Thirst and Suffering in Modern Western Society
Thirst and Suffering in Modern Western Society
By G. Apollo MacKenna
PREFACE – October 2006
How many times have you heard, “everything happens for a reason”? It’s normally understood to mean that some outcome, usually positive, explains why something negative occurred prior to it, a very comforting idea when faced with an otherwise inexplicable tragedy. The sufferer seeks to ameliorate pain by holding hope that he or she is not the victim of a cruel, random and meaningless universe. Whether the belief is held during the tragedy itself or in hindsight after a positive event deriving from the tragedy, when used this way, everything happening for a reason is a metaphysical concept. It implies that there is a fundamental and benevolent order to the universe wherein consequences become the reason events occur. It is a backwards causality. A rational person taking a logical, skeptical point of view won’t take as fact that there are silver linings behind every cloud, and clearly disagree that an assertion that clouds are caused by silver linings.
Taken out of it’s usual platitudinous context, everything happening for a reason becomes stating the obvious. Everything does happen for a reason; everything has a particular cause or set of causes. Our innate desire to understand the world better drives humanity to try to discover those causes. The sciences developed as tool to learn why things happen, and that causes precede events is part of the scientific order of the universe.
Consider for a moment the nature of time itself. Einstein told us that time is the 4th dimension. We experience time as a linear progression because of our limited perspective. Imagine living in a two dimensional universe, a plane, like a sheet of paper. That plane could move through a three dimensional universe and would experience the travel in a linear manner. If we could see through the 4th dimension, we would see that the future already exists. It brings into question the whole concept of one thing preceding and causing another. In a Euclidean world, point “A” on a line does not bring point “B” into existence simply because it comes before it in the particular perspective we take. Traveling on that line, it appears that “A” causes “B”. Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc.
In the philosophical debate between free will and determinism, the Einsteinian conception of time provides a scientific model by which a deterministic universe can be better understood. It is equally valid to say that the past determined the present as it is to say that the present determined the past because only one set of events would create the present reality as it currently exists. Furthermore, present events are occurring in order the create a future that we cannot see, but already exists.
In this essay, I endeavor to maintain a rational and logical point of view. while holding some presuppositions that I do not take the time to defend because they are not the subject of the essay. The first presupposition I have already mentioned, that we live in a deterministic universe. The second is that there is a force that created this universe. We have labeled this force “God”. This essay is not about defending a belief in God against those who would say that this belief is inconsistent with the rational and logical point of view I want to use.
William James described three ways people come to believe that there is or might be a God. The first is through faith. Throughout history there have been learned beings, and they say there is a God, and by having faith that what these beings have said is true, the person believes as well. Faith can’t be defended with logic, although it easily attacked. The second way one can come to believe in God is through direct experience. Through meditation, prayer, drugs, or being thrown from a horse on a hot day, one has a transcendental experience, one experiences God first hand. The third way is through deduction. The person has a feeling that there must be more than this everyday reality and studies the words of the worlds religions, theologians, spiritualists, and concludes that they can’t all be nuts. Maybe there is a God; he or she doesn’t know for sure.
It’s for this last group that I direct any convincing I am trying to accomplish in this essay. The traditional view of God in almost every religion is that God can and does influence humanity directly. How can that be true looking at the world today? What kind of God allows the world to be how it is today? If everything happens for a reason, wouldn’t it be God determining those reasons? My essay looks for those reasons.
Main article written Winter, 1993
Revised 2006
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2011 FriendBurst Note…
I’m feeling kind of philosophical tonight. It seemed the right moment to link to the essay I linked above (it’s 20 pages long, so I’m asking for a TL;DR if I post it here). If I was put on the world to tell people one thing, it would be what I explain in an essay I wrote almost 20 years ago.
Your comments, feedback and objections are encouraged.
I always believed that faith came before religion. Then I pick the best attributes of everyone else’s religion or way of life and apply them to my God of choice. If the ten commandants give me structure and an idea how I should live my life that I use those. If I come across a Buddhist passage that I like then I will apply that to what God might be like. My method to making my faith easier to believe in is pretty simple and pretty much child like. Find a religion or way of life, peel away its ugliness and then take the best part of it with you. And if someone asks me why does God let bad things happen; I say what most Christians say and that it is because God gave man free will and he chooses to be evil at times. I try not to argue about which religion or way of life is better, because there are fallacies in every religion or a people chosen way of life. Faith is not logical, nor can it be contain within a set of anybody else’s ideal parameters.
Is challenging,will return soon 2 challenge
I told you about my daughter in your last blog. I said those same words to her, everything happens for a reason, where one door shuts, another opens, as I was saying the words, I felt no comfort, and I know she didn’t either. I just did not know how to make her feel better about the jail/rehab??? By the way, she skipped out, she is now wanted on a blue warrant, what the hell is a Mother to do?? Good blog Joko. Peace.