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No, it’s not. I contribute to the world around me in many very tangible ways, and I’m certain that everyone in my life would readily agree. I barely even interface with the healthcare system, I have never taken one cent of welfare, unemployment benefits, etc. I just don’t know which resources you believe I’m wasting.
The reason I’m on the ambulance is so they can take me someplace where I can get better. The health condition I’m suffering is, hopefully, temporary. This is fundamentally different from an infant with anencephaly or cyclopia or some such condition. That child will never ever recover from this; their body has failed to develop in a way that is necessary for life. There is no chance whatsoever - barring medical technological advances that we can’t even currently imagine - that such a child will live long enough to even make it out of that operating room. Such a child is often in significant pain - it lacks lungs, so it can no longer breathe once removed from the womb, etc.
If it is true that “God makes no mistakes” he has some very serious explaining to do in regards to why he engineers certain pregnancies to result in a fetus with half a brain, or with no lungs. These children are set up to die; whether they die on the operating table, or they die a few hours later in an incubator, there is nothing we can do to keep it from dying very soon after birth. I don’t think you’re really grappling with the question of what it even means to say that such a life “matters.”
What if the existence of that child - just its existence, no concern for it's "productivity" - brings unquantifiable joy to its parents?
Do you know how many people I know? Less than most of them. Like, I might now a couple hundred people. Most of human productivity is completely disconnected and alien to me. Sure, you can make the argument about the man downtown who puts peaches in a can that I then enjoy, but that's a very transactional exchange of value. And zero exchange of meaning.
I get meaning from a subset of the group of people I know. You do too. We all do. We call these people close friends and family. We like that they exist and just that they exist.
This is not the case for a baby with anencephaly or cyclopia. These babies are, besides being very obviously deformed in a way that is highly distressing to look at (go look for yourself if you want to see what I mean), an unequivocally disastrous result for a pregnancy. Again, they are absolutely unable to survive for more than a few days at absolute maximum, because their bodies lack basic components required to sustain a human life.
This slippery slope argument in roughly the shape of “If we admit that the life of an infant who literally never grew a brain doesn’t matter, we have to admit that no human life has inherent value” is, in my opinion, obviously specious and not worth taking seriously. No, I’m perfectly capable of believing that the lives of normal, functional, reasonably healthy people have inherent value, while rejecting the idea that there is significant inherent moral value in a clump of human-adjacent body parts which are not animated by a functioning human brain, or which are missing parts so crucial that its impossible to survive without them.
That's just, like, your opinion, man!
But, seriously, you understand what I was trying to do there and with the rest of my comment; the "worth" of a human life is dependent upon its subjective relationship to other humans. Of course I can see that maybe a majority of parents with a child with those conditions you listed would be distraught. I also believe that some portion of them would treasure the fleeting moments with their child as worth it nonetheless (try to detect the anecdotal experience I'm insinuating here...).
The only remedy to this is to draw a line on when human life starts versus when it doesn't. I'm happy to have that discussion because I think it is unresolved at various levels (scientific, philosophic ... not religious, however). What I'm saying is that your rubric of "usefulness" or "worthy enough life" is specious because you're trying to apply an objective rule to what is a subjective problem.
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Then by all means, don't abort, just no endless media campaigns asking for money keeping Johnny who's sick with Fucked-for-Entirety-of-Brief-and-Stunted-Lifeitis alive for one more year, please.
Yeah but the tribe that's generally pro-abortion also tends to be pro public healthcare spending and bottomless purse spending on life extension for the elderly and/or their pets.
Which is the confusing issue here since based on all other Blue Tribe beliefs you'd think they'd really be the pro-lifers and vice-versa for the Conservatives. The whole script gets flipped essentially for this one issue.
No I don't think that follows, blue states (and canada) are implementing right to die and red media is calling it forced suicide of undesirables. Terri Schiavo case was all right wing people trying to keep a vegetable with no brain matter left alive. I don't see right wingers actually taking their parents out back when they get demented. I see a lot more DNRs being set up by my blue family and old school repubs as opposed to the MAGA ones who are leaving it in Gods hands (Gods hands being extraordinary medical interventions at end of life).
Yes, it's almost like we're legitimate when we talk about choice and freedom when it comes to health care choices that doesn't effect other people - want a baby, great we think the state should support you heavily. Don't want it, great, here's state funding for abortion. Want to rage against the dying of the light? Let's use public health to do so? Don't want to be a burden, that's cool too.
I don't understand what you're saying here. So you do support assisted suicide?
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This is a fair and valid opinion, albeit a touch indelicate.
It’s not that fair. What if those donors get some amount of joy from helping fund Johnny’s life extension treatments?
If you don’t like the media campaigns, just tune them out. Heaven knows conservatives have had to do it for decades.
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I think you realize that this line of argument applies to you as well should you suffer a stroke that renders you a net drain on society for the rest of your life. You might fall back on “my family would be sad if I were left to die,” but there are millions of Christians saddened by the availability of abortion and especially infants born and left to die.
Utility-based moral systems tend to have these problems.
Yes, I have had this conversation with my family multiple times and made it very clear that I would like to be euthanized/taken off life support if such a thing were to happen to me. I do not believe that my physical body is so sacrosanct that it should be kept alive, at great expense, if and when my mental faculties are gone. My mother feels the same way, and as her power of attorney I may one day need to make that decision for her; I plan to honor her explicit desire.
This is part of why I advocate so strongly for eugenics: I would like to eliminate, to the greatest extent possible, congenital conditions which have a strong likelihood of rendering humans mentally inert or broken, such that they become (or just are, from the very beginning of life) a pure burden.
Still there are going to be grey areas where you have retained enough mental faculties to not be 'gone' but you are still nonetheless a burden in the utility scale.
Most of us would trust our immediate family to make the correct decision in these grey areas more than we trust the legislature. Given the general views of conservative Republicans on family values and the trustworthiness of the government, it is odd that the conservative movement thinks that this particular deeply personal decision needs to be taken once-and-for-all by politicians who don't have to live with the consequences, but the nature of American coalitional politics is what it is.
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Creationists say there would be no such mistakes were Adam not to have eaten a specific delicious fruit. There would be no mutations, humans would live a thousand years even without eating the fruit of the tree of life, and T-Rexes would still be vegan to this day.
Christian evolutionists have a much simpler answer: God used the death-churn of evolution to make us, so we should have no complaints about the problem of evil/suffering.
Both of these answers are equally batshit. I fail to understand how either of these answers is compatible with the Christian idea of a God who so loves humanity that he sent his own incarnate son to be tortured in order to redeem us. Such a loving and powerful God could surely come up with a plan for humanity that does not involve this level of utterly wanton suffering and ugliness.
A woman had to nurture and grow that fetus inside of her for months, eagerly and lovingly expecting to bring into the world a beautiful new life full of possibility, and at the last possible second she discovers she’s actually growing a broken, functionless monstrosity within her. It’s the stuff of body horror science fiction. It’s the kind of thing that makes me very sympathetic to the Gnostic urge to overthrow the sadistic demiurge.
The point of believing in a God is that you don’t understand every decision He makes, because God is too far above us to understand.
That sounds more like Cthulhu than the God any Christian I know seems to believe in.
"If you treasure the life and well-being of your colonists so much, why did you start a RimWorld game in a challenging location?"
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Then what is the point of praying to Him? Do you think he loves you enough to make sure you get that promotion at work, or that your football team wins a game, but doesn’t love those mothers enough to prevent them from having catastrophically deformed children?
I’m all for a Deist conception of an inscrutable alien intelligence who created the basic rules of physics and then sat back to passively watch the simulation play out. What I cannot understand is a conception of a loving God who made humanity in his image, who intervenes positively in quotidian human affairs, and yet who allows, either through direct control or negligence, things like catastrophic natural disasters and anencephalic newborns.
Is it specifically the catastrophic natural disasters and anencephalic newborns that raise the objection, or is it in fact any form of suffering at all?
I observe that suffering is highly useful, even from a materialist perspective. We suffer hunger and thirst, and it motivates us to eat and drink. More abstract and generalized suffering provides the contrast necessary to recognize the difference between good and bad; if you agree that the "experience machine" is repugnant, that necessarily requires suffering and pleasure to be different from good and bad. From there, general acceptance of suffering, even of natural disasters and anencephalic newborns is not a large step: suffering is a reminder that there is a reality outside our selves that must be grappled with, and this is an insight we cannot dispense with.
The point of praying to Him is to build a relationship with Him. When we encounter suffering, we ask for his help, and when we encounter joy, we thank him for it. A similar process can be observed in the parent/child relationship; young children suffer greatly for reasons they do not understand and their parents cannot explain to them, but their parents mitigate some of this suffering and comfort them in the rest, and without gaining any insight into the causes or reasons for the suffering or indeed the reasoning of the parents, children hopefully learn that their parents are not its ultimate source, even when they are the proximate source. My eldest reliably starts screaming and crying when I turn off Cocomelon, but still lets me pick her up and soothe her until the discontent passes. So it is for me and the greater sufferings of pain and sickness and weakness and death.
There's a sense in which none of the above is rational, but then, rationality is a spook. Your rage and disgust at the evil of pain and suffering brings you no closer to solving them, and my acceptance of them produces no additional obstacle to fighting against them. Certainly sterilization or euthanasia are not general or even notably broad solutions to the problem. Humans will continue to live and die in pain no matter what you or I choose to believe or to do, short of complete extermination of the species. Nor does it appear that suffering is, in fact, in any fundamental way connected to material circumstances. Perfectly healthy, rich, comfortable people frequently demonstrate that suffering expands to fill the available space of one's psyche, regardless of material circumstances. The most concrete quantization of suffering available, the experience of physical pain, observably expands and contracts dramatically, and possibly without limit, based solely on how we engage with it, and particularly with choices we make when engaging with it.
It’s specifically the very bad forms of suffering.
The Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 killed about 230,000 people. Many were killed fairly quickly, although in one of most distressing ways I can imagine - for example, being swept away by a rushing deluge after slipping from the grasp of a family member clinging to a building, who then has to watch you slip away to your death - although a great many died later from starvation, disease, etc. All because they simply happened to live somewhere within the affected zone.
You want me to believe that this level of unspeakable death and suffering was the most effective way for God to send the message that suffering is real and that there are things more powerful that humanity? And you also want me to believe that such a God loves me? (Did he not love those 230,000 people?)
Imagine if every time your child cried, you grabbed a random stranger’s child and strangled it to death in front of your kid. This might indeed demonstrate to your child that there are worse things in the world than having Cocomelon turned off. It would also be an incredibly psychopathic and gratuitous way to teach that lesson - especially if the idea is that you love every child equally, and don’t just arbitrarily pick favorites.
Again, totally risible. It is precisely the recognition that a state of affairs is monstrous and unjust which provides the impetus to begin working to change it. For the vast majority of human history, childbirth was ridiculously dangerous to women, and children so often died young. Entire religious traditions sprang up to teach us that these things are just an inevitable part of life, that we are powerless to stop them because God wills them, and that they’re actually our fault for being so wicked and fallen. But hey, what do you know: they actually weren’t an inevitable part of human life, and the second we figured out how to exercise agency over them, we eagerly did so; in the 21st century, they are now incredibly rare in every society that has access to the technologies to prevent them. The same is true of disease; plagues used to be the inescapable will of a vengeful God, but now we can usually stave them off with some basic vaccination. I’m really fucking glad some enterprising souls decided that God’s inscrutable will might be worth defying. I desperately hope that one day humans get good enough at geo-engineering that we never again need to be smugly told that earthquakes and tsunamis are just part of God’s plan.
You’re once again doing the thing where you pretend not to understand that there are degrees. It is possible for some suffering to be inevitable, but at the same time for us to have the power to massively reduce it. I don’t want to live in the “experience box”; I also don’t want to have my fingernails ripped out, or to burn alive, or to see my infant be born without a brain. You’re welcome to throw your hands up and thank God for suffering; I’m going to go a different path.
Agreed, I much prefer a disinterested clockmaker that implicitly says "as for your comfort, that will depend upon your efforts" than an all-loving deity who lets a devoutly Catholic Lisbon be razed by an earthquake on All Saints Day.
There is no good reason the arc of history (and physics itself) needs to involve such enormous amounts of suffering. An omnipotent being could structure the universe like a slice-of-life anime where the worst that could happen is that you look foolish in front of your friends.
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Further, when you look at the teachings of Christian spiritual teachers, the point is very often that you shoudn’t be praying for random things you want, you should be praying for God to do what he wants. The Lord’s Prayer has no place for the Chiefs winning the Super Bowl; instead it says, “thy will be done.” I would argue that any prayer that goes “God give me this thing I want,” is a bad and spiritually dangerous prayer.
Instead you should be praying for strength, or peace, or any of the mental and spiritual gifts that can help you deal with whatever’s going to happen. The point of Christianity is not material success but spiritual growth. That’s why prosperity theology is such a dangerous heresy.
Also, I believe in a vision of Christianity where suffering is itself almost a positive good, because it creates closeness to Christ the suffering servant, and I believe the world was created in order that we could suffer with him. Or, at least, so that our slate of experiences and God’s slate of experiences could be the same — God’s passability and ours is the point of the world. So I find the classical answers to the problem of evil unsatisfying, though I understand their point.
I know that sounds nuts to non-Christians, but I don’t have a high view of folk Christianity and I think it very often misses the mark.
Just so. For myself personally, though, I think I've leaned too hard in that direction in the past, verging on a sort of fatalism, to the point that I no longer prayed for people to be healed, but only for what God wanted to happen, to happen. It seems to me that this verged on a sort of cowardice, where it became more about not asking for things because I didn't believe they'd happen anyway. On the other hand, I've found the faith to pray to God for things that seemed highly improbable, have in fact received some of those highly improbable things, and am very grateful for them. To a great extent, my life is now defined by those positive answers to specific requests, which inspires great thankfulness to God for granting them.
The rational perspective would point out that this is all just confirmation bias. I've chosen to believe in God axiomatically, and I interpret all evidence I receive according to that axiom. But of course, there is no other way to reason from incomplete data; Axioms are necessary precisely because they cannot be proven, and they are necessary because it is impossible to reason without them.
Agreed that Prosperity theology is radioactive trash.
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I don’t claim to fully understand the problem of evil in the same way a two year old doesn’t fully understand why he can’t have candy for dinner. But the issue of original sin ensures there will be bad things until the end of the earth as the fault of man; that much I can say.
A truly wretched ideology, I’m sorry to say. I have a ton of cultural affinity with Christians, and devout Christians have been some of the kindest people I’ve ever known. But that is just colossally repellent metaphysics.
Scott’s short treatment of the subject in his review of Malleus Maleficarum gives the most defensible explanation:
This is the best they can come up with. I’m serious. I don’t believe in God, but conditional on there being a magic sky fairy, this is the most likely explanation.
Paul himself gestures in this direction. Read Romans 9 sometime, especially the metaphor about the potter and the clay.
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