Why did God make life so hard for humans?

[Miguel1]

Think about an ant. How much it works, fights and suffers its whole life.. just for you to step on it.

Do you care? Does it even register in your mind?

So why should a higher intelligent being care about your suffering?

[LordFall]

54 minutes ago, Miguel1 said:

Think about an ant. How much it works, fights and suffers its whole life.. just for you to step on it.

Do you care? Does it even register in your mind?

So why should a higher intelligent being care about your suffering?

I don't randomly step on ants or fuck up their colonies. I don't know much about them apart from the fact that they build stuff and walk around. In a way it's an irrelevant point since from God perspective you should care about both's suffering. 

Seems like life is a wildly irresponsible creation. The gnostics believed in the Demiurge Yaldaboth that created material reality to punish humans and rejoice in their suffering. I don't believe in that view of reality but sure feels like it at times.

God is not a leader. It's at best a mad scientist enjoying human suffering like a fucking sadomasochist. Really not impressed. 

[zurew]

If you think God has an ability to stop certain things from happening and or to create this world in a different way then the indifference principle is probably one of the most dogshit response to the POE.

Also curious how you guys reconcile spiral dynamics and spiritual development (however you want to track that) with  the highest development being "be indifferent to the suffering of all sentient beings".

[LordFall]

49 minutes ago, zurew said:

If you think God has an ability to stop certain things from happening and or to create this world in a different way then the indifference principle is probably one of the most dogshit response to the POE.

Also curious how you guys reconcile spiral dynamics and spiritual development (however you want to track that) with  the highest development being "be indifferent to the suffering of all sentient beings".

Cope and delusion. If you see someone get raped in front of you and you're detached and admiring the beauty of nature at work you're a fucking psycho. Which is why often spiritual leaders stop actually interacting with the world they find enough material success to isolate themselves from it and then just reflect and ponder and share their insights with their followers while being completely removed and out of touch from other people's actual lives. 

The whole point is you have agency and the power to change stuff but until you're higher consciousness you probably won't recognize the consequences of your actions and will just hurt someone else to lessen your own suffering well like a rapist a thief a warmonger, etc. 

I really have a dislike for spiritual teachers right now though rubs me the wrong way a lot of narcissism baked into it. Much easier to preach about detachment than to solve the actual tangible material problems that we face. Then having the balls to declare themselves higher consciousness and more developed lol 

How do you build resilient supply chains and diplomatic alliances to stop world hunger? Fuck bro idk don't worry about that though you're God, it's all good! Life is a perfect dream! Don't worry about it! Just meditate more! Become God realized dude it'll be great! 

 

 

Edited 20 hours ago by LordFall

[moonawakening444]

is it possible to become conscious of God and still be aware of the world´s problems while also doing something about it? 

like actually doing something to make the lives of people around you better....

that´s the question i´ve been sitting with these days

Edited 19 hours ago by moonawakening444

[Eskilon]

1 hour ago, zurew said:

Also curious how you guys reconcile spiral dynamics and spiritual development (however you want to track that) with  the highest development being "be indifferent to the suffering of all sentient beings".

There's a difference between indifference and non-interference?

This doen't seem crazy because freedom is really one of the ultimate values and highest in virtue. Giving freedom and therefore allowing errors and suffering is still much better than control and coercion.

Freedom will give beings wisdom, love, and intelligence, but that might come through suffering, agony and errors.

The whole point of spirituality is to attain to ever higher levels of freedom and sovereignty. 

Edited 18 hours ago by Eskilon

[zurew]

11 hours ago, Eskilon said:

There's a difference between indifference and non-interference?

Going with the assumption that you think God had a choice about what kind of world or Universe he should create and that he can consciously change the world this is my response:

You can make a conceptual distinction between the two, but I dont think that will be a relevant and good enough to reconcile the moral issues. In most cases, especially if the given event has moral weight according to you, you will do something about it, if you have the resources and power to do so (and it seems strange, that not even world wars and not even the holocaust had enough moral weight for an all powerful , all good being to lift his fingers)

But sure, you can say that you arent indifferent to thousands of kids getting raped and at the same time say that you dont want to intervene - but that sounds extra strange from God's pov, who literally created a world  where child rapists are running around and he can under any second change and or stop anything. 

 

 

But the free will response is  incredibly weak for many other  different reasons:

 First, just to flag - people literally have a higher moral standard for people, than what they have for God, because they wouldn't ever accept a response like "look dude, the reason why I didnt stop the child rapist from raping your child (even though I had the power to easily do so) is because I valued and respected his free will".

Second, it makes 0 sense  that God values the child rapist's free will over the children's free will who gets raped. So any time a given person violates another person's free will, it seems strange that God doesnt do shit about it, especially when one person violates multiple people's free will.

Third, to your lesson response: I dont know what you learn from getting skinned alive or burned alive or tortured to death or from getting raped - but whatever hypothetical lesson is learned from there - if I know that thats what I need to drag certain sentient creatures through for them to learn that given thing, then I would be personally okay with that lesson not being learned and not allowing and or creating those state of affairs at all . Here I would also flag, that if God has the power to give you that knowledge and lesson without dragging you through those psychopathic state of affairs, then if he is all good, he would obviously pick alternative pathways.

Fourth: if God is all powerful , then he could have just created a world with agents who always freely chooses to do good without any coercion. Like what stopped God from creating enlightened beings from the get-go?

Fifth: Or if you think that the 4. for some reason fails -  God could have just created a world, where agents can only choose from a set of good options - here your claim about coercion just simply wouldnt hold up , because you still have the ability to choose from avalaible options, its just that there just wouldnt be "rape this kid" kind of options avalaible to anyone. (But here I would flag again, that even if you think that this would somehow be coercion, I will remind you that I would personally choose this kind of "coercion" at any given time over creating a world, where I sit back and watch billions of sentient creatures ripping each other apart and eating each other and raping each other and torturing each other etc).

Sixth: Even if you think that all of the above fails, for your defense to go through, you would need to argue for a position like this - From God's pov it makes the world a worse place if he stops child rapists from raping children than to let child rapists exercise their free will.

I have more reasons why I think the free will response fails, but I think this is a good start for now.

 

 

 

I think the POE is a very serious issue if you have a particular conception of God, and it is much more honest to not desperately try to generate a bunch of ad-hoc explanations and to not maintain that conception of God and to rather change it to something thats much more plausible given all the facts of this world . Enlightenment and spiritual work is compatible with a bunch of different conceptions of God and there is an underdetermination issue.

For instance, in my opinion, its much more plausible that its either the case that God didnt have a choice about what world to create and or God isn't all powerful and cant change what happens in this world and or he is not all good or he doesnt even have a meta-cognition at all and he doesnt have intentions.

Edited 6 hours ago by zurew

[Basman]

If you don't like the world you see, change your prescription.