The Problematics of Joy in a World of Sin, Suffering, and Death

6/2/2022

"Problematic" is one of leftism's favorite words. Leftists tend to apply it to anything that disagrees with their absurd, oppositional ideologies and doctrines. Leftism has no positive, long-term motivation or goal and accepts reality as ultimately meaningless, which entails that everything eventually falls under the problematic banner. Though most leftists are oblivious to the fact, problematic encompasses everything that defies destruction and damnation, which is why God and Creation are the most fundamentally "problematic" of all leftist "problems".

Beyond the scope of leftism's definition and use of the word, problematic refers to things that are difficult, taxing, troublesome, complex, complicated, knotty, thorny, paradoxical, baffling, and puzzling. The word can also describe things that are difficult to discern and solve. Uncertain, questionable, debatable, and indefinite things can also be considered problematic.

With this in mind, we could readily employ problematic to describe the experience of mortal life. Despite leftism's hijacking of the word, mortal life in this world can indeed be very difficult, taxing, complicated, knotty, paradoxical, and baffling.

Equally problematic are the thinking and lines of communication we utilize to manage and make sense of the many problematic things we encounter and face during our mortal lives. The words we use to communicate core realities like God, Creation, love, and freedom become just as problematic as the realities they are trying to define and describe. The same applies to most words and concepts -- in fact, every word and concept, including "joy".

Surprisingly enough, joy is not a supremely problematic concept for leftists and those opposed to God and Creation.

At the minion level, leftists positively conceptualize joy as anything that provides hedonistic pleasure, happiness, comfort, and satisfaction. Leftists anchor joy in ego and materialism. Superior experiences of joy include all sorts of material gratifications fueled by egoistic self-interest that can range from the seediest of sexual gratifications to the grandest altruistic, utopian visions of improving the world and creating heaven on earth.

From a purely negative perspective, joy for a leftist is the delay and avoidance of physical pain and suffering, both for themselves and -- once again, altruistically -- for all of humanity.
Joy is only problematic for leftists when the joy of others infringes upon their joy or when they sense the inherent transience or non-permanence of the joy they experience and pursue in mortal life.

At the demonic level -- from which minion leftists draw their energy -- the matter of joy is not problematic at all. Joy is simple and straightforward for demons. Everything and anything that assists in the destruction of Creation and the damnation of souls is joyful because, at the demonic level, joy is a terminal concept. The greatest joy a demon hopes to experience is its own self-destruction after it has succeeded in destroying everything else in Creation.

Peak joy at the demonic level is non-being -- the absolute dissolution and destruction of God and Creation.

If we rank joy on a problematic scale, we find that joy is not problematic for demons, only somewhat problematic for leftists and, oddly enough, extremely problematic for Christians.

What makes joy so problematic for Christians in mortal life? I imagine a great deal of it has to do with the temptations towards the hedonistic, egoistic, and materialistic amusements, comforts, and distractions in mortal life through which leftists find pleasure.

The sexual revolution provides a solid negative example in this regard. Though Christians recognize and comprehend the innate immorality and sins of the sexual revolution, they are nonetheless lured by the apparently “joyful” temptations it offers. The same applies to all leftist ideologies and litmus test issues. Leftists enslave themselves to joy as a means through which to escape the awareness of sin. Christians, on other hand, know that deriving joy from sin opposes God and Creation. Though such knowledge should free and liberate, Christians often regard it as difficult and burdensome.

The problem of impermanence affects Christians just as much as it affects leftists. Like leftists, Christians aspire to maximize and maintain joy in mortal life, but the kinds of joy Christians attempt to maximize and maintain are just as impermanent and transitory as the kinds of joy leftists attempt to maximize and maintain.

The reality of suffering, pain, entropy, and death in mortal life also make joy problematic for Christians. After all, how can anyone in the grips of extreme pain or severe suffering experience genuine joy? How can anyone who experiences the tragic loss of a young child or the eventual loss of their own mental and physical faculties feel authentic joy? Moreover, why should they? To claim to be joyful in such conditions would be a sign of gross dishonesty. To deny the reality of suffering, pain, and entropy is to deny the significance of suffering, pain, and entropy.

Suffice to say that the human condition sets definite limits on genuine joy – at least in the conventional sense of the concept.

Joy is easy for demons because they aim at destruction, death, and non-being. Joy is more problematic for Christians because they are – ideally – aiming at creation, life, and being, which are far more problematic to pursue in this world.

Though the world contains beauty, truth, and goodness, it is also filled with ugliness, lies, and evil. Beauty, truth, and goodness can sustain joy; ugliness, lies, and evil seek to destroy it. If we are aligned with God and Creation, we can pursue beauty, truth, and goodness in mortal life, but this pursuit does not negate the existence of ugliness, lies, and evil, which is why joy in mortal life is often problematic for Christians.

Nevertheless, Christians can tap a level of joy that is unproblematic and not restricted by the limits of their mortal lives, but this requires a level of thinking and understanding that includes the experience of their mortal lives and eternity.

It begins with the understanding that we existed as disembodied spiritual beings before our mortal lives. As disembodied spiritual beings, we asked God to incarnate us into this world to experience the kind of spiritual learning that could help us to attain a permanently embodied form of spiritual life.

We asked God to put us in His Creation, in a time and place conducive to the kinds of learning we needed most. We knew what we were “signing up” for beforehand. We knew a large part of the learning we had to undergo involved suffering, pain, and death as well as happiness, pleasure, and life. We also knew that if we learned the lessons we needed to learn, we could move onto a form of everlasting life that will be vastly superior.

Our deepest, truest self – the spiritual being having the human experience in mortal life – knows this still and experiences joy for the opportunity.

The joy within our true selves – our divine selves – is the only unproblematic joy we can hope to know during our mortal lives, but we can only come to know this unproblematic joy if we begin to know -- or at least become aware of -- the reality of our true and divine self and what it is aiming for.

Note added: Chapter 16 of the Fourth Gospel has much to say about the unproblematic joy I have attempted to describe in the post, particularly 16:20-33, which I have included below (bold added):

20 Verily, verily, I say unto you, That ye shall weep and lament, but the world shall rejoice: and ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy.
21 A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world.
22 And ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.
23 And in that day ye shall ask me nothing. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give it you.
24 Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.
25 These things have I spoken unto you in proverbs: but the time cometh, when I shall no more speak unto you in proverbs, but I shall shew you plainly of the Father.
26 At that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not unto you, that I will pray the Father for you:
27 For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God.
28 I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.
29 His disciples said unto him, Lo, now speakest thou plainly, and speakest no proverb.
30 Now are we sure that thou knowest all things, and needest not that any man should ask thee: by this we believe that thou camest forth from God.
31 Jesus answered them, Do ye now believe?
32 Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me.
33 These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.

14 Comments

Carol

6/2/2022 21:10:24

First, I wanted to say how much I loved your May 31st post, as I totally 'get' what you describe there as "Being 'in' joy"...
...Reading that post, I literally had a flash of memory to just such a particular "moment", and suddenly that reverie of memory became yet another such "moment 'in' joy", and I felt such gratitude both to God and to yourself as a conduit to His grace that I am rather ashamed to only just now be expressing my thankfulness to you!

I also really appreciate what you are conveying in today's post, but I do have a quibble with regard to this particular paragraph:

"We asked God to put us in His Creation, in a time and place conducive to the kinds of learning we needed most. We knew what we were “signing up” for beforehand. We knew a large part of the learning we had to undergo involved suffering, pain, and death as well as happiness, pleasure, and life. We also knew that if we learned the lessons we needed to learn, we could move onto a form of everlasting life that will be vastly superior."

The thing is...while I absolutely agree with the concept of 'Earth as a place for learning'...I don't think it is as fully 'foreknown/foreplanned' as you describe.
Because it seems to me that - the metaphysics of reality has to apply to every single person born....
so, read that paragraph and then ask yourself -
- could you really love a 'God' who placed any value at all on "the kinds of learning" to be gained by any 'spiritual being' incarnating into a life which included experiencing such an abusive childhood that the person would inevitably grow up to become torturously abusive to their own children?
(and that's a drop in the ocean compared to the buckets of 'ugly' that innocent children experience every day in this world)

I am a firm believer in the 'value' of suffering (having actually reached a point of genuine gratitude to God for all I have learned in over 40 yrs. severe Clinical Depression), and as well -
- that "All things work to good for those that love God" (Romans 8, I think), but from a metaphysical perspective:

It would be an insane 'spiritual being' who "asked God" to 'incarnate in His Creation' in such circumstances as I described...
...And worse, it would be an insane God who would agree to place any being in some of the atrociously 'ugly' life circumstances into which many are born and from which, nothing of 'value' could possibly be experienced...

Francis Berger

6/3/2022 10:13:02

@ Carol - That's a good quibble, and I agree with some of it.

To clarify, I believe that we knew what we were signing up for in a general sense; that is, we understood that we incarnate into a world in which suffering, pain, and death were unavoidable. I believe we also put faith and trust in God to allow us to incarnate in a time and place most conducive to our individual needs.

At the same time, I don't think we knew the specifics of the time, place, or suffering we would encounter. I don't think God provided a checklist or any sort of itinerary as to what we would experience in terms of specifics -- partly because doing so would be a major hindrance on our free will and agency and partly God Himself would not know the specifics either (because of our free will and agency).

The only thing that was foreknown or foreplanned was that we were willing -- of our own free choice -- to incarnate and that this incarnation would involve the experience of suffering and death. I don't believe we knew what kind of suffering or death we would experience after our incarnation and, to a large part, neither did God.

"- could you really love a 'God' who placed any value at all on "the kinds of learning" to be gained by any 'spiritual being' incarnating into a life which included experiencing such an abusive childhood that the person would inevitably grow up to become torturously abusive to their own children?
(and that's a drop in the ocean compared to the buckets of 'ugly' that innocent children experience every day in this world)"

Your example of the abused child reminds me of Ivan Karamazov's "rebellion" in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. According to Ivan, the meaningless suffering of innocent children was too great to justify the existence of a loving God or the promise of everlasting life. Ivan couldn't support the notion that a loving God could be so cruel, and he decided to "hand back his ticket" when it came to the promise of everlasting life. Dostoevsky later outlines why this is not a viable option from a spiritual perspective.

The conventional understanding is that suffering is supposed to redeem. Ivan's point is that sometimes the degree of suffering vastly outweighs the redemption -- that no level of redemption is equal to the kinds of suffering we see and experience on earth. Hence, God is cruel and unloving and unfit to be loved -- best not believe in Him.

The problem is this -- eliminating a supposedly cruel god does not eliminate or decrease the suffering of innocent children. All it does in the end is render the suffering meaningless.

I think the best way to approach suffering in life is to deal with it on an individual basis. Why God places certain individuals in ugly circumstances is only really knowable to the individuals in those circumstances.

At the same time, the individuals in those ugly circumstances have agency and free will, which means they can influence, affect, and alter the circumstances in which they have been placed, either through action or through thinking or both. Their actions, choices, discernment, etc. have an effect on the circumstances, in ways God cannot foresee or determine.

Suffering is not good, yet it is necessary. If it wasn't necessary, God would not include it in our experience in this world. Most people think suffering is about redemption. I think suffering has more to do with clearing up and eliminating false assumptions.

We could start clearing up some of those false assumptions about suffering in mortal life by examining why God would permit His "only begotten son" -- who was just as innocent as a child -- to be tortured and crucified like a common criminal. Or why Jesus freely submitted to the crucifixion in the way He did.

On the one hand, we could declare that God and Jesus are insane to have agreed to such an endeavor. On the other hand, we could begin to think about it more creatively and accept that our assumption that only insane beings would agree to such a thing is limited and false.

6/3/2022 19:08:17

Carol, I'd just like to add that your observation about the insane spiritual being is a really good one.

If God and the spiritual being agreed to those conditions -- foreplanned, foreseen -- it would be extremely difficult to justify God as good or incarnation as desirable.

Your observation and example would lead to the same sort of metaphysical conundrums present in traditional Christian theology and its insistence upon creation from nothing and God as Omnigod.

As I mentioned in my previous comment, incarnation for pre-existing spiritual beings only makes sense to me if the being agreed to the incarnation knowing only the general conditions, which include the experience of suffering and death, and not a preplanned, mapped out life in which both the being and God knew all the details ahead of time.

My basic argument was that the Divine Self, the essence of that spiritual being, still retains the knowledge of that decision to incarnate. Despite the suffering experienced in human life -- suffering it could not know about beforehand in terms of specifics -- the Divine Self knows the decision was a good one or, at the very least, was made with the best motivations and aims.

Whether our human selves manage to interpret the decision as a good or bad depends on many factors, including the quality of spiritual learning experienced in mortal life.

ben

6/3/2022 19:50:31

It might be that there just can't be that much choice when it comes to the parents a person incarnates to. It might be that a particular genetic combination is necessary to receive a particular soul.

A pre-mortal spirit might be such that the only genetic combinations capable of receiving them are ones formed by a bad parent/bad parents.

This sort of thing will at least be playing a role.

6/4/2022 20:31:33

Mr. Berger,
Thank you for taking the time to reply at such length, I do understand and agree with much of your point of view.

Primarily, the point I had hoped to make was that any given "metaphysical assumption" (to quote Dr. Charlton) must apply to any given person thru-out time...
And as such, 'if' the particular life circumstances of any given persons cannot be 'truly' attributable to the concept of 'learning from Earthly suffering' -
- then, it behooves us to broaden our perspectives, ask ourselves/Holy Spirit the hard questions, and allow our "metaphysical assumptions" to grow accordingly.

I speak from personal experience, in literally having had to "grow" thru a continuum of metaphysical 'ideals' during a lifetime (58 yrs.), which has included both personal experience of abusive childhood, resolution (both psychologically & spiritually) of residual emotional pain, and witnessing/counseling others who had endured far worse than my own experience had been.

For example: How would you respond to a person who is atheist precisely because as a child, they had cried out to the Lord Jesus during severe abuse episodes and received no help?

You see, even for a 'determined' Christian (as I am), the answer must involve metaphysical assumptions much more complex than merely 'learning from (pre-birth agreed to) suffering'.

Then another question I encourage pondering is this:
Do the insane have freewill?
Do the brainwashed?
There are people walking around who have reached adulthood, having been so thoroughly 'programmed' (or driven insane) by childhood indoctrination/abuse, that it would take a great deal of hubris to claim those persons to truly be in possession of freewill.

And for my part, it is in this realization that I must humbly submit to God all claim of any 'virtue' in my own efforts toward becoming and remaining a true 'believer' -
- it is only by the Grace of God Himself, that I reached adulthood with enough of my own freewill intact to allow the 'choosing' of Faith in Christ Jesus, and it has been touch and go at times as to whether I would remain so blessed.

Please forgive me for 'pontificating', so to speak...
I should probably delete much of what I've written, but honestly, I hate composing thoughts into words so much, I can't bear to even reread it, much less delete any of it!
I will leave it to your judgement - edit out as much as you like.
Thank you for this blog, and God Bless you and your loved ones!

6/4/2022 22:58:41

@ Carol - Thanks for the thought-provoking response. I think you can appreciate why I focused on the word "problematic" in this post. This is "problematic" stuff!

"And as such, 'if' the particular life circumstances of any given persons cannot be 'truly' attributable to the concept of 'learning from Earthly suffering' -
- then, it behooves us to broaden our perspectives, ask ourselves/Holy Spirit the hard questions, and allow our "metaphysical assumptions" to grow accordingly."

I am curious to know how your metaphysical assumptions have grown in this regard.

For my part, I don't really understand the first part of the statement. What does it mean that a person's particular life circumstances are not truly conducive to learning?

By what criteria can this be determined?

For example, the experience of incarnation for countless millions of individuals throughout history ended in the womb or shortly after birth. On the one hand, we could argue that the life circumstances of these countless millions of individuals was not truly attributable to the concept of earthly learning. On the other hand, we could argue that these individuals learned what they had to had to learn in the brief time they had on earth. It all hinges upon what we define as learning in this earthly life, and to my understanding this learning is primarily spiritual in nature, which means that even a brief incarnation can provide necessary spiritual learning.

Spiritual learning is learning for what is divine within us, not the incarnated human being we are now. It aims at and affects what is eternal in us - that which existed before we incarnated and will exist after our incarnation ends. Some spiritual learning may be perceptible in the world, to ourselves and others; some may even influence human behavior, but most spiritual learning will have little effect on behavior.

The vast bulk of our spiritual learning from the experience of our mortal lives will only become apparent and meaningful to us after death, which means those even who suffer mental disabilities or are brainwashed mindless drones will have the chance to assess the experiences they had during life.

To me it all boils down to the following, metaphysically. God is a personal, loving, Creator who provides us with mortal experience so that we can spiritually learn the things we need to learn eternally -- things we could not learn without having had the experience of mortal life.

We -- the eternal part of this, the spiritual being we discussed earlier -- agreed to the mortal experience beforehand knowing that it will include suffering and death (as well as happiness, joy, pleasure, etc.), but that this suffering and death will be restricted to mortal flesh. The eternal part of us will survive mortal life in some form or other based on the learning we gained here.

We freely agreed to the experience because we understood God to be a loving, personal, wholly good Creator who could offer us something that would be of immense benefit to our eternal lives.

We knew God would be able to provide us with the kind of world and experience we personally needed to make this immense eternal benefit possible,

That is the joy to which I was referring -- a joy only the eternal part of ourselves is capable of perceiving.

If we do not believe that all mortal lives are truly conducive to this sort of spiritual learning then God is either cruel or incompetent or the metaphysical assumptions I have outlined are false or limited.

I think I get where you're coming from Carol, but I get the sense -- forgive me if I am wrong -- that you lay too much emphasis on the perceived quality of the worldly experience as interpreted by the facile human part of us rather than the quality of the earthly experience as viewed from the perspective of the eternal.

"And for my part, it is in this realization that I must humbly submit to God all claim of any 'virtue' in my own efforts toward becoming and remaining a true 'believer' -
- it is only by the Grace of God Himself, that I reached adulthood with enough of my own freewill intact to allow the 'choosing' of Faith in Christ Jesus, and it has been touch and go at times as to whether I would remain so blessed."

That puts it well. Thanks for sharing that. I believe everyone will be given the chance to choose Jesus after death, even those who were ignorant of him or opposed him or those who thought they were great Christians but really weren't, etc., but those who believed in him in mortal life and understood their lives to be about spiritual learning will better understand his offer of heaven and better understand the eternal learning they accumulated in mortal life that makes heaven possible.

6/5/2022 01:08:04

Oh my goodness Frank (Can I call you "Frank"?),
This would be so much easier for 'both of us' - in the sense of 'easier for me' to explain myself to you - if we could do it by telephone ;^))

"For my part, I don't really understand the first part of the statement. What does it mean that a person's particular life circumstances are not truly conducive to learning?"

I didn't say "not...conducive to learning", so that first statement as a whole seems to be misinterpretible (is that a word?), this is why I hate writing...
...because I agree with all you've written, but I was trying to convey a broader picture, hence the intended meaning in the first statement leads to the questions of "freewill" later on in the comment..

You are correct in regards that my emphasis here is 'on' the "perceived quality of the worldly experience" from the human perspective...and I understand that you are 'speaking' from the "eternal" view...

...which is why I had hoped to 'spark' greater understanding by offering questions (alternative perspectives) for 'pondering...'
(oh, I almost wrote "for your pondering pleasure" - that's a bit insensitive sounding ;^))

...Because, to a person 'in the midst' of decades of suffering, it simply does not suffice to say, "It's all going to be ok in the end, because you know God loves you and you'll be with him, and you'll know it was all worth it!"

Here's another (alternative perspective) question:
Does a 'truly' loving parent teach a child to swim by throwing him into the deep end of the pool?
Or teach him to swim faster by throwing him into shark infested water?

So, why do you think that our Loving Heavenly Father (and remember, I am a Believer) would 'willingly' (that's my caveat) place His children in a learning environment which has been 'infested' with demons?

Why wouldn't He put up barriers between such 'predators' and His beloved children?

See, I'm trying (badly, I admit) to make a point directly related to the problem of "metaphysical assumptions"...
...and the difficulty is that I don't know the answer, I only know that so far, I'm the only person I've ever known who can clearly see the 'question'.
Well, and obviously I know that I'm a terrible writer, because 'clearly' I am not succeeding at conveying what I'm trying to convey..

Thank you for the 'conversation', I really appreciate you're taking the time - you don't have to respond to this one. God Bless...etc..etc..

6/6/2022 06:22:47

@ Carol - I prefer Frank or Francis or Frankie or any other derivation of Frank. Mr. Berger reminds me of my high school teaching days (You want to talk about suffering? Oh boy!)

Kidding aside, I sense your frustration, and I apologize that my responses have failed to address the core of what you are focusing on here. I'll do my best to address it now. Before I do, I would like to stress that I can feel you are coming to this from a very personal perspective, and I am aiming to keep my responses from coming off as sounding callous or insensitive.

You've been reading my blog long enough to know the overall content of my metaphysical assumptions, so I won't continue to rehash them in my responses here.

To begin with: "It's all going to be ok in the end, because you know God loves you and you'll be with him, and you'll know it was all worth it!"

As "problematic" as this statement sounds against the backdrop of the immense and often brutal suffering in mortal life, it is the central tenet of Christianity.

Your point is that sometimes the suffering is too great or too prolonged in mortal life to be considered "worth it" -- the suffering is too much to be attributable to spiritual learning and the acceptance of everlasting life -- which is the exact argument Ivan Karamazov makes in The Brothers Karamazov when he offers to return his ticket and cancel his subscription to the resurrection.

This is where your caveat of "willing" comes in, I assume. How could God, as our loving parent willingly agree to submit his children to such conditions. Moreover, how could we, as pre-mortal spiritual beings, have agreed to such an arrangement?

This leads the the notion that perhaps God was not willing to place us in the world as human mortals. That the process is deterministic or that he was tricked or duped or has a massive blind spot as to what his Creation is all about. Or that we, as spiritual beings, would not have been willing to incarnate if we had known -- truly known -- about the amount of suffering, entropy, and death we would experience here on earth.

In my understanding, much of it comes down to freedom. God, as a loving, personal Creator, would not resort to coercion or force. We asked to be placed here, and he granted our request because he had faith in our abilities to be able to withstand the demon-infested world from an eternal perspective.

This is the central problem of theodicy. Traditional theology informs us that an all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing god the world. The question is, how could or why would an all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing god create a world so filled with suffering and evil?

Despite libraries of books on the matter, traditional theology has no satisfactory answer for this. Indeed, if God is Omnigod, there is no satisfactory answer for the presence of evil in the world.

I don't believe God is an Omnigod. I believe God is restricted in many ways, particularly when it comes to freedom. The world is full of suffering and evil because he cannot create the world any other way. God doesn't create from nothingness, but from freedom, which can be conceptualized as a sort of nothingness with the potential to become being.

To my understanding, the beings he creates into world are all imbued with freedom over which he has no real control. He cannot prevent beings from turning their freedom against him toward evil. he cannot prevent a being from rejecting the offer of everlasting life. Though I believe he strives to put up as many barriers as he can between his children and the predators, he cannot block the predators completely.

We asked God to put us in shark-infested waters because we believed we were up to the task. God had faith in our abilities and granted our request.

The sharks in the waters only pose a danger to our physical selves; they cannot "kill" what is eternal within us. Put another way, they can rip of our swimsuits, but they cannot really harm us otherwise.

The greatest threat we face in the water is ourselves! The greatest harm we can experience in the world eternally does not come from predators or demons, but from ourselves!

Having said that, I believe God suffers when he sees us falter. I also believe he does everything in his power to manage the world in such a way to provide new opportunities for us, but his interventions are not immune to freedom -- the freedom of other beings, but more importantly, our own use of freedom.

Since mortal life is a transitional phase that ends in death regardless of the amount or quality or suffering one experiences, it is not eternal and is not meant to be eternal, yet we often think and act as if mortal life was meant to be eternal. Our lives in this world have a definite beginning and end, but the eternal part of us continues on. How it continues on boils down to the matter of what we learned during our mortal experience.

Returning to the predators for a moment, they can only take the physical and temporal

6/6/2022 06:36:35

@ Carol - not the eternal. They can only destroy the eternal within us if we destroy it for them.

Acquiring spiritual freedom is one of the overarching goals of mortal life. We cannot get to heaven and become co-Creators if we do not learn the lessons of spiritual freedom. Heaven is a place of spiritual freedom where we can focus our energies on love and creation without being encumbered by suffering and death, but getting to that stage appears to involve having to "live" the experience of suffering and death so that we can honestly and freely become detached from them, say no to them, and embrace something better.

I'm rambling, and I could go on and on, but I'll end here. In your original comment you mentioned the Holy Spirit. I think it's good to ask the Holy Spirit hard questions, but the hard questions have to be the right questions. The Holy Spirit guides and comforts us in mortal life, but its focus is on the eternal. I think we have to keep this in mind when we formulate our questions, especially when it comes to suffering.

6/5/2022 13:33:36

Thank you very much for your work, which has enriched my understanding greatly.

When the perfect God creates us, we are necessarily less perfect than God. Otherwise, we'd be God. My thoight , though sketchy and incomplete, is that we don't know how far down the scale from perfection is our current level of suffering. Nor do we know how much suffering we have already been shielded from. It is what it is. Maybe that's what it takes. And, it could be worse.

I wonder how we would react had we been given an easy life of wealth and plenty. Would human nature still be to complain about the suffering of being placed in a cold climate versus Joe who was placed on Miami? Or, being given a white mansion versus Mary's more holy purple villa? When that's or only frame of reference, it too might seem cruel?

I don't know. Thanks again.

6/6/2022 20:06:27

That was a wonderful response, Frank - thank you!!!

I want you to understand that it's not a matter of my 'disagreeing' with anything you've written, it's that I seem to have a uniquely broad perspective....
Because, that is 'the thing' - although it is a "very personal perspective" from which I'm writing, it is not 'only' my own 'personal perspective'.

I don't know if I can explain this without it sounding a bit...over the top...

Some years after my daughter (she's 24, only child) was born, as she reached stages of independence (needing less 'mothering').....
...something 'shifted', growing within me, and I began to feel a sense of 'mother love' for all children.
This will sound crazy...but I can 'feel' their pain. And I feel the pain that mothers feel in response to their child's pain.

That is an extremely simplified version - it's all tied up with God and my experience of faith and prayer, and complicated by a growing sense that (along the lines of Berdyaev's works) 'we' are meant to be co-creating with God during our lives in 'this' world...

So, it's both "personal" and not personal, because one thing I can tell you -
I've seen evidence of God's protection of and provision for my own daughter (Thanks and praise be to Him!!), so my difficulty with the questions regarding children incarnating in a world with demonic predators is not 'personally' personal, per se ;^)

(yes, also I have an offbeat sense of humor)

Anyway, I really, really appreciate you taking so much time and effort to 'engage' with me about all this!! It is very challenging to be pondering huge spiritual ideas and have no one to discuss them with in person...

Thanks again and God Bless you!

6/7/2022 21:55:53

Thanks, Carol. Our discussion brought home the importance of metaphysical assumptions when thinking about suffering. It motivated me to revisit and reflect upon some of my deepest held beliefs.

Luke

6/8/2022 00:45:21

I think something that William Wildblood recounted here might help, he said the Masters told him that "The greater part of you remains with us" which I think helps to explain how it is that this life can be understood as a learning environment. If we believe that who we are here is the only, or even the main part of who we are then it is easy to see that we could be overwhelmed by the world, possibly irrevocably. But if we believe that the greater part of us is waiting to be reunited after death, then we can understand that our learning can only be overwhelmed for a while, and that after death there is the greater part of ourselves that will make sense of it.

6/8/2022 17:22:04

Well Luke, that's all very well as an explanation -
- until you have a child kidnapped by sadistic deviants, who spend days/weeks sexually torturing him to death...

...sorry to be so blunt, but I have spent the last few years watching such cases multiply in this world!
And I have to work so hard every day to remember that God is not to blame for this -
- as well, I have come to believe that every person who is not attempting to work out (as God's co-creators in reality) some sort of 'here and now' spiritual 'response' regarding the demonic powers who are to blame for such evil -
- is somewhat complicit and may even be held accountable by God (or "the greater part of ourselves") after death..

The imaginations we've been blessed with are not merely for inner 'entertainment' purposes...
I believe we are being called to utilize imagination metaphysically, to 'brainstorm' ways in which we might aid God's purposes in 'this' world as creatively spiritual warriors.

And I don't really care anymore if that sounds crazy...

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The Problematics of Joy in a World of Sin, Suffering, and Death

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