45. WHY THERE IS SUFFERING

​Other than the horrific record and falsities of man-made religions, perhaps the greatest impediment to recognizing that an intelligence is responsible for our reality, is suffering. The argument is that if there is such an intelligence with unlimited capabilities, it would have compassion and prevent catastrophes and suffering.
 
Such thinking emerges from anthropomorphizing the Creator, attributing to it human emotions, and short-sighted unreasonableness. Also, blaming others, in this case, the Creator, is always too convenient for us humans. Let's think it through.
 
All the chapters leading to this one provide the necessary backdrop for understanding. Their proof that evolution, materialism, atheism, religion, and mortality are not true, creates the light needed to understand that there are very good reasons the mixed bag of life on Earth is as it is.
 
Suffering in Nature
 
First, we must consider the reality of our Earthly circumstance. We are part of a gigantic interconnected natural machine. To enjoy Earth's benefits, we must assume our role in that machine. We are not an extrinsic toy infected with evil and punished by a sadistic god hungry for worship.
 
Natural disasters are just the necessary workings of the nature machine obeying nature's laws. Yes, we can suffer if we get in the way. But Earth has to do its thing. Nature is a creature doing what it must, no more fair or cruel than cat or man. It's a dynamic of rock, water, air, magma, mud, fire, ice, and myriad other physical elements and forces that result in atmospheric, hydrological, and geological change. If this and the resultant cataclysms did not happen to relieve tensions, pressures would build that could make the whole planet barren of life. For example, without plate tectonics and volcanoes that cause earthquakes, the contour of the crust would be level, resulting in the entire Earth covered with water almost two miles deep.
 
So, it is one thing to wish nature would behave differently. It's quite another to define what that would be without creating consequences direr than what we do face.
 
Moreover, all disasters bring benefits. Floods fertilize the land, ice ages carve out lakes and make soil, volcanoes create land and seed the Earth with minerals, and forest fires create the opportunity for new growth. If the Creator interfered with these events, events that may even take billions of lives (human and other), natural law would need to be set aside. But that can't be done without disrupting everything else since everything is connected. Such cheating is also not the nature of a true and just Creator. A rigged system with constant miraculous interventions would be unpredictable and unreliable. Natural law, upon which we depend for everything, would be meaningless.
 
Nature is not in our debt for the mere act of living. So, it's inappropriate to claim victimization if we don't use good sense and take care not to live on a fault line or at the foot of a volcano. If we don't and suffer from lava flowing into our bedroom or the whole house sinking into a fissure, the Creator is not the culpable party.
 
The biological world can also seem cruel. Each second, billions of creatures suffer and die. Predation, parasitism, competition, pathogenesis, and food harvesting (killing) pervade. It's not a matter of good, evil, divine obliviousness, or vengeance. It's the necessary functioning of the interconnected creature called life. It must behave as it does for the whole to survive. If the whole didn't survive, neither could we.
 
Nature is no crueler in its acts than we are when we inadvertently squash insects underfoot or shred the life out of lettuce when we chew a salad. Life just is; it must function and obey natural law. Lions kill zebras, humans kill food animals, and plants can kill insects and even us.
 
In fact, killing and death are necessary. Without death, life is not possible. Try as we might, it's not possible to work out feasible details of how a world without death could exist. If we were able to prevent all death, the world would soon be buried miles deep with starving, suffocating, and suffering creatures.
 
Our Own Worst Enemy
 
Much of life's travail is not about forces of nature over which we have no control. Rather, it's about bearing the consequences of our own beliefs and acts. We (individually and as a collective) clamor for freedom to believe and do what we choose. But that freedom also means we own the consequences for what we choose to believe and do. Unfounded belief and faith, greed, laziness, impatience, shortsightedness, reliance on others, and ego all block the flow of truth and impact behavior. With that comes a deserved nest of woes such as war, terrorism, Crusades, Inquisitions, communism, Nazism, and so on.

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Modern medicine is falsely based upon the invented creeds of materialism and evolution. This results in the pretense and hubris of knowledge that is simply not there. With impunity, bodies are manipulated with drugs and other interventions as if they were mere machines and profit centers. The result is that modern medicine is the number one killer and maimer. Self-serving and ignorant humans do this, and willingly uninformed humans submit to it. Blame does not lie with the Creator.
 
We foul our air, water, land, and food. We cover our skin with toxic clothes, hide from the sun (avoiding its critical health benefits), wear shoes not permitting skin-to-Earth contact (avoiding the electron health benefits), and flood our world with toxins, artificial light, electromagnetism, and other pollutants. The result is rampant cancer, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and other chronic degenerative and deadly conditions. Blame does not lie with the Creator.
 
Sow with ignorance, reap with tears.

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A host of crippling and cruel genetic conditions occur in religions that insist on inbreeding because their man-made god tells them they are more special than the rest of us. The Bible and Qur'an say that pain and suffering are the results of Adam and Eve eating forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. We supposedly inherited this moral infraction from them, and the only way out of misery is through Jesus or Mohammed religions. But submission to such religions has caused incalculable human misery and death through the ages. Blame does not lie with the Creator.

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​Moreover, nothing is learned from the religious practice of playing the victim, supplicating, begging, importuning, and blaming the Creator. Nor is it befitting a dignified Creator of the universe to need such "worship," or to respond to pleadings from those who will not take responsibility for themselves. Praying is fine but people need to keep their brains alert and hands and feet moving.

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​The evolution/materialist mindset that we are mere animals unleashes the selfish, egoistic, might-makes-right, and reproductive animal forces rising from the hindbrain. Theft, violence, domination, sexual conquest, undeserved gain, and other selfish desires undiminished by free will and conscience—which are denied by evolutionists and materialists, or ignored by those who believe they do have them— result in terrible wars, crime, and terrible suffering.
 
Such misery is not the result of a malevolent or dispassionate god. It's our choice to ignore facts, reason, and conscience. If we marry ourselves to insidious beliefs and faiths, justice doesn't demand that we are saved from ourselves.
 
Suffering Creates Opportunity
 
If everything was always hunky-dory and blissful, or someone always intervened to save us from acting out base thoughts and from any resulting pain, failure, or disappointment, we would learn little. We need challenges and discomfort, not just euphoria. If sticking our hand in a bonfire didn't hurt, we'd have a lot of people minus hands. Pain is, perhaps, life's greatest teacher.
 
Being tested, tasting failure, tragedy, pain, joy, conflicts of conscience, frustration, guilt, compassion, injustice, cruelty, missed shots at the buzzer, and all of the other contents in life's mixed bag create the opportunity for learning and growing. Most of us, upon reflection, must admit we have grown in some way from even the most terrible of experiences.
 
Even the best of lives can experience tragedy and pain. A heartless murder, a maiming accident, premature death, and other unfortunate calamities over which we have no control can bring pain and suffering. But they also create an opportunity for empathy, compassion, love, and gaining perspective on life's true values.
 
The world is only ruthless and cruel if we don't intervene. If we do, the world can become quite wonderful. An abused child creates an opportunity for others to step in and show love. A famine permits others to be kind and share their food. Paraplegia can create the circumstances for a person to learn skills they would have otherwise never known, and an opportunity for caregivers to learn the joy of compassion and selflessness. Out of misery can come happiness, out of ugliness, beauty, and out of unspeakable cruelty, love. It's up to us.
 
This reminds me of a wonderful feral mother cat who befriended my family. We would feed her and give her some pats, but she was soon off into the woods doing her wild thing. We lost track of her for a time and feared that she had been killed or captured by a pound. But then one day she returned with a youngster, the proud accomplishment of her absence. On one occasion I walked out the back door to be faced with wild kingdom. She had caught a mouse and brought it to her kitten. The mouse was unharmed and almost as big as the kitten. The kitten had it at bay but was getting bitten. Which was prey was hard to discern. The mother just reclined quietly nearby, nonchalantly, occasionally glancing over at her youngster. The kitten was learning valuable and painful lessons, lessons that could never be learned by just watching the mom and eating pre-killed harmless meals. Since the kitten's survival would one day depend upon such lessons, the mother's actions showed true love, not apathy and cruelty.
 
The Choice Was and Is Ours
 
The battle between conscience and hind-brain animal instincts is in large part the challenge we choose for Earth life. It's a war between the ethics within and the biological forces of the creature we chose to inhabit. The degree to which we learn to master the evil that can rise from within and take responsibility for our own acts determines to a large extent the quality of our lives and the fulfillment of our purpose here.
 
A Creator constantly removing all risk would make free will and learning pointless. Also, think of the dullness of a world where, regardless of the choices made, everything happened in a predictably safe and beneficial way.
 
As shown in previous chapters, we plan our Earth-life, including its pain and suffering. We also have the ability to change that plan while on Earth. Suicide, for instance, would be a dramatic example of a person's choice to abort their Earth effort due to the extreme difficulty that was chosen.
 
Such free will is the necessary ingredient for moral development. A person may decide that the best way to learn compassion is to come to Earth and be tortured. Another person may want to be more selfless, so they choose to be miserably poor. Yet another may want to understand generosity better, so they are born into a starving family. A person desiring to know the emptiness of wealth may live a life burdened by riches. In some cases, people choose a relatively easy Earth life as a rejuvenator after a previously very difficult or traumatic life. W.C. Fields, the boozing comedian, said that when he comes back, he'll live over a saloon.
 
Since we choose our Earth-life and its challenges with eyes wide open, we have nobody to blame but ourselves for whatever circumstances befall us. The fact that we are free to make our own decisions to come here, live a life we plan, and carry the responsibility and consequences for that life is the epitome of justice. It is the way of the perfectly just Creator, not evidence of cruelty and indifference.
 
Moreover, since everyone is at a different stage of moral development, and everyone has a different script for learning by experience, and free will is always at play, Earth will always be a mix of good and bad. We know that before entering the bargain.
 
Choosing to come to Earth to experience pain may—with a narrowed materialistic and human view—seem ridiculous. But if the goal is to become a better person and pain is the only way we think we can achieve that, it's not ridiculous at all. Moreover, as immortal beings, this sojourn on Earth in the perspective of infinity is but a blink.
 
So, we freely and wisely choose the blink of pain for an eternity of benefit.