Amie

Hi puck
I wouldn't think you are trying to attack me, I like your posts as well...
As I said in my post I don't have the answers for that and many things don't make sense to me. I was not just speaking of "hard times". I have had heartache in my life, not just hard times but genuine gut wrenching pain and I can only speak from what my experiences have taught me.
The terrible things tht go on in this world are hard to think about. I think it is horrible that people suffer. And I don't understand why innocent people are stuck enduring terrible difficulties, why children suffer through illnesses, I don't understand why some are born only to die. I just don't have the answers. I wish I did.
Amie~

thebeave

Amie, I can see why you don't understand why those horrible things happen. When I was a theist (many years ago), I couldn't understand it either. I could not reconcile a loving God with the injustice I saw around me, which was causing some serious cognitive dissonance in my head. Becoming an atheist made it easier for me to understand why these horrible things do happen. I may not like it, but I understand it. As an atheist, you recognize that we live in a universe that is morally indifferent and that things happen (good or bad) soley because of the laws of physics, random good luck and random bad luck, and "being in the wrong[right] place at the wrong[right] time". It's really that simple. At times, it pisses me off to no end to see that that is the way our universe works (especially when beautiful, innocent children die at the hands of kidnappers, etc), but I accept it. I think we all need to accept that in many ways we are just hapless victims of the indifference of the universe, but we should always strive to seek justice and make positive changes for those things we can control.

beyelzu

mzneko feel free to steal the line. glad you enjoyed it.

MzNeko

Thanks.

Seriously, it needs to be on a T-shirt or a bumper-sticker somewhere.

atheist_in_foxhole

Go here

Puck

Oh, I get it now, god isn't cruel, just a boob.

Perchance

Good morning, seebs.

Or I can think of it as something to get through. For example, if I know that someone I really don't like is coming to my house and must be treated politely, as a guest, even though I really don't like them, then I will treat them politely as a guest. I won't make warm overtures, and I won't think it's my fault for not liking the person (since I would assume I have good reason). There are certain situations that I've been through enough to know what's going to happen- certain arguments, certain pains, certain happenings. Any "growth" that I might have derived from them has long since withered. I sit through them, grit my teeth, and think of something else.

The two options you offer are both too extreme, I think. Not everything will help me immensely, and not everything will scar me for life. There are things that can pass over me, things that will annoy me for a few hours, and things that I endure basically by "looking to the end"- as in knowing that a certain class with a teacher who had told me that I was nuts and going to fail in graduate school was going to end in a few months. A lot of things fall in the middle.

Besides, quite often horrible things happen very suddenly, without warning, and one may or may not have time to think in that way.

If I make myself miserable trying to derive some benefit from it, then I'm not going to be happier. This happened in the past with the teacher I mentioned. I felt guilt for a week telling myself that I should somehow be happy about what she'd said to me- her honesty, maybe. And then I realized that it just really sucked, and that I would just have to get through it.

This sounds as though, if you must do something you don't like, you are required to like it. No, thank you. By twisting things in my mind, I've managed to come up with benefits, but I remain conscious always that this is a way of looking at things. I can't persuade myself that it's the only way. It's one of several thousand.

Actually, I don't think that the opening example I gave- being orphaned, raped, and tortured in a war- is trivial, but I will grant you this. However, since problems also vary from person to person, it's extraordinarily difficult to judge what's trivial. I've seen people scorn the things that make me panic, and I've been cool in the midst of situations where other people were screaming. I get very nervous about asking people for favors, for instance, and my sister does it with no problem. On the other hand, I enjoy snakes, and my sister can't be in the same room with one for very long.

I thought control was what you were arguing for, though. Control over one's thoughts becoming control over the experience.

I think one reason it fails a lot of the time is that people will offer this advice to others but are reluctant to adopt it themselves. If someone fails to get the right order at a restuarant, it's incompetence. If the person himself fails, it's malice. I've seen and done it myself.

My way is to dismiss it much of the time (unless someone tells me directly that she hates me, of course). I do a lot of "Oh, well she might have meant it this way" thinking- but I'm never going to know, in most situations. It's a way of preferring to think, rather than a way of altering reality, and if I found out later that something I had dismissed as a mistake was in fact done as the result of deliberate laziness or malice, then I would be very angry.
I don't think anger is as unhealthy an emotion as people think, especially if it gets cleared up right away.

As I said above, I think there are a lot of neutral actions. Falling down the stairs doesn't help much. Nor does tying my shoe, not remembering to take an umbrella when it's raining, or pronouncing a word wrong.

But I don't see the world that way. I know people who do, but again, I don't think everyone fits into one of the two extremes.

I'm actually one of the happiest people I know because, I think, I deal with problems when they happen, and don't spend much time trying to justify them. "All right, I can get a benefit from it;" "All right, that was deliberate and makes me angry;" and "Nothing can be done about it and it's neutral" are some of the immdiate responses. If I can't think of a way to make it good, I don't spend time desperately staring up at the ceiling trying to make it so.

What makes me angry about the "God only gives us what we can handle" phrase is that I see it (especially when delivered thoughtlessly, or without any attempt to explain) as a Christian way of saying, "Like your burdens, bear up under them, and don't let me hear you doing any complaining." Yet, most of the time, these people are not the ones who never complain themselves.

-Perchance.

Ab_Normal

Same here. I went through some serious mental gymnastics, finally deciding on "God is perfect, but matter is flawed, so the universe is flawed", which I believe I stole from Harold Kushner's When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

Removing god from the equation simplified things greatly.

THE_LEGENDARY_HQB

I think it is important to understand the mindset of the person who repeated that tiresome old "God only gives us what we can handle" cliche.

In the Fundie worldview {I'm assuming here that this person is a Fundie}, God, as well as being the usual atributes {omniscient, omnipresent, etc}, can be said to be "omnisovereign" {hey, I invented a new word!}.

To them, nothing in this universe happens that is not the Will of God. Indeed, if God is omniscient, with complete knowledge of past, present and future, it stands to reason that the current state of affairs is exactly what God wants. After all, if God wanted to change things, what could possibly get in His way?

Of course, the massive amount of suffering and cruelty inherent in this world causes many believers to bang their heads in frustration, trying to reconcile their image of a loving God with the power to end all suffering with a wave of His hand, and the current state of affaris. This is done by:

1. Redefining the word "suffering", romanticising it really, to make it sound like a positive thing.

2. Using the "free will defense" to effectively tie Gods hands, and make it sound like there's nothing He can do about it.

3. Simply saying that whatever happens in this world is perfectly fine by them, because anything God does {or doesn't do}, is automatically right and just.

In the end, though, the problem of pain does absolutely NOTHING to prove the nonexistence of God. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

Because, in discussing God, we're discussing something that has never been seen, never been touched, never been talked to.
We have an image of God based on what WE want Him to be, not on any empirical evidence. And really, who wants a God that resembles Satan? Of course, the evidence for a just God is exactly the same as the evidence for an evil one. 0%. One of the things that helped nudge me towards atheism was when I sat down, one night in 1997 and started thinking.

How can I possibly know that God is a loving God?

Does He even care about me?

Is He actually out to get me?

What if He is, by every objective standard, evil?

What if He takes pleasure in watching the screams of His creations, as they rape, pillage, murder, and torture each other?

What if God is a psychopath?

I prayed that night. Prayed long and hard. The ramifications of this epithany were simply too horrible for me to face. I begged God to give me some insight. I would have accepted anything as evidence that night, such was my mental state.

Of course, nothing happened.

Allow me to adress the theists reading this.

Amie, Seebs, I understand your motivations for believing in God. I would love to have a giant Big Brother in the sky. But do this for me. Pretend the Bible didn't exist. Imagine that you had never been told about the nature of God by ministers, friends, family, etc.. All you have is your own senses, your own perceptions.

Feel free to pray tonight. Pray that God will give you a better understanding of who He is. Don't hold your breath, though.

Even if we assume there is a God, can you really deduce that He bears any resemblance to the loving father figure that I assume you claim Him to be?

Instead of simply saying "I don't understand why all this suffering has to happen", then putting it out of your mind, keep it on your mind. When the cognitive dissonance arises, dont't pretend it isn't there, like I did for years. Don't try to take your mind off it.

I contend that the pain and sadness caused by realizing that there was most likely no higher power to watch out for me was more than matched by the relief I felt when I stopped making excuses for God. When I realized that bad things happen not as the preordained plans of some inaccesible deity, but were simply a result of random chance, a great weight was lifted from my shoulders. No longer did I need to try to reconcile reality with my beliefs. No longer was I tortured by the nagging question of "why did God allow this to happen?" when a friend of mine was stabbed to death and dumped in a river.

No longer did I feel angry at God for allowing my grandmother to slowly rot away from Alzheimers.

I was able to deal with the grief of losing 3 relatives to cancer within 4 years, without the the added burden of trying to figure out why God would take them in such an agonizing way.

So, to end this admittedly long rant, I encourage all the theists reading this thread to think long and hard about how absurd the "God only gives us what we can handle" schtick is, and then ask yourself one simple question.

Do I have a better answer?
Respect,
HQB

Marduk

This “God only gives us what we can handle” stuff seems as bizarre as the “New Age” silliness “You get to pick to your own life!” crap.

I wanna be a crack whore!
I wanna be a severely abused child!
I wanna starve to death in some third world rat hole!
Not me, I wanna be a deranged psycho killer!