Either God is not omniscient/all good or he’s not all powerful take your pick. That’s how suffering is justified.
Here’s what I think: I think that there is a grand design, a needle’s path that does its best to minimize suffering and provides meaning and joy to all lives. I also believe we as people have the option to ignore that path and forge our own, less optimal one. We have to be allowed to do that. Without free will faith is meaningless. God or the higher power, he wants us to be happy but he don’t control us, that’s not benevolence that’s not what he wants for his children. He wants us to be kind, and caring, and funny, and happy but those things only mean anything if we find them ourselves.
That’s not to say that every bad thing, every painful moment, is our individual fault. That bad things happen because we stray from the “path of the light” or some crock like that. It’s just what happens with a multivariable system. The larger it gets, the more variables there are, the less every action is free from influence.
Think about causality, everything happens for a reason. I’m not talking about a Reason as in a grand design but a reason as in the unbroken chain of causality. Pool balls bouncing off the bumpers creating the infinite complexity of reality.
So where does that leave us? In a boundlessly uncontrollable random world where our own actions, even the most well intentioned, can still lead to ruin?
Yes
But that shouldn’t demoralize you because if others can have that much of an impact on us than We can have that much of an impact on Others.
It’s no different than flattening the curve. The world will never be a perfectly balanced watch with everyone on their perfectly blissful loops but the struggle, the attempt to bring some semblance of joy into this world has an affect.
So what do we do? We try. We try to be kind, and understanding, and joyful. We try to think of the whole just as much as ourselves.
And that’s how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can.
Laini Taylor
Notes:
The world doesn’t care. That’s not to put down the world or the people in it but more about understanding that the machinations of your own mind have no purchase outside of it.
It took me a very long time to grasp how “everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story”. We’re all just words on paper.. we need to be careful what stories we tell ourselves.
If you want to read the tea leaves, fine; if it brings you some peace I would never infringe on that but it doesn’t mean it has any bearing on the world around you. Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, every one is going to die.
I love you
In a world like that love is a radical act because if nothing we do matters than all that matters is what we do, especially to each other, for it reveals who we truly are. From cold random meanlessness comes meaning
In the same way that your heart feels and your mind thinks you are the instrument with which the universe cares. If you choose to care then the universe cares if you Don’t then it doesn’t