Whats the point when...

Chorcai

What the point in all those prays, attending mass every morning at 8am, being a good person, kind, not sinning and putting others before yourself. Only to end up with Parkinsons, Breast Cancer and Alzheimer's ? I don't want hear "oh its god's plan" "he works in misterious way", why or what would my Grandmother done to warrent such suffering ? Tell me why if god is ment to be kind and forgiving why would he do such a thing ? Even I wouldn't wish my Grandmothers suffering on my worst enemy. I stopped beliveing in god/church along time ago, for my own reasons. What I still don't understand is if there is a god why is he so mean and nasty to person and inflict so much pain and suffering on them ?

If I had my way, when my Grandmother dies I would ask for her to be cermated put some of her ashes in a huge firework display to celebrate her life, a good life she lead.

Anyone care to enlighten me ?

PDN

Only your grandmother can know what she thought the point was of doing anything she did.

Most Christians would see the point of those kind of things as being our correct response and our expression of gratitude for God's mercy in sending His Son to die for our sins. I certainly wouldn't see them as providing me with some kind of insurance policy that will prevent me from suffering the kind of diseases and infirmities which, sadly, can be a part of our living into old age.

Fanny Cradock

Your post presupposed that cancer, Alzheimers, earthquakes or whatever is desired by God. I don't believe such a thing.

Fanny Cradock

Fanny Cradock wrote: »

Your post presupposed that cancer, Alzheimers, earthquakes or whatever is desired by God. I don't believe such a thing.

I'm nearly afraid to bring up an old argument, but what?
Why would you create a world affected by earthquakes that you perfectly well know based on the physics of the world is going to have earthquakes, if you didn't want to in the first place? We are still assuming god is omnipotent and omniscient right?

Fanny Cradock

bluewolf wrote: »

I'm nearly afraid to bring up an old argument, but what?
Why would you create a world affected by earthquakes that you perfectly well know based on the physics of the world is going to have earthquakes, if you didn't want to in the first place? We are still assuming god is omnipotent and omniscient right?

Given the nature of the OP, I assumed that my reply obviously implied certain things. Maybe if I had said something like "purposeful death by earthquakes" you wouldn't have been so bewildered.

David Hart's article on the 2004 tsunami might help you understand at least one attempt to square the age old problem of suffering in the world and a good God.

Chorcai

PDN wrote: »

Only your grandmother can know what she thought the point was of doing anything she did.

Most Christians would see the point of those kind of things as being our correct response and our expression of gratitude for God's mercy in sending His Son to die for our sins. I certainly wouldn't see them as providing me with some kind of insurance policy that will prevent me from suffering the kind of diseases and infirmities which, sadly, can be a part of our living into old age.

Well god created everything right ? Then why create such horrid nasty things to inflict on the people he created in his own image ??

So would that mean if someone wakes up in the morning and only says thank you god, ineffect they could then leave out going to mass, praying etc ? Are they not doing the same thing as a person going to mass everyday, praying etc. It is sort of a mute point I know.

Xluna

All I'll say is this-the "Problem of evil" was the least of my reasons for becoming an atheist.

Fanny Cradock

Chorcai wrote: »

Well god created everything right ? Then why create such horrid nasty things to inflict on the people he created in his own image ??

It's a mighty problem, and I don't think there is a simple answer available. To me it seems undeniable that death and suffering were always part of creation. And while one could suggest that the sin that entered into the world somehow fueled and empowered them both, it doesn't remove the problem of why they were there to begin with. Still, I believe that this ties in with what I said in my previous post about the world being good, not perfect. The hope of Christianity is that God always intended something bigger and better than this reality with all it's death and decay. This might suggest that ensuring our physical well-being is not of primary importance to God and that, instead, God is primarily concerned with salvation and creation remade. So while there may be no completely satisfactory answer to why your gran is suffering, it might be of some comfort to know that there is a God who loves us and he is with us in our suffering.

Again, I wonder if you are still operating under the assumption that God gives out cancers etc. to those who don't mumble the correct supplications or whatever, rather than these things being the deleterious and most regrettable results of the evolutionary processes that made us what we are.

Chorcai wrote: »

So would that mean if someone wakes up in the morning and only says thank you god, ineffect they could then leave out going to mass, praying etc ? Are they not doing the same thing as a person going to mass everyday, praying etc. It is sort of a mute point I know.

I think that being in fellowship with other Christians (going to mass, church, bible study, whatever) is good for your relationship with Jesus, it's not necessary for God. In other words, this is easier if you have a relevant support network to help you grow and guide you through the tough times.

Xluna wrote: »

All I'll say is this-the "Problem of evil" was the least of my reasons for becoming an atheist.

But this thread isn't about why you became an atheist.

PDN

Chorcai wrote: »

Well god created everything right ? Then why create such horrid nasty things to inflict on the people he created in his own image ??

God created everything, but He then entrusted stewardship of that creation to mankind. We, unfortunately, have managed to make a pretty bad mess of it all.

The world we live in today is a very far cry from the world that God originally created. We have polluted it, daily breath in a potent chemical cocktail of fumes that we have created for ourselves, eat processed crap instead of real food, and in hundreds of other ways our lifestlye is very different from that intended for us in creation.

The fact is we live in a world where people get old, get sick, and die. It happens to all of us. I'm sorry your grandmother is sick, and it's always painful to have to watch a loved one suffering - but blaming God, in my experience, rarely helps. Some of us have lost loved ones who were much younger (I had a daughter who was severely disabled and died at 4 years of age) so my advice is to show your grandmother as much love and care as you possibly can, and be appreciative of the good memories and experiences you have had together.

rovert

PDN wrote: »

God created everything, but He then entrusted stewardship of that creation to mankind. We, unfortunately, have managed to make a pretty bad mess of it all.

The world we live in today is a very far cry from the world that God originally created. We have polluted it, daily breath in a potent chemical cocktail of fumes that we have created for ourselves, eat processed crap instead of real food, and in hundreds of other ways our lifestlye is very different from that intended for us in creation.

The fact is we live in a world where people get old, get sick, and die. It happens to all of us. I'm sorry your grandmother is sick, and it's always painful to have to watch a loved one suffering - but blaming God, in my experience, rarely helps. Some of us have lost loved ones who were much younger (I had a daughter who was severely disabled and died at 4 years of age) so my advice is to show your grandmother as much love and care as you possibly can, and be appreciative of the good memories and experiences you have had together.

Please dont take offence to this and I know what day it is too but Ive always thought that to be the ultimate cop out even as a child.

PDN

rovert wrote: »

Please dont take offence to this and I know what day it is too but Ive always thought that to be the ultimate cop out even as a child.

What, every single word I posted is a cop-out?

rovert

PDN wrote: »

What, every single word I posted is a cop-out?

No, the whole concept of God giving freewill. It is easier for Christians to state this as it abdicates God from blame and stops people from asking uncomfortable larger questions about his actual existence. That is the way Ive always take it, sorry.

PDN

rovert wrote: »

No, the whole concept of God giving freewill. It is easier for Christians to state this as it abdicates God from blame and stops people from asking uncomfortable larger questions about his actual existence. That is the way Ive always take it, sorry.

So you would prefer to live in a world where we had no free will?

I don't think it's a cop-out to see love as being the most important thing in the world. And love cannot be coerced or forced. It has to be freely given. Therefore, as soon as God gave us the capacity to love, he also inevitably gave us the freedom to choose not to love.

You are free not to choose to believe in or to follow God if you wish, but please don't accuse us of 'a cop out' because we place a high value on love and freedom.

janeeen

Gods intention for man in the beginning was to live in perfect harmony with each other with no pain or sorrow.
It was not until the first sin when Adam and Eve chose to listen to Satan, that pain and suffering became part of this world.
Pain, suffering, and sorrow is the consequence of Adams original sin.
God dose not want us to suffer that is why he sent his son down to this earth to die for our sins.
I believe through prayer and true belief that God can ease pain and suffering.
Just believing in God is not enough.We must follow the ways of Jesus and Gods instruction through the Bible.
As for earthquakes and famine we must also remember that Satan is the ruler of this world until Armageddon and Jesus second coming.

rovert

PDN wrote: »

So you would prefer to live in a world where we had no free will?

I don't think it's a cop-out to see love as being the most important thing in the world. And love cannot be coerced or forced. It has to be freely given. Therefore, as soon as God gave us the capacity to love, he also inevitably gave us the freedom to choose not to love.

You are free not to choose to believe in or to follow God if you wish, but please don't accuse us of 'a cop out' because we place a high value on love and freedom.

I just think it is one of the more "convenient" pieces of scripture as it prevents from people asking the tough why questions already stated. I’ve heard most of the arguments and testimony on why God gave us freewill and it has ultimately never swayed me.

I don’t want to turn this into a flame thread and belabour the point; I just simply wanted to state my view as it has been something I’ve never come to grips with personally.

There is nothing for me to add but wish you well on this Good Friday.

Slav

Hi Chorcai,

It's a good question asked at the very right time of the year!

Suffering is wrong and death is wrong. We humans see it as such and we believe God sees it as such as well. Moreover, we humans and God both offended by death and your OP is a good example of the natural and very healthy human reaction to the death. We don't belong to this world as naturally we belong to God'd Kingdom which "is not of this world" (John 18:36). However, we are in this world. How did we get here is another question but once we are here we are subject to its natural laws and that includes suffering and death. Death is unavoidable and even God cannot simply remove it from us. What He can however do is to change sufferings and death from being our misery to become our glory and from being the ultimate end of life to become a source of life. He died himself so we would be able to die with Him and resurrect with Him and in Him.

Chorcai wrote: »

What the point in all those prays, attending mass every morning at 8am, being a good person, kind, not sinning and putting others before yourself. Only to end up with Parkinsons, Breast Cancer and Alzheimer's ?

I don't know have you thought of it this way but the reason of doing all this is not to follow some rituals or just to be a nice and kind person in order to get this way some comfort in return. That would not be a Christian position. It might sound strange but we do all this to die! We die for this world when we baptise into the death of Christ, we die for this world every time at Eucharist when we receive the broken Body and the shed Blood, we die for this world when we repent our sins and we die for this world when we truly love each other same way Jesus Christ loves us (check John 15:12-13). When our time comes ideally we are already dead and our physical death has no power to rule over us. I believe the sufferings and death of your Grandmother is her glory and victory. It is wrong and very un-Christian to see them as her misery, still less as her deserved or undeserved punishment.

Only yesterday I posted a link in another thread that actually addresses this very topic. If you are interested you can listen to it from here (you can download mp3's as well):

The Death of Christ and Our Death in Him - Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

What I still don't understand is if there is a god why is he so mean and nasty to person and inflict so much pain and suffering on them ?

People are not puppets in God's hands. We are pretty much independent creatures so not everything that happens to us or within us is a direct wish of God; in fact in majority of cases it's quite the opposite. But again this is a very different question.

Stephentlig

Below is the Supreme pontiffs letter on Human suffering I've qouted the first few paragraphs but I would ask you to read the whole letter in order to get what Pope John Paul II is saying, sometimes I often tend to read a half a letter and often interpret it out of context or impose upon the text something that I want to see and not whats actually there, until I go back and read the whole letter and then I get it.

Pax Christi
Stephen

SALVIFICI DOLORIS
OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF
JOHN PAUL II
TO THE BISHOPS, TO THE PRIESTS,
TO THE RELIGIOUS FAMILIES
AND TO THE FAITHFUL
OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
ON THE CHRISTIAN MEANING
OF HUMAN SUFFERING

Venerable Brothers in the Episcopate and dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
I
INTRODUCTION
1. Declaring the power of salvific suffering, the Apostle Paul says: "In my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church"(1).

These words seem to be found at the end of the long road that winds through the suffering which forms part of the history of man and which is illuminated by the Word of God. These words have as it were the value of a final discovery, which is accompanied by joy. For this reason Saint Paul writes: "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake"(2). The joy comes from the discovery of the meaning of suffering, and this discovery, even if it is most personally shared in by Paul of Tarsus who wrote these words, is at the same time valid for others. The Apostle shares his own discovery and rejoices in it because of all those whom it can help—just as it helped him—to understand the salvific meaning of suffering.

2. The theme of suffering - precisely under the aspect of this salvific meaning - seems to fit profoundly into the context of the Holy Year of the Redemption as an extraordinary Jubilee of the Church. And this circumstance too clearly favours the attention it deserves during this period. Independently of this fact, it is a universal theme that accompanies man at every point on earth: in a certain sense it co-exists with him in the world, and thus demands to be constantly reconsidered. Even though Paul, in the Letter to the Romans, wrote that "the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now"(3), even though man knows and is close to the sufferings of the animal world, nevertheless what we express by the word "suffering" seems to be particularly essential to the nature of man. It is as deep as man himself, precisely because it manifests in its own way that depth which is proper to man, and in its own way surpasses it. Suffering seems to belong to man's transcendence: it is one of those points in which man is in a certain sense "destined" to go beyond himself, and he is called to this in a mysterious way.

3. The theme of suffering in a special way demands to be faced in the context of the Holy Year of the Redemption, and this is so, in the first place, because the Redemption was accomplished through the Cross of Christ, that is, through his suffering. And at the same time, during the Holy Year of the Redemption we recall the truth expressed in the Encyclical Redemptor Hominis: in Christ "every man becomes the way for the Church"(4). It can be said that man in a special fashion becomes the way for the Church when suffering enters his life. This happens, as we know, at different moments in life, it takes place in different ways, it assumes different dimensions; nevertheless, in whatever form, suffering seems to be, and is, almost inseparable from man's earthly existence.

Assuming then that throughout his earthly life man walks in one manner or another on the long path of suffering, it is precisely on this path that the Church at all times - and perhaps especially during the Holy Year of the Redemption - should meet man. Born of the mystery of Redemption in the Cross of Christ, the Church has to try to meet man in a special way on the path of his suffering. In this meeting man "becomes the way for the Church", and this way is one of the most important ones.

4. This is the origin also of the present reflection, precisely in the Year of the Redemption: a meditation on suffering. Human suffering evokes compassion; it also evokes respect, and in its own way it intimidates. For in suffering is contained the greatness of a specific mystery. This special respect for every form of human suffering must be set at the beginning of what will be expressed here later by the deepest need of the heart, and also by the deep imperative of faith. About the theme of suffering these two reasons seem to draw particularly close to each other and to become one: the need of the heart commands us to overcome fear, and the imperative of faith—formulated, for example, in the words of Saint Paul quoted at the beginning—provides the content, in the name of which and by virtue of which we dare to touch what appears in every man so intangible: for man, in his suffering, remains an intangible mystery.

Stephentlig

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_letters/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_11021984_salvifici-doloris_en.html

forgot to give you the link to the letter

Chorcai

Thanks for the replies, I will read them. I guess I am just annoyed/frustrated that I can't do anything. More to the point I'm looking for someone/something to blame. Sadly this is my main reason for not beliving in a god. No god would ever inflict such pain on anyone as humble, kind and loving as some sort of twisted "test" of faith to enter the kingdom of heaven. Thanks for taking the time to reply to some of my questions.

Regards.

Fanny Cradock

Chorcai wrote: »

Thanks for the replies, I will read them. I guess I am just annoyed/frustrated that I can't do anything. More to the point I'm looking for someone/something to blame. Sadly this is my main reason for not beliving in a god. No god would ever inflict such pain on anyone as humble, kind and loving as some sort of twisted "test" of faith to enter the kingdom of heaven. Thanks for taking the time to reply to some of my questions.

Regards.

I would agree with you, Chorcai. I don't believe in this God either, and I think that this could be said of the majority of Christians. (Fred Phelps etc. aside, of course.)

If you don't believe in a loving God (and Easter is all about the celebration of what this loving God did for all of us) then I guess you have to simply accept sickness, physical decay and death as dreadfully regrettable but inevitable consequences of life.

PDN

Chorcai wrote: »

Thanks for the replies, I will read them. I guess I am just annoyed/frustrated that I can't do anything. More to the point I'm looking for someone/something to blame. Sadly this is my main reason for not beliving in a god. No god would ever inflict such pain on anyone as humble, kind and loving as some sort of twisted "test" of faith to enter the kingdom of heaven. Thanks for taking the time to reply to some of my questions.

Regards.

I quite agree. No God would inflict pain on someone as a twisted test of faith to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Which is probably why we as Christians don't believe any such thing!

Memnoch

err... I just posted a long and detailed reply on the topic... and out of nowhere my post has disappeared without any reason or explanation as if it never existed?

PDN

Memnoch wrote: »

err... I just posted a long and detailed reply on the topic... and out of nowhere my post has disappeared without any reason or explanation as if it never existed?

It was deleted as a favour to you, rather than issuing a yellow card (I'm feeling mellow today because it's Easter).

If you want to make sweeping statements about religion playing nasty tricks on people, or about Christianity not knowing anything, then the A&A Forum is the playground for you. Please read the Charter of this Forum to help you understand why this forum exists.

As always, if you have a problem with this, or any other, moderating decision, then please address it through PMs or, if that doesn't resolve your concerns, the Helpdesk. In-thread discussion of moderating is strongly discouraged.

Happy Easter!

theg81der

Isn`t the fact that you got to know these wonderful people proof that there IS something else? Do you really believe with all your complex bodily structures that you aren`t a miracle but a coinsidence (however remotely minute that chance was).

I`m not saying Catholic, protestant, buddist whatever - where ever you are born, whenever in time, there is some organised religion. I am saying that religion is there because humans innately know there is something else.

No one can explain why because no one can know but like other people will thorise why there isn`t religion try to find a rational explination other people will try to verbalise there innate knowing into logical explanation.

Don`t you love your free will and choice where ever it comes from? You can`t answer the value of another persons suffering. One of the reasons I believe is because I was sick - and at just the right time to change my life. Without that suffering I would not be who I am today and who I am is better than who I was.