In the face of unbearable, inexplicable or unjustifiable suffering, there are three responses.
The first says: This life is not all there is. There is another world, after death. There is heaven. There is peace and eternal life. All the evil of this world is banished in the world to come.
The second response is to see, as did John Keats, that this world is ‘a vale of soul-making’. We suffer so that we can grow. Others suffer so that we can practise charity or kindness. The bad in our lives is an invitation to the good. For that is how we become morally responsible agents.
The third response is to say: There is evil, therefore there is no God and no ultimate meaning. There is no justice, therefore there is no judge. The world is as it is. Homo hominis lupus est, man is wolf to man. The world is a restless searching for power after power that ceaseth only in death, as Hobbes said.
Primarily empathy is my response, followed by anger more often than I like to admit.
While I personally seek to not cause harm to others and live a life of harmony. I also follow the philosophy that I don't start fights, but I damn sure end them.
Recently in my professional career I've learned that I can't ignore those who are undermining and or sabotaging the well being of others and the company for their own personal gain. That I must enforce discipline and punishment to hold those in line and to show others that there is acceptable and unacceptable behavior.
Issuing punishment brings me no joy and yet, I know it must be done to enforce limits and order in a chaotic system.
You can not become strong until you overcome adversity. You can not defeat evil until you acknowledge it exists and you know it's power.
Life eats life
This is necessary
I have had several discussions with theists about "evil". I submit that it cannot exist as a separate entity. There can be evil acts or even evil people and it can make me angry and have sympathy for those affected by an evil act.
Suffering can be caused by evil acts such as the Buddhists treatment of the Rohingya people in Myanmar or to an individual because of illness and just bad luck.
The response should be again to have sympathy and help if possible.
No need for nay supernatural nonsense.
I hate it... But it's not 'personal.' Suffering is built into our universe. Stars and galaxies collide, destroying billions of planets. Our earth is the product of extreme violence for billions of years. Sometimes entire species--nearly all--have been wiped out in one fell swoop. Even now, we are pretty much helpless in the face of nature.
As sentient beings, we do have the ability to mitigate some of that suffering, but most people choose to live by their evolutionary makeup and perpetuate violence against "others."
The universe was 'born/borne' to suffer.
Suffering: God did it! Read the stupid book where he made innocents and then left alone to run around with scissors but when they fell and cut themselves did he heal them? Not on a bet, instead he threw them out into a world of suffering and anguish - what a total asshole.
The truly evil part of this saga is not that there is such a horrible god who has caused this evil but that he was created in the minds of men and deemed worthy of worship.
It's difficult for god to intervene when man does evil things.
Being non-existent, he is oblivious to it.
Nature is red of tooth and claw and we are not apart from it but a part of it and all it's rules. We may call something 'evil' but nature knows no evil or good, only evolution and if you try and get in the way of this watch out. We absolutely must stop placing ourselves in the center of things. This is the path to our undoing.
Another point of view on the question..
The brain itself has no senses..It is encased inside a dark "bone" enclosure. Our existence is defined by the eye's, ear's, olfactory and other nerves that send information to it. The world as each individual knows it is made from electrical and chemical impulses. The brain processes the incoming information from the body and constructs reality based on its own internal wiring. The organ itself is programmed by our genetics, experience's and interaction with others during the first 3 to 5 years of life. Reality itself is by nature.. "Subjective" What we learn during the first few years of our lives often determine which of the responses listed above one might pick.
I agree that the world is as it is, but I don’t follow that with an assumption that we know everything there is to know about ‘how it is.’
So I don’t rest on any of those three. My fourth response would be to adopt an attitude of “spiritual” adulthood. I would modify those three this way:
God (the totality of reality) exists. Santa (an attitude of generosity) exists. Evil (unfavorable circumstances) exist. Metaphor (linguistic and visual shorthand) exists. The meaning of meaning is just a signifier. Finding an antelope I can kill with an arrow means I will eat tonight. Recognizing a lion's footprint and avoiding it means I will live to steal its antelope another day. A raincloud on the horizon means the life-threatening drought may soon be over. Life is brimming with meaning.
Suffering is mostly psychological. The physical kind we can treat medically more effectively every day. The emotional kind we are not so good at dealing with. There is psychiatric care for the seriously ill, but unless we are nearly disabled, our pride and fear of stigma (not to mention budget) won't allow us near it. We're happy to pop the pharmaceuticals, or otherwise self-medicate, but we are afraid of being "marked" as mentally unstable... so we suffer on.
Ancient wisdom traditions bear evidence that someone knew a way out of this suffering, long before psychiatric intervention was invented. Someone knew that most of our suffering was generated by our natural identification with ego, and that, with practice, we could train ourselves out of that identification, and cease the otherwise endless suffering. Someone encoded this wisdom into allegories that vary from culture to culture, but which all contain a similar formula. That formula worked, reasonably well, for most people, until the Age of Enlightenment, when we were taught that the only story worth listening to is a literal story. So we began separating into camps; those who took spiritual metaphor literally and could still swallow it (mostly the undereducated majority) and those who also took the metaphor literally but felt they had to reject it on intellectual grounds. Metaphor as a language of truth died of intellectual abandonment, or was relegated to the "non-essential" arts.
So now poetry and prose are fiercely alienated from each other, and tribalism is alive and well. Meanwhile we are no better at, and arguably worse at, reducing the suffering we generate for ourselves (and others) than we were two thousand years ago.
Wild animals show little evidence of complex, or debilitating, psychological suffering. They may feel momentary disappointment, frustration, or fear, but they deal with it in the moment and get on about the business of living. Domesticated animals, H. sapiens in particular, have an "enhanced" capacity for suffering, because they are operating under conditions of evolutionary mismatch. The Agricultural Revolution radically altered the environment for these animals, and generated a need for a curative counterbalance. Organized religion was our first response, but the Enlightenment whacked that. Psychology and Psychiatry were our second response, but Psychology, in the scientific sense, is less than three hundred years old, whereas religion-as-a-response-to-evolutionary-mismatch had some twelve thousand years to evolve.
Religion is not, strictly speaking, a conscious "invention" of humans. It is an emergent cultural phenomenon, as subject to evolution as our physiology is. It contains the same wisdom as an opposable thumb or a nictitating membrane. It evolved under the pressures of natural selection. It contains an antidote to unnatural (domesticated) suffering, but is currently unavailable to believers and non-believers; but still fully accessible by understanders.
Sorry, but eternally singing praises to some gawd seems to me to be far more awful than any hell you could imagine.....
The best response is to reject good and evil and judge things not by how right or wrong they are but by their utility for whatever arbitrary goals you set for yourself.
Sounds like Nietzsche/Crowley. “Do what you will”. Great until someone’s ‘will’ conflicts with yours
@Geoffrey51 I would say things are boring until that happens.
@Happy_Killbot Probably true. The interesting part is when one’s Will subjugates another’s. That always brings interesting results. Could call it social Darwinism I guess.
@Geoffrey51 Or a functioning, equal, secure, and just society. Not that I would call it as such.
@Happy_Killbot Not a likely outcome!
@Geoffrey51 Hey, North Korea is formally known as: The "Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea" You know what with all that democracy they got going on, and its for the people or something, and guess what? They have zero unemployment and they always win the Olympics.
the conflict among men is not between Good and Evil different rationales of good.
I subscribe to the Buddhist idea that there is no such thing as evil, an individual may be sick, they cannot be evil.
it is sometimes useful in philosophical discussions to bring out extreme examples,
the Nazis believe that eugenics would benefit mankind as a whole.
this was a mainstream scientific belief that the time which of course created great evil.
it should be noted that their intention was not to do evil.
we have no evidence of an afterlife of any kind, therefore heaven was created to give suffering people hope. the best example of this I know is" Sugar Candy Mountain" in Animal Farm
There are a lot more responses than three How many I can't say but I know it's more than 3. Evil is a subjective concept that doesn't exist outside of our own judgements. You can see this because what's considered evil changes from person to person and over time. Suffering is just the fate of all living creatures in this universe. We exist in a universe designed to make black holes it seems, it wasn't designed for life. The unescapable fact we are doomed to destruction ensures we all suffer. Some are just chosen by nature to suffer more than others. I see no sign of a designer outside of gravity and other forces so I see logical reason to buy into the theroy that a magic being created it. Seems like something we humans have dreamed up as most of what we do know is far more wonderful and beautiful than anything any person ever imagined.
Fourth. Sadness and anger. Then work to eradicate it. Eradication, or at least reduction, of needless suffering in itself is a meaning.
“I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.” - Dr. Rieux, from the Plague-
@Matias Exactly. Hobbes is wise and that wisdom should be heeded.
Always remember to a religious zealots it is always god(s) will!
That is their patent response to anything that happens to them, their families, their tribe(s), their lands, cultures, and their religious beliefs!
"You want, if possible - and there is no more insane "if possible" - to abolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it - that is no goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible - that makes his destruction desirable. The discipline of suffering, of great suffering - do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?" Nietzsche