Why Pain?

Discussion in 'Religion Archives' started by G71, Oct 5, 2005.

  1. G71 AI Coder Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    163
    Why pain? Old question, I know.. But is there a good answer? If God exists, why the concept of uncomfortable exists? How about God himself? Does it make sense for God to feel uncomfortable? Do subjects (including God) take actions if they don't feel uncomfortable? Is God comfortable with what's going on in our world? Can all the suffering end instantly? Why pain for pain (e.g. the pain of Jesus to "save us" and so on)? Does it make any sense? Sure, we might be getting some experience from uncomfortable feelings - but such experience can potentially mean something in imperfect worlds only. It becomes totally meaningless in the world of absolute happiness (with no risks, no dangerous things). What are we doing in this world if such a great God is/was around? Isn't all this suffering just a totally sick idea considering the possibility of living without it from the beginning? Why the first garden wasn't a much, MUCH, better place? Maybe someone's fantasy was just too limited.. Or someone’s concept of "perfect" was a bit, let's say, bizarre.. Or someone just wanted us to feel guilty. Does a bad choice have a place in a perfect world? Does any choice have a place in a perfect world? Do we really need to deal with anything else than with great feelings or some unknown type of the best possible future? Is pain a fair price for free will in our world? Does it really make sense to create a self-satisfaction-driven creature, give it free will and then punish it for not following author’s rules? Why would I write a code which could potentially do what I don't want it to do and included factors which would increase the probability that it will really do it? Why would I want anything dangerous around the people I love? What kind of God are we supposedly dealing with?
     
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  3. water the sea Registered Senior Member

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    It is the belief that suffering is wrong that makes people doubt God and the meaning of life.

    By saying that suffering is not wrong I do not mean that suffering is right. I mean that suffering *is*. By saying it is wrong, abnormal, we are trying to escape it, and thus escape reality.

    Suffering is part of life, such is life on earth. It is when we are trying to deny the reality of suffering, when we are trying to escape suffering, that we end up suffering even more.


    Prove that suffering is wrong, and your above questions will subsequently be answered.
     
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  5. KennyJC Registered Senior Member

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    Pain is a wonderfully efficient way for life to preserve it's existence. It's quite fascinating if you think about it. If God did come up with the concept of pain he's one smart dude. If it wasn't for pain I doubt we'd see such variety in evolutionary defences and the evolution of carnivores to cope with these defences. It's a bit of a natrually occurring arms race.

    I remember reading about a plant that suffers the fate of having eggs laid on it, and the caterpillars hatch and eat the plant to death. How did the plant get over this? It somehow managed to get yellow blots on it's leaves to fool the insect into thinking there is already eggs there so it needs to find another plant. Amazing.
     
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  7. GodlessEvil God is dead Registered Senior Member

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    Actually if you watch insects and plant life, they are more fascinating than boring old humans, we think we are clever and all that, but we do not compare to the evolution and uniqueness of insects and plants.

    Suffering is good though, if you never suffer then you'll get bored and uncreative, you would be useless, you would be like a drugged up hippy at a festival day in and day out.
     
  8. pain and suffering contradict the belief that god is omnibenevolent, which i believe is a central tenet more or less of the christian god concept. since benevolence is by its definition the propogation of good, then anything that contradicts it is bad.

    religious suppositions aside, it would appear to be self evident that pain is wrong as viewed through a human lens. pain is the antithesis of pleasure, and pleasure makes us feel pleasant which we encourage and view as a desirable state. since pain is the opposite of this it seems obvious that it is undesirable for people and therefore "not good" or "wrong".

    there was a really stupid argument in that book called Angels and Demons by Dan Brown where a priest tries to disspell that pain and omnibenevolence are contradictions in terms, it went something like this:

    if you are a loving parent, and you let your child go skateboarding even though you know he might hurt himself, then how can you let him skateboard and remain benevolent? the priest says the reason for this is because you believe that letting your child learn that he can be hurt by skateboarding is a more valuable lesson than holding him back from it so he doesnt get hurt, thus sheilding him from the realities of the world.

    the problem with this kind of argument as i see it is that as a parent you dont claim to have created the universe from scratch and have contol over every part of it, because then if you had the ability to prevent the pain, you would or else you would by definition no longer be omnibenevolent.
     
  9. c7ityi_ Registered Senior Member

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    1,924
    Pain is just a different form of of the same thing as pleasure is a part of. At the other side. People create pain because they don't to accept the wholeness. They disturb the balance between the positive and negative (which in reality do not exist)
     
  10. Prince_James Plutarch (Mickey's Dog) Registered Senior Member

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  11. GodlessEvil God is dead Registered Senior Member

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    210
    Very convincing argument, but then who says a creator has to be a good guy?

    Where does the idea of god being a good guy come from?
    If it comes from religions that is not enough to say a creator does not exist it only shows religions are all wrong in the belief god is good.
     
  12. water the sea Registered Senior Member

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    6,442
    You are arguing from the position of people having no free will.
    At least a part of Christians claim that humans do have free will, and that they can choose their actions -- so when talking about Christianity, and its understanding of God being benevolent, we have to keep to their stance on free will.
    Namely, if people are given free will, then a benevolent God and the existence of suffering are not mutually exclusive anymore.


    And by thinking thus, people condemn themselves to suffering.
     
  13. All.For.One 1 Corinthians 11:1..are you in Registered Senior Member

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    49
    If we fall over onto a sharp rock do you feel pain?The body was made to feel pain. So is pain bad or evil? If we only felt good all the time how could we know it was good if their was no comparative? Pain isn't always 'evil' as such.
     
  14. water

    You are arguing from the position of people having no free will.
    At least a part of Christians claim that humans do have free will, and that they can choose their actions -- so when talking about Christianity, and its understanding of God being benevolent, we have to keep to their stance on free will.
    Namely, if people are given free will, then a benevolent God and the existence of suffering are not mutually exclusive anymore.


    i was arguing why pain cannot exist while the concept of an omnibenevolent god exists. i wasnt arguing against free will. freedom to choose has nothing to do with why a god with the power to eradicate suffering would allow it to exist.
    i think you may be wrong about all christians believing in free will. especially throughout the ages. john calvin, the famous protestant leader came up with an idea called predestination that states basically that god has a plan for every single person and that regardless of any personal action they may take, this course of events is essentially unalterable. that doctrine does not exist today in the same form but it does pervade the thoughts of religiously minded people of many christian sects, you see it surface whenever you hear someone talk about gods plan, or when a little kid dies and their grandmother says "well we might not know the reason but he was called back to god"...etc. thats a pretty serious indictment of the concept of free will dont you think?




    And by thinking thus, people condemn themselves to suffering.

    although it pains me to say it, in a way you are right. its like how people are condemned to darkness at night because they understand the concept of daylight. there is an essential duality at work here. if you did not understand pleasure you could not know pain. if you didnt know what the day was you could never have night. if you only ever were exposed to good there could be no evil. that however is not the fault of people themselves. they have within them the capacity to understand these two opposite things and also possess the ability to judge which of the two is preferable. so in the context of your statement people are condemned to suffer because they can understand the opposite of suffering. tough break i guess, but still pretty irrelevant.
     
  15. G71 AI Coder Registered Senior Member

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    163
    >[water]
    >"Prove that suffering is wrong"

    If suffering doesn't exist in heaven, can't we assume that there must be something wrong with it? If so, what could be the reason for its existence?

    >[KennyJC]
    >"Pain is a wonderfully efficient way for life to preserve it's existence"

    That would not apply in a well designed world of pleasure which could have been designed by God.

    >[GodlessEvil]
    >"Suffering is good though, if you never suffer then you'll get bored and uncreative, you would be useless, you would be like a drugged up hippy at a festival day in and day out."

    Looks like our crazy world makes many of us hardly capable of imagining a pleasure-only world. You simply cannot get "bored" there.. The concept of uncomfortable doesn't exist there. The "useless" also doesn't really apply.. There are simply no problems to solve..

    >[charles cure]
    >"the priest says the reason for this is because you believe that letting your child learn that he can be hurt by skateboarding is a more valuable lesson than holding him back from it so he doesnt get hurt, thus sheilding him from the realities of the world. The problem with this kind of argument as i see it is that as a parent you dont claim to have created the universe from scratch and have contol over every part of it, because then if you had the ability to prevent the pain, you would or else you would by definition no longer be omnibenevolent."

    Yes, that's exactly the problem.. Christians are typically lost when it comes to this argument.

    >[water]
    >"if people are given free will, then a benevolent God and the existence of suffering are not mutually exclusive anymore"

    This is IMO a separate issue.. But I would be interested to know if you think that suffering is always a punishment for doing something God does not like.. If you think so then what about suffering newborns? BTW note that newborns don't have a well-enough functional memory so they cannot really get the lesson or comprehend what's right/wrong according to someone else's values.. But they definitely can suffer and they often do. For example, consider earthquakes or birth defects as a source of their suffering..

    >[All.For.One] & [charles cure]

    We could fully experience pleasure without knowing anything about suffering. It's just a biochemistry involving serotonin, acetylcholine, noradrenaline, glutamate, enkephalins and endorphins.. If all the right stuff is there, you get the feeling. It does not depend on the previous experience. It's not like the more you suffer the more you can enjoy things later. There are people who suffered very little and who are getting lots of intense pleasure..
     
  16. duendy Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    6,585
    just say you were near a red hot metal, and you put your nhand on it, and felt no pain, so you watched as the hot metal starting burning and melting your skin and tissue and muscle....tilll you have no hand no more and cant use it. that wouldn't be very intelligent would it. i mean if Nature was like that we'd all be walking round wit bits of flesh hangn off, other bits hanging off broken bones. horror
    so obviously physical pain informs us to take han away, etc. so that is physical

    then there is psychological pain....i am aware of spychosomatic pain, but for now i am trying to keep it simple

    what is wit pychological pain. this is usually what people hate about life and makes them ask questions about 'God' and 'evil etc. tough admittedly physical pain's no picnic neither

    is psychological pain confilct? alienation? if so...maybe THISpain is in-forming us of someting wouldn't you say? like the hand near the piece of metal?

    we mov e out hands quickly away from the hot stove, yet many will keep to a shit job, shit lifestyle even tough their lifestyle is giving them pain. ten they blame 'God'

    of course many many people cannot walk away from an imposed lifestyle, for fear of starvation. they may even BE starving

    so it behoves all of us who can spoeak out to do i. NOT to blame 'God' fro pain. caue pain is natrual. but to encourage a way of looking at why we allow the proliferation of psycholigical pain though indoctrination, and disempowerment
     
  17. water the sea Registered Senior Member

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    6,442
    charles cure,



    Freedom to choose has to do with the way we think about suffering and with how we respond to it. And we do can choose our responses. (Keep tuned in, there's more to say to this.)
    I think that only a benevolent God would give humans the freedom to choose.


    I said:
    At least a part of Christians claim that humans do have free will, and that they can choose their actions ...


    Why irrelevant?

    Must I be depressed about having cancer?

    Is there indeed only one response possible to suffering -- is the only response to suffering, "Now, I hurt and I am depressed about it, and I have no choice but to be depressed about my suffering"?


    * * *


    G71,


    I would not say there is something "wrong" with suffering. There is often something wrong with the way we treat suffering: we tend to deny it, or we try to escape it. We rarely embrace it and let it be. Note that by this I don't mean we should cause ourselves suffering, I mean that we should not resist it once it happens.


    For us to be given the chance to learn the truth, to see things for what they truly are. To learn who we are.


    Or, the asker doesn't understand his question.


    In a way, our negative response to our suffering (for example, when we are depressed about being ill) is a punishment in and of itself.
    When we respond negatively to our suffering, then we are responding in ways God (as some Christians understand God) does not like, but I would not consider this God's punishment.


    I couldn't say how newborns experience suffering. I can imagine it is possible that they experience it differently than adults. I can rightly predict that little children don't attach so many stygmas, prejudices and preconceptions to their suffering, as adults do; children simply have not yet learned the socially accepted ways of dealing with pain. And that therefore, the children's suffering is far less of a trauma (for them) as the adults' suffering is a trauma (for them).

    It is a general observation that children are very resilient, and I think this has a lot to do with the lack of prejudices and preconceptions they have about suffering.


    Okay. So it is all about FEELING a certain way?

    I'm not sure where exactly are you getting at with this topic:
    Are you saying that if God were benevolent, then there would be no *causes* of suffering (like wars and illness)?
    Or are you saying that if God were benevolent, then we would never *feel* suffering?
     
  18. youre technically right. we could expereience pleasure fully without knowing what pain was. what matters is that you have something to compare it to. it doesnt matter if the only suffering that you ever endure is the doctor slapping you on the bottom after you are born, it is a sensation that is the opposite of what is generally considered pleasureable. suffering has a range spanning from minor discomfort to tortorous agony, but where you find yourself on that spectrum doesnt matter. yes, pleasure can happen without the experience of suffering, but knowing how pleasure is different from suffering is what makes pleasure desireable. if you knew nothing at all except pleasure, it would be the natural state of things, unremarkable, unimportant. but the experience of suffering gives pleasure and freedom from pain the scope that it needs to be judged as a preferable state of being.
     
  19. [water]
    Freedom to choose has to do with the way we think about suffering and with how we respond to it. And we do can choose our responses. (Keep tuned in, there's more to say to this.)
    I think that only a benevolent God would give humans the freedom to choose.

    no one discussed responses to suffering, because how a human can respond to suffering doesnt have anything to do with the issue of why a god that is (and this is key here ) omnibenevolent would allow suffering to exist in the first place. the concept i was challenging here is that the christian god concept puts forth that god is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent. a god that has the power to shape the world and eradicate the suffering of its creation, but chooses not to do so cannot be seen in the eyes of his creation as omnibenevolent because suffering by definition brings harm to humans. it is still possible for god to be benevolent most of the time and for suffering to still exist, but benevolent sometimes isnt the same thing as omnibenevolent. so in response to your statement, so what if only a benevolent god would give people the right to choose, that doesn t mean suffering has disappeared. (and by the way i dont agree with you that choice in and of itself is necessarily a good thing, although living in the world that we live in i would prefer my choice to prevail in matters that concern me rather than the choice of another person).


    I said:
    At least a part of Christians claim that humans do have free will, and that they can choose their actions ...


    yes sorry i read that as part of A christians claim. my mistake.




    Why irrelevant?

    Must I be depressed about having cancer?

    Is there indeed only one response possible to suffering -- is the only response to suffering, "Now, I hurt and I am depressed about it, and I have no choice but to be depressed about my suffering"?


    what youre saying here is that your suffering and pain can disappear or not exist if you only choose to respond to the situation correctly. this is an incorrect assumption. you are talking about emotional or psychic pain which i would agree, many times is optional depending on your mental or emotional response to a particular situation. but there is no skirting physical pain in this way, because it is part of a key information reception mechanism in our bodies. you may say "oh suffering doesnt have to exist because i can choose to be happy about having cancer so that makes it up to me". possibly. however theres no getting around the suffering you will go through if a tumor the size of a fist grows in your throat and slowly but surely makes it impossible for you to breathe. or one grows in your stomach and gets so big that it is painful to digest any food, and then it gets so big that it pushes on your bladder, ruptures your appendix...etc. theres pain involved there and the only way to get around it probably is to overdose on morphine, theres no freedom to choose to feel pain or not involved in a situation like that, and thats only what happened when i stayed within the lines of your hypothetical scenario. thats why freedom of choice is irrelevant to the question of gods benevolence as it relates to human suffering.
     
  20. duendy Registered Senior Member

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    6,585
    had this very rvealing discussion wit bunch a Buddhists a while back at a forum......i notced that many said they wanted to getr beyond pain too. one sowed a pic of some Buddhist monk being kicked in the balls and he wa just standing there like not in pain

    how unnatural all that is and reflects thhe philosophy of wantin to escape Nature. it is the patriarchal desire to gt beyond any senusal feeling,including pain

    rather i think it the height of wisdonm and intelligence to scream in you are in pain......to moan an groan. physical an/or psychological
    ohewise ou just become a machine. or a stone buddha
     
  21. water the sea Registered Senior Member

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    6,442
    charles cure,


    How we respond to suffering has everything to do with God -- namely, if we posit that God created us, and what our relation to God is.
    If we argue from the position of Christianity, then God created us, but also gave us free will.


    Why do humans suffer?


    Of course having free will doesn't mean that suffering has disappeared. It means that it can disappear. (And "disappear" is the right word in this context!)


    I didn't claim that choice is in and of itself necessarily a good thing. To some people it is, to some it is not.


    Why?


    No, I am not saying that. This is how you read it.


    If one believes "I am my body", then one is doomed to suffering as you describe above, yes.

    But, as the Buddha taught, Even though the body is sick, the mind doesn't need to be sick.


    Once again, it is all a matter of whether one believes that God created humans, and in what way, and how God's creations relate to God.

    I find it pointless to talk about God and God's characteristics and human suffering, if the underlying assumptions are that God didn't create humans, and that "A man is his body".


    * * *

    duendy,


    Pleasure and pain are very strong anchors to which we can bind our identity. We very much like to identify with states of pleasure, and also of pain. It's easy and convenient.

    Say, you cut yourself in the finger, and then you moan and complain. Is this going to help heal your finger?


    And if you think Buddhists are trying to escape "nature", then I'd say you need to learn more about Buddhism.
     
  22. Red Devil Born Again Athiest Registered Senior Member

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    1,996
    Pain is the means by which the body tells us something, however trivial, is wrong. How we deal with it is up to the individual. There are those who go one step further and find some sort of perverse pleasure in both receiving and, in the main, inflicting said pain. The first are sick and the second pathetic.
     
  23. duendy Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    6,585
    water~~~~~i am guessing you are either a Buddhist, or someone who is very attracted to Buddish. because it is not the first time i have heard you defend that belief system. of course whe i say 'that belif system' i am aware there are different schools of Buddhism........and you are wrong, i have studied it over yhe yars. not as a devotee as such. but out of exploring othe world views

    the most eye-openingexprience i had of Buddhism in action was when i was a member of theinfidel forums and found myself communiating with a good cross section of Buddhists from different countries and schools......i was completely disappointed with their behaviour!

    very narrow minded, and offensive, and viscious if their belief system was challenged. actually those forums seemed to be run by that mindset. kind of 'atheist cum Buddhist'

    of course i ha had my reservations abot Buddhims before which i tried to debate with them, but as i say it was like debating wit a pile of fukin spoilt kids.

    regarding your view tey dont want to escape Nature, i think you are wrong. yes tey do. they seek 'nirvana'...which is 'beyond he wheel of birth and death'.....ish't tat wnting to escape Nature??

    as for pain. you ask if moaning about a cut finger will make it go away? maybe. maybe your expression, allowing emotion may open UP organism, ratherthan suppressing emotion. of course i am aware of the 'mind over matter' tactics of some Buddhists, but over all i feel it is losing humanity. as i say, they turn into stone buddhas. very austere, unapproachable, and elitist. you shoulda heard the guys i spoke with......!....and if say one hadn't joined the nasy gang, as soon as i spoke to him another Buddhist would pop up and gossip that he is not to speak to me etc........quiote remarkable, and utterly childish
     

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