On the big question of suffering:
We can't choose reality. We have to accept reality as it is. Reality includes suffering, and every human being on this planet will have to endure some form of suffering in their lifetime.
No argument from me, or from anybody sane, there.
When a Christian prays for God to take suffering away, God will answer the prayer in one of two ways. He will either bring about a miraculous end to the suffering, or He will give the person strength and courage to endure it in order to bring about a greater good.
I've usually heard it quoted as three answers - "Yes," "No" and "Not in right now - please leave a message and I'll get back to you." But as you please.
In either case what you can't get past - and I know that this has been mentioned before so it's going to seem like the bog-standard stock response, but it remains unanswered - is that you simply have absolutely no means of being able to tell the difference between two scenarios: one with the God you believe either answering prayers (yes, no, or wait) and the other with no God of any kind at all and the operation of sheer random chance. Both scenarios look identical. There is literally no way of being able to distinguish one situation from t'other. It just can't be done because - going back to my mini-epic of yesterday - you have erected an indefeasible God, a God in your own mind absolutely no amount of contrary, disconfirming evidence will ever be allowed to encroach upon. When God is deliberately made to be compatible with
literally every possible state of affairs, no matter how beautiful or (especially) horrific that state might be, then you have just waved bye-byes to any chance of being able to test your belief against reality. Since Occam's Razor has us prefer the explanation with the least fat on it - the lighter, leaner one; the one which has us start off with the smallest possible number of assumptions - I will go with the most economical explanation. Explanations are like machines or tools, in a way; the more complex they are, the more movable working parts they have, the more likely they are to go wrong. Far more can go wrong with a laptop than with a butterfly tin opener. There's more chance of something going awry with the Large Hadron Collider than with a comb. In this country years ago an artist called Heath Robinson made his name immortal by drawing immensely complicated, over-fussy machines which in the end do something incredibly simple, even trivial. They have the same concept in the USA - they call them Rube Goldberg machines. The relevance of this is that an explanation that bears a greater number of assumptions is more likely to be wrong somewhere along the line - more working parts -, so keep it simple. Some stuff happens here and doesn't happen over there; some people get lucky and others don't. Religion, it has always seemed to me, has always been mankind's oldest and most desperate attempt to try to explain the inherent randomness of the universe, the element of sheer chance in life, by trying to put these things down to the conscious and deliberate plan of unseen forces, sometimes abstract (as in a belief in fate, destiny or kismet) but often (as in theism) personalistic forces. A quote I like comes from the philosopher George Santayana: "Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes." As I remarked a week or two ago, there are some people who seem to have a psychological need to believe that something or, better still, some
one is in charge even if the captain of the ship is either well-meaning but a bit of a klutz, an amiable duffer, a sort of divine Private Pike or Tim Nice-But-Dim, or even that he's an out-and-out callous bastard of the Dennis Nilsen or Jeffrey Dahmer variety - an active sadist. Either scenario seems preferable, to such people, than the alternative explanation - nobody's steering the ship, nobody's in charge.
The suffering we endure either comes from the actions of others, or from some natural disaster in nature. I am certain that God does not send suffering down on us of His own free will.
In either case, if you believe - as I assume you do, but I am open to correction - in a God who is ultimately in charge of the universe and all within it, God is ultimately responsible even for these things. Like the sign on Harry Truman's desk used to say, the buck stops here. A few days ago I used the analogy of a careless, callous and slipshod engineer - something like a car designer - who sends a machine out into the big wide world, something like a car for example, knowing that there are design flaws serious enough to cause injury or even death but simply not bothering to do anything about it. If the car causes those injuries and deaths the engineer isn't
proximately responsible, but he would certainly be
ultimately responsible; and so, it seems to me, is the case with the God you believe in if that God is held to be in control of the universe and everything in it. Saying that humans and natural disasters cause suffering is only inserting an extra link in the chain - a superfluous middle man- but that chain still terminates with God.
If you ever met Becky's husband, Andrew, he will witness to how God is helping him, his children and Becky through this ordeal. Andrew has very strong faith, probably stronger than mine, and he knows God will see them through this.
Would you not consider help to be more along the lines of having a fit and healthy wife who isn't lying in a hospital bed? Again, you are desperately trying to make a virtue out of necessity, pleading with God not to fuck up Becky's brain and the lives of Becky and her family even more than you must presumably believe he has already done to date (and thanking him for it!). Sorry to be blunt, but that's the way it comes across. Either you believe that your God is in ultimate control of all things or you do not - that there is a random element over which God has no control. In the latter case, why posit God?
As I said, we can't choose the reality we would like, but we have to accept it as it is, and with God's help we see true pupose in our existence and we will live to see a reality beyond our wildest dreams.
Tying your brain in knots trying to excuse, rationalise and justify events with the most absurdly far-fetched pseudo-explanations isn't what I regard as accepting reality. It is a flight from it.
