identify some of the things you're doing in your life as a cult (guided by the general features given in the text) and pay more attention to them. The text, however, is vague enough to classify a lot of things as cults, even though you/I/we may believe these aren't.

giantg2 4y ago

I didn't get it at all.

vincnetas 4y ago

I'm pretty sure it's religion. You will experience unpleasant feelings here. Feelings your cult has told you are of the devil. Part of our program involves exposing you to the idea that there are very rarely easy answers in life. People suffer for no reason. You will suffer, and have suffered, for no reason. But people can also do great things for no reason, or rather unmotivated by some promise of godly exaltation or gift in a theoretical afterlife.

gwd 4y ago
It sounds like the problem thinking they're trying to address here is the idea, "I'm suffering because I've done something bad and am being punished by God." But if they think this kind of thinking is directly linked to religion, then it's just ignorance and bigotry. Consider the folloing quote: "Everything happens for a reason. Sometimes the reason is you're stupid and make bad decisions." The people I know who most strongly connect with that quote have all been (right-wing) atheists. By contrast, consider the following quotes: 'As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him."' (John 9:1-2) 'Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.' (James 1:2-4) 'In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.' (1 Peter 6-7) 'Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined—and everyone undergoes discipline—then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of spirits and live! They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.' (Hebrews 12:7-11) In other words, Christianity says that far from suffering always being a punishment from God for bad behavior, it is sometimes a gift from God to accomplish a greater purpose. So consider three hypothetical universes: 1. Nearly all your suffering is your fault; the result of God's wrath and/or the natural consequence of your own bad choices. 2. Most suffering is pointless. It has no meaning or benefit or blame; it just happens. 3. Suffering can be valuable. It is allowed by God because it achieves higher purposes; we as individuals , and the universe at large, are both better off because of the suffering. I agree with the authors, that universe #2 (if true) is better than universe #1. But universe #3 -- the universe actually described by Christianity -- is even better.