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What is your response to evil and suffering?

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.

Matias 8 June 1
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37 comments

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0

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.

4

There is no such thing as good and evil in the context being used; which suggests some cosmic, eternal struggle. We know this to be nonsensical and without basis or evidence.

Good and evil are religious terms that suggest humans have "purpose" outside of what they determine for themselves. Evolution and extinction illustrate that man has no more purpose than brontosaurus.

The Earth and cosmos do not cease upon the absence of man.

Suffering is a subjective term to each individual and animal. It is simply a part of the living experience.

SCal Level 7 June 1, 2019

cruel and kind, just and unjust. the nomenclature matters little, you understand the question, don't be pedantic.

@dellik My response is simply to suggest a book for your perusal.

The Tyranny of Words by Stuart Chase.

Semantics and syntax absolutely matter.

@BryanLV They don't when you understand intent. but you do you man, I don't really care.

1

I believe what Hobbes says. Not yours but mine.

@Matias Exactly. Hobbes is wise and that wisdom should be heeded.

2

My response is simply "THAT'S LIFE"

alon Level 6 June 1, 2019
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Evil is just man's excuse for doing shitty things

evil is what we call it when the other guy does a shity thing

3

The third response.
There’s nothing noble/divine about suffering, nothing especially glorious about dying for a cause, except the comfort it gives survivors. ‘God’ doesn’t test us or ‘have a plan’ because there IS no god. That’s all a delusion.

4

Make sure I am not contributing to it.

1

Of the three, I would choose the second response. However, I would not say that suffering has a purpose. It's just part of life. Humans suffer. Other animals suffer. Without suffering, would we recognize joy?

0

And there are those who say you're being punished for your own misdeeds . And there are those who say all bad is due to Satan .

0

John Keats or John Hick? (Perhaps both...)

0

When I first saw the headline, I comically thought "I usually tell my ex I'll see her in court." But the. I saw you had a deeper intent.

The one thing I do to help prevent the spread of evil is speak up when I can to put a stop to it. I teach my child what the evil is and advise him to act in positive ways. There's always going to be some sort of suffering, treat everyone respectfully but stand up for whats truely right.

0

Best try to avoid it.

1

In my opinion, evil is solely human activity, suffering is just part of nature and life on planet earth.

0

A fourth response:

There’s no such thing as evil. What we perceive as evil is just the workings of nature. Things happen for reasons, but those reasons might be over our heads. The life or death of a single organism is of little significance.

There is no afterlife. Time is an illusion. We are in heaven right now. The sense of existence as a separate individual in a body is an illusion. We are not our bodies. Our true essence in Ultimate Reality is conscious awareness itself.

1

Life is random, good things happen and shit things happen. C'est la vie

0

"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

cava Level 7 June 1, 2019
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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!

1

Human emotional constructs.

Buxx Level 7 June 1, 2019
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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-

1

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.

0

Nuke 'em til they glow and shoot 'em in the dark.

Fuck them and anybody who looks like them.

Walk it off.

But then I'm told I'm a very primitive and unregenerate type of person.

0

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

3

Sorry, but eternally singing praises to some gawd seems to me to be far more awful than any hell you could imagine.....

0

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:

  1. This life, as it is this moment, is not all there is. There is another potential way of being that can be achieved after the death of that mental attitude, namely the skill of living in the current moment instead of lingering in the past or worrying about the future. As Wittgenstein said... “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
  2. We suffer because we have not grown. There is no profit in exalting suffering to the status of benevolent teacher. It is only an unpleasant and destructive happenstance of nature that is best left behind as soon as we can learn how to do so. And many before us have learned this skill, so there is no reason to think we can’t. Suffering, like the rest of nature, has no teleological intent.
  3. It is an emotional, rather than a rational, response to say that since “evil” exists in the world, the world is nothing but evil. The world is as it is, but humans are not wolves, and wolves are not even how we thought they were. And power is not the only motivation humans possess. Evolution has given us “good” qualities as well as “bad” and a remarkable capacity for training our own behavior away from the worst of our natural instincts.
  4. Children imagine Santa Claus as a real, flesh-and-blood person, but adults can recognize Santa as a personification of the spirit of giving. It is our biological nature rather than our ignorance alone that tends to anthropomorphize abstractions. It's just a visual shorthand; not a deliberate lie. We draw cartoon googly eyes on pink, stomach-shaped characters to sell antacid to adults! There is nothing inherently wrong with envisioning the totality of nature's forces as a god character so long as we take the more adult understanding as metaphor. Arguably, those, of any age, who continue to take the metaphor as literal truth are "spiritual" children. But those who then deny that the spirit of giving, or that the totality of nature's forces exist, simply because they are unable or unwilling to unpack the metaphor, are hardly more sophisticated.

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.

skado Level 9 June 1, 2019
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I guess i would come closer to being in the third camp, if any. I think it might be more accurate to say "there is cruelty" than to say "there is evil." We can argue that cruelty is evil, but cruelty can be defined differently from one mind to the next.

Deb57 Level 8 June 1, 2019
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