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Then what are prayers for? What do you expect them to “do”? Do you expect them to produce any outcome, either in this life or the next, that’s more tangible than simply a lessening of your own internal anxiety? Is my accusation of “God as Therapist” more or less accurate here?
Yes, but I think that one of the “axioms” on which you’re operating — the one people call “faith” — is that none of the potential arguments which could potentially prove fatal to your continued adherence to Christianity can possibly be true. Such arguments are necessarily false, because your religion is necessarily true. Therefore everything else is an argument backwards from that — a series of post-hoc epicycles designed to lessen the impact of various arguments which seem to reveal contradictions within the doctrines and claims of your religion. Some of those epicycles are fairly persuasive and do a pretty good job of repelling certain criticisms — clearly there are many poor arguments against Christianity, and against other religions as well — but some of the epicycles (and again, I think the ones dealing with theodicy are the chief example here) are genuinely pretty unpersuasive in the eyes of those who have not already taken to heart the centra faith-based axiom that Christianity, despite its myriad apparent contradictions, is true.
They are for building a relationship with God. The relationship is built on gratitude and trust; gratitude for the many good things he provides for us, and trust that he will care for and preserve us, to a limited but significant extent in this life, and to the maximal extent in the next.
Only to the extent that Therapy is, in its essence, a relationship, but perhaps that's close enough from your perspective.
That's one way to frame it, sure. It's also an isolated demand for rigor.
It is routinely argued here that humans are deterministic machines. All forms of this argument that resulted in falsifiable predictions resulted in those predictions being consistently falsified over more than a century of dedicated testing across the globe, and the current popular form of the argument is very clearly unfalsifiable. Likewise for bedrock Materialist claims about the Material being all that exists: by their own standards, it is very clear that things definitely exist that we cannot observe or interact with even in principle; to the extent that we can in principle observe the chain of cause and effect, we arrive at an effect with no observable cause. And yet even those materialists who recognize this fact are not disturbed by it, because their Materialism is axiomatic, the origin of their reasoning rather than its destination. And that is perfectly appropriate, because this is the only way anyone can reason in any way at all.
Axioms that make bad predictions are selected against. Axioms that fit as much of the available evidence as possible are selected for. It should not be surprising that a set of axioms that have lasted thousands of years fit the available evidence pretty well, and both Christianity and Atheism have existed for thousands of years.
Our disagreement, it seems to me, is not over the facts, but over their interpretation, and specifically over the moral significance of pain and death. You seem to argue as though death were avoidable, but it evidently is not, and everyone does in fact die. You seem to argue as though suffering is much more real and more significant than I understand it to be. I observe that death and pain do not necessitate some uniform amount of suffering, that suffering expands and contracts by orders of magnitude based on a variety of factors, the state of one's own mind being predominant among them.
From a previous discussion:
...And indeed, a cursory examination of Christianity or the Bible will reveal the belief that some suffering, pain and death, even extreme forms of these, are a positive good, admirable, desirable even, with no shortage of examples of Christians acting on this belief and other Christians admiring them for it.
We observe the same pain and death, and draw different conclusions, because our axioms are different, and because axioms drive interpretation of evidence much more than evidence drives adoption of axioms. Reason is fundamentally an act of the Will; neither of us is being "forced" by evidence anywhere we do not want to go. But it is not clear to me why I should consider your axioms better than mine; your moral anguish over evident pain and death does not actually serve to reduce the pain and death more than my moral accommodation of it, and arguably has resulted in worse pain and death in the long-term as attempts at Utopia collapse into harsh reality. My accommodation of pain and death prevents neither buckling seat-belts nor attempting cancer cures; I am all for preventing pain and death, and even paying significant costs to do so. It's not even obvious to me that our metric for what costs are unacceptably high is too terribly different.
What's your assessment of voluntary human extinction? That's one way to solve pain for good, right?
I want to interrogate what the word trust means in this sentence. When we talk about “trust” in the context of human relationships, we recognize that trust is something which can be broken. We recognize that there are degrees of trust — that some people are more trustworthy than others, and that when determining how much trust to extend to another person, one consideration is usually a probabilistic determination of how likely that person is to behave in the way I’m trusting him or her to behave. As I gather more data about that person’s actions, I can decide to upgrade or downgrade my level of trust in that person. Obviously a healthy marriage, for example, necessarily involves a great degree of trust; however, if one spouse commits proven adultery, that necessarily alters the level of trust the other spouse can extend to that person moving forward. Trust isn’t independent of evidence and observation, in other words.
If I pray to God every day to keep me and my family safe and healthy, and then one of my children contracts leukemia and dies, I’m struggling to understand what you think that event should do for my level of “trust” in the proposition that God will “care for us and preserve us”. If leukemia was just something that happened to people all the time, like stubbing a toe, then I agree that it would make little sense to downgrade one’s trust in God based on that occurrence. But since so few children die of leukemia, the fact that it happened to my child specifically, despite my daily prayers to God for the opposite outcome, may very well have some import.
And particularly, if the children of devout Christians who pray daily for their family’s health are, upon observation of data, no less likely to die of leukemia than the children of atheists, then an outsider may begin to wonder what the “relationship” is actually for. What level of “trust” can there be in a relationship if one party is committed to total indifference about whether the other party fails at doing what that party has been “entrusted” to do? It’s an idiosyncratic definition of “trust” indeed if one commits to loving another party with the exact same level of devotion whether that other party behaves well or badly. “Trust” divorced from any expectation of outcomes, and any judgment on those outcomes, seems not to be trust at all.
It’s a specific type of relationship, though. It’s a relationship in which the purpose of the therapist is, ultimately, to just be a sounding board to which one can vent one’s problems. The therapist has no power to materially affect the situations about which you’re complaining to him. At best, he can offer helpful advice on how you should psychologically frame those situations. He’s just there to help you better order one’s internal life. Not to actually change it, except to the extent that one’s outlook and emotional state can change one’s problem-solving approach. A valuable contribution, to be sure, but one very different from what one would expect from a God to whom many great miracles and divine interventions are attributed.
In the sense that a Christian martyr’s death might serve as a useful example to other Christians, sure. “That man bore his persecution with dignity and stuck to his principles. There’s a lesson in that for all of us.” I just really struggle to understand what positive message or example you expect us to glean from the instantaneous, terrifying death of several hundred thousand people from a freak natural disaster. Those people didn’t have the option to choose otherwise, as, for example, a Christian martyr might choose to recant his faith to avoid suffering. They didn’t even have time, in the fleeting moments between normalcy and calamity, to reflect on Goodness and to make peace with it. It just doesn’t seem to carry within it any positive, hopeful, or moral message. Maybe there’s just some fundamental psychologically dismally between you and me — either cultivated or innate — which explains why I cannot glean a message of hope, and of a confirmation of trust in God as my shepherd, in the way you can.
This seems directly in contradiction to your statement that the Bible teaches that suffering and death are admirable “and desirable even.” If the message of the Bible is that one should be indifferent to one’s suffering, then why bother to buckle your children’s seatbelts, let alone your own? God wills what he wills, and your child’s death could be desirable per God’s plan! I don’t really understand the purpose here of taking actions to forestall the potentially grisly fate God may — for reasons which you’re content to allow to remain inscrutable — have in store for you and/or your loved ones. If God wills it, it will be, and an ostensibly “bad” outcome actually isn’t any worse than an ostensibly “good” outcome! It’s all a matter of outlook!
“If we can’t entirely eradicate pain, then we should actually be fine with infinite pain, and actually a God who causes us infinite pain is no worse than a God who causes us no pain at all.”
There are obviously degrees of pain and suffering. If I stub my toe, or have a mildly unpleasant interaction with a stranger, it does not produce within me an existential crisis or cause me to curse God. But if I developed a terribly painful disease, through no fault or action of my own, which led me to suffer daily, and a Christian told me that this is good, actually, and that the God who either willed this or failed to prevent it is benevolent and that his actions toward me are rooted in love — that I should trust such a God — then, again, I have to wonder what the words “love” and “trust” mean in this worldview. I would like to be able to “trust” that a God of immense power and benevolence could proffer to his adherents — those with whom he has a “relationship” — at least some degree less suffering and pain than that which is meted out to those with whom he doesn’t have a relationship. Otherwise God really is nothing more than a therapist — valuable, but not the King of Kings.
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