~Mysteriousgal~
Age: 124
Total Posts: 6584
Points: 0
Location:
Pakistan, Pakistan
When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Kushner
i like dis book... wanted to share sumthings wid u guys...
Why do the righteous suffer?
"It is tempting at one level to believe that bad things happen to people (especially other people) because God is a righteous judge who gives them what they deserve. By believing that, we keep the world orderly and understandable."
"It was hard [for the woman in Kushner's example] to live with multiple sclerosis, but it was even harder to live with the idea that things happened to people for no reason, that God had lost touch with the world and nobody was in the driver's seat."
Kushner outlines the various ways that people try to salvage their view of God and His orderly world. They explain that misfortune occurs because
1. Someone made a mistake, or failed in the observance of some religious duty.
2. God has a hidden purpose, or is making use of knowledge we don't have.
3. Suffering itself will turn out to be good for us.
4. God's purpose is in the grand design of the Universal (which is good and beautiful), not in the life of the individual.
5. Suffering teaches something, either to us or to those who see us suffer.
6. Suffering is a test.
7. Death leads us and our loved ones to a better place.
Kushner rejects all of these explanations.
"All the responses to tragedy which we have considered have at least one thing in common. They all assume that God is the cause of our suffering, and they try to understand why God would want us to suffer. … There may be another approach. Maybe God does not cause our suffering. Maybe it happens for some reason other than the will of God."
~Mysteriousgal~
Age: 124
8076 days old here
Total Posts: 6584
Points: 0
Location:
Pakistan, Pakistan
The story of a man named Job
Summary of Job: Job was a fortunate and pious man. Satan charges that Job is pious only because he is fortunate. To prove a point, God lets Satan take away all that Job has, including his children, and to cover his body with boils. Three friends come to visit Job, and their conversations are the bulk of the book. Job complains that his suffering is an injustice from God. His friends defend the idea that God is just with a variety of arguments, including that Job must have done something to deserve his suffering. Job declares his innocence and challenges God to be his accuser. God appears in a whirlwind and points out that He and Job are not equals. Job is silenced. God then reproves Job's friends and restores Job's health and fortune.
"To try to understand the book and its answer, let us take note of three statements which everyone in the book, and most of the readers, would like to be able to believe:
God is all-powerful and causes everything that happens in the world. Nothing happens without His will it.
God is just and fair, and stands for people getting what they deserve, so that the good prosper and the wicked are punished.
Job is a good person.
As long as Job is healthy and wealthy, we can believe all three of those statements at the same time with no difficulty. When Job suffers, when he loses his possessions, his family and his health, we have a problem. We can no longer make sense of all three propositions together. We can now affirm any two only by denying the third.
If God is both just and powerful, then Job must be a sinner who deserves what is happening to him. If Job is good but God causes his suffering anyway, then God is not just. If Job deserved better and God did not send his suffering, then God is not all-powerful.…Job's friends are prepared to stop believing in (C), the assertion that Job is a good person. …Job's solution is to reject proposition (B), the affirmation of God's goodness. Job is in fact a good man, but God is so powerful that He is not limited by considerations of fairness and justice. … Let me suggest that the author of the Book of Job takes the position which neither Job nor his friends take. He believes in God's goodness and in Job's goodness, and is prepared to give up his belief in proposition (A): that God is all-powerful."
"I take these lines [from God's speech at the end of Job] to mean 'if you think that it is so easy to keep the world straight and true, to keep unfair things from happening to people, you try it.' God wants the righteous to live peaceful, happy lives, but sometimes even He can't bring that about. It is too difficult even for God to keep cruelty and chaos from claiming their innocent victims. But could man, without God, do it better?"
I have to point out that this is a most unusual reading of Job, and I don't see much support for it in the text, in which God very explicitly gives Satan license to persecute Job. I would claim that the position of the author of Job is not much different from the position Kushner ascribes to the character Job. Kushner comments on this view:
"That is to say that the morality of the Bible, with its stress on human virtue and the sanctity of human life, is irrelevant to God, and that charity, justice and the dignity of the individual human being have some source other than God. If that were true, many of us would be tempted to leave God, and seek out and worship that source of charity, justice, and human dignity instead."
"If God is God of justice and not of power, the He can still be on our side when bad things happen to us. He can know that we are good and honest people who deserve better. Our misfortunes are none of His doing, and so we can turn to Him for help. … We will turn to God, not to be judged or forgiven, but to be strengthened and comforted."
"We can be angry at what has happened to us, without feeling that we are angry at God. More than that, we can recognize our anger at life's unfairness, our instinctive compassion at seeing people suffer, as coming from God who teaches us to be angry at injustice and to feel compassion for the afflicted. Instead of feeling that we are opposed to God, we can feel that our indignation is God's anger at unfairness working through us, that when we cry out, we are still on God's side, and He is still on ours."
~Mysteriousgal~
Age: 124
8076 days old here
Total Posts: 6584
Points: 0
Location:
Pakistan, Pakistan
Sometimes there is no reason
"Can you accept the idea that some things happen for no reason, that there is randomness in the universe?"
"The world is mostly an orderly, predictable place, showing ample evidence of God's thoroughness and handiwork, but pockets of chaos remain. Most of the time, the events of the universe follow firm natural laws. But every now and then, things happen not contrary to those laws of nature but outside them. Things happen which could just as easily have happened differently."
"An engine bolt breaks on flight 205 instead of on flight 209, inflicting tragedy on one random group of families rather than another. There is no message in all of that. There is no reason for those particular people to be afflicted rather than others. These events do not reflect God's choices. They happen at random, and randomness is another name for chaos, in those corners of the universe where God's creative light has not yet penetrated. And chaos is evil; not wrong, not malevolent, but evil nonetheless, because by causing tragedies at random, it prevents people from believing in God's goodness."
"A system left to itself may evolve in the direction of randomness [as thermodynamics says]. On the other hand, our world may not be a system left to itself. There may in fact be a creative impulse acting on it, the Spirit of God hovering over the dark waters, operating over the course of millennia to bring order out of the chaos. It may yet come to pass that, as 'Friday afternoon' of the world's evolution ticks toward the Great Sabbath which is the End of Days, the impact of random evil will be diminished. Or it may be that God finished His work of creating eons ago, and left the rest to us. … In that case, we will simply have to learn to live with it, sustained and comforted by the knowledge that the earthquake and the accident, like the murder and the robbery, are not the will of God, but represent that aspect of reality which stands independent of His will, and which angers and saddens God even as it angers and saddens us."
