Status::seedlings
Tags:: writing religion spirituality life
Either God is not omniscient/all good or he's not all powerful take your pick. That's how suffering is justified.
Here's what I think: I think that there is a grand design, a needle's path that does its best to minimize suffering and provides meaning and joy to all lives. I also believe we as people have the option to ignore that path and forge our own, less optimal one. We have to be allowed to do that. Without free will faith is meaningless. God or the higher power, he wants us to be happy but he don't control us, that's not benevolence that's not what he wants for his children. He wants us to be kind, and caring, and funny, and happy but those things only mean anything if we find them ourselves.
That's not to say that every bad thing, every painful moment, is our individual fault. That bad things happen because we stray from the "path of the light" or some crock like that. It's just what happens with a multivariable system. The larger it gets, the more variables there are, the less every action is free from influence.
Think about causality, everything happens for a reason. I'm not talking about a Reason as in a grand design but a reason as in the unbroken chain of causality. Pool balls bouncing off the bumpers creating the infinite complexity of reality.
So where does that leave us? In a boundlessly uncontrollable random world where our own actions, even the most well intentioned, can still lead to ruin? Yes But that shouldn't demoralize you because if others can have that much of an impact on us than We can have that much of an impact on Others.
It's no different than flattening the curve. The world will never be a perfectly balanced watch with everyone on their perfectly blissful loops but the struggle, the attempt to bring some semblance of joy into this world has an affect.
So what do we do? We try. We try to be kind, and understanding, and joyful. We try to think of the whole just as much as ourselves.