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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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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?

It’s specifically the very bad forms of suffering.

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 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?)

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.

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.

Your rage and disgust at the evil of pain and suffering brings you no closer to solving them

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.

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.

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.