I’ve just been pondering, for an hour or maybe two — I can’t quite remember anymore as it’s late and I’m tired — about all the things I’ve done in my life. No distinctions made, just all the things I’ve managed to pack into twenty-two years of existence. I’ve stood atop cess-pool covers, barraging the myriad mystical creatures of my mind with my mighty bubble gun. I’ve fell in love. I’ve gone to summer camp. I’ve broken a bone. I had a dog.
I loved that fucking dog.
He died a few years ago, that mutt was my best friend. I know it’s cliche, but they really don’t judge you, he was always happy to see me even if I hadn’t been the best caretaker. I hadn’t been there much for the last few years he was alive. I’ve always felt like I let him down somehow. He wandered off one day into the woods and never came back — though I think that might be one of those comfortable lies my family has decided to tell me to help me deal with the fact that they put him down. He was old, he had a good life.
I loved that fucking dog.
His name was Randy, we played a lot. I talked to him, he listened. I would tell him my troubles and he would advise me that the proper solution was to feed him large quantities of human food, as it made him happy to receive it. By making him happy, I would be happy, and all would be right with the world.
I don’t know why I’m talking about him, this whole thing is half experiment in free-writing, half two-in-the-morning rant, half cocked and half shot-off and who the hell knows what kind of fractions are going on here.
I just miss my dog. I feel a little alone sometimes, I think we all do. We all have a friend we hold close and lose, a companion which leaves us for whatever reason. Maybe they move, maybe they just fall out of touch, maybe they die.
December seventh gets a lot of press. Before 9/11, it was the last time we had been attacked — really attacked — as a country. No one ever talks about December eighth.
I think it’s an interesting thing, that as a culture we are so good at remembering the initial shock of tragedy, but not the long pain of recovery. Look at 9/11, we are horrified by the images of burning towers against a cobalt sky, but we don’t think about the hundreds of people who were mutilated by the falling debris, the people who had (and have) chronic breathing issues from the dust. No, those people don’t seem to matter — only instant death is important, not slow suffering.
Look at Hurricane Katrina, people remember the shocking images of houses submerged and debris-filled-former-streets. People forget that, even now, New Orleans is a broken city. Many still have not recovered from the long term effects of the Hurricane.
No one thinks about the soldiers who survived the attack, the ones who had no cherry-red-lipstick "M" etched on their forehead by inexperienced nurses, overwhelmed by the gore. No one seems to remember these men and women who were too hurt to survive but not hurt enough allieviated from their pain by morphine.
"M"
Why don’t we react to this psychic stress? The 3000 who died in 9/11 — horrible, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died in the Second Oil War — who cares? The hundreds who died in Katrina’s onslaught — horrible, the thousands who died in the botched reaction, due to unsafe, unsanitary conditions — that’s just fine.
I recently read a quote from "A People’s History of the United States" by Howard Zinn (I fear I’ve just tagged myself an uncivilized radical, I am okay with this. I’m unkempt, unkind, and proud. I am caring, I am human). In which he talks about a man, another professor, he of Columbian (as in, Columbus) history, and the founding of the new world. This professor buried one line about the horror Colombus and those who followed him cast upon the Arawaks and other Native tribes. Slavery, Deathcamps, abject slaughter as livestock to an abattoir. He buried it in one line, in a page extolling dear old Chris’ virtues. Zinn responds by noting that this historian didn’t try to hide the truth, or lie about it, he just tried to make it unimportant.
Why do we seek to make the ugly things unimportant? As horrible as 9/11 was, it wasn’t that ugly. What was (and is) truly ugly is the flurry of death it gave painful birth too.
3000 deaths were enough.
Some say America as a power is fading, that other nations will soon take their turn as leaders on the global stage, I welcome the loss of this mantle of supposed responsibility (nothing we have done as a nation can ever be confused with any notion of being "responsible"). We are a broken nation, a broken culture, we have been for a long time. We think we are great but we are not. We hide from the ugliness, we hide from the bitter memories of our youth. We hide from the death, and genocide, and evil that we have done.
The Civil War
The Trail of Tears
The Massacre of Natives in General
The Corporate-Sponsored, Uncle Sam Approved Wars for Profit.
What are we?
Hiroshima
Who are we?
Nagasaki
We are a broken people. We are too hurt to survive, but not hurt enough for the cherry red
"M"
I have one thing to say, no one perfect, but as a nation we have gone far, there are few if any places that give a person as many rights as America. There is much pain in this world, most caused by the choices of man, but we have a choice we can let it trample us under foot, or we can arise stronger then we were before. We can choose to live with Hope or we can choose to live with despair. “Hope is fragile, but it is to kill”; We are where we are today because those of the days past had hope had a dream, hope in that which some call impossible. “Everything that is or was began with a dream.”
Comment by Thomaslee — December 16, 2009 @ 3:43 pm
I agree, I think we have gone pretty far, that we’ve gotten perhaps further than anyone else even, my point here is not so much that we’re a bunch of hopeless loons, but rather of the dangers of exceptionalism/ethnocentrism. The point is not that we aren’t good, or that we are bad, but rather that we are simply not the best (or worst, for that matter). In fact, the idea is that we aren’t really capable of even making such a distinction amongst cultures. Every culture is “good” and “bad” in it’s own way. Islamic culture is beautiful and deep and has a rich history, it has some good points — the Qu’ran is a fantastic peice of literature, Islamic culture is, in some sense — good. However, it has some _serious_ ugly parts, fanaticism and the islamocentric portion of the islamic world is ugly as sin (pun intended).
Similarly, the LDS church has it’s share of good things (y’all have some seriously pretty architecture, and the Book of Mormon is a decent read, among other things), and some not-so-good, and even ugly things, out of respect I won’t drag your skeletons out of the closet, but as an enlightened person, I’m sure you know what they are.
Atheism too has good points (I count all that cool sciencey stuff we support), and some bad points, while Stalin wasn’t what I would call an “average” atheist (as in, one of the kind I associate with), he was an atheist. I don’t think his atheism informed all of his horrible actions, but it certainly is possible.
The point is that we need to accept the demons of our culture — even to the point of accepting our culture as being dead, so it can come back into a newer, better culture. To borrow a biblical analogy, we are the potter, culture is the clay. Sometimes the pot falls, and we have to “drop” the pot back to a wet hunk of red earth, but that doesn’t mean we’ve “failed”, or that we should simply stop trying to make a pot, rather, we should start again, use what we’ve learned to make a _better_ pot.
I think that was the point, though — as I mentioned in the intro, this was a bit of free-writing, so it could really mean anything…
Comment by jfredett — December 16, 2009 @ 4:09 pm
I have heard and read quite a few things on our “skeletons”, but (at least the ugly things) they are usually in the form of Anti-Mormon writings and videos, and there is one thing I keep in mind these are written by people who hate the LDS Church, and quite a few of them are also ex-members of the church, and quite a few of them left the church because they couldn’t follow one of the tenets of the church or were offended for whatever reason. So I am careful and critical with what they speak of, I try not to get sucked in too deeply in what they say.
Comment by Thomaslee — December 16, 2009 @ 4:32 pm
At the same time, it is obvious that there _are_ skeletons. No one is perfect, and I can think of at least two major “skeletons” which are well known, objectively observable facts. There is a lovely Frontline documentary available which covers both of them, relying on both mormon and non-mormon sources and experts. The point though, is not _what_ they are, but _that_ they are. I think we can both agree that there are skeletons in every closet, which is the point of the whole thing anyway.
Comment by jfredett — December 16, 2009 @ 4:36 pm
You are right, but I will defend the church in that it not nearly as bad (or as weird) as some people tries to say it is. I have a question have you heard of the “Lizard Aliens Theory” that at it largest involves not only my church but most religions and governments of the world, it’s quite amusing.
I empathize with you to a large extent on the death of your friend/pet, I love animals and one of my main goals in life is to become a veterinarian and if that doesn’t work psychology. Sadly when I was young all I ever had was a few goldfish, sigh. Isn’t it strange that many times we only truly appreciate someone or something is when it’s gone, that we think everything will work out fine, but what does fate then do, it throws use a curve ball. But I know, at least with my family, that death isn’t forever, but only temporary.
Comment by Thomaslee — December 16, 2009 @ 7:09 pm
Oh certainly there are crazier things then mormonism. I think one need look no further than Scientology to find the trump card of crazy. I have heard of the “Reptilian” theory, as the dear Mr. Icke has put it. David Icke, Tom Cruise, all comedians…
As for the latter half, I’ve always found the argument of temporary death then eternal life interesting, as it seems to indicate that if I don’t get all my living in done now, I can just finish it up later. Even when I was a Christian I thought, “Isn’t it weird that a core tenet of this religion is that it’s okay to, in effect, slack off on the whole ‘living life to the fullest’ thing?” It wasn’t about sinning or, as I would put it now, doing unethical things, it was about this kind of faint encouragement to not bother appreciating every day you have with someone, because you’ll have eternity with them. As it stands, I think my relationships with my family, my fiancee, my friends are all better because I _know_ that someday they will simply end, and I have no guarantee that they’ll ever start up again. Maybe I’m wrong about the afterlife, but I always thought it was more — practical? Is that the right term? — in some sense to simply assume there wasn’t one.
In any case, the whole thing is moot, we won’t know until ex post morte.
Comment by jfredett — December 16, 2009 @ 7:17 pm
Now who said anything about slacking off? We will all have eternal live, but to truly have the best slice of pie so to speak, we can’t slack off, especially for those people who would like to live with their families forever; we have to work for it. At least that how I believe it. Next question what do you do when you aren’t doing school work, do you have hobbies (I won’t allow math to count), like as an example do you like to read, or build models stuff like that?
Comment by Thomaslee — December 16, 2009 @ 7:28 pm
Hehe, it was never said “out loud” — it was just this kind of implicit thing. Perhaps it was just me and my perception.
When I’m not doing school work — which is an invalid question to begin with, because I’m always doing schoolwork — I do math, play guitar, program, and play video games (roughly in that order). Now, doing math may not seem like a hobby (especially since I’m a mathematician), but typically I do math that is more personally interesting (I’ve been on an algrbraic topology kick, as of late) than professionally (in the sense of being a professional student) interesting (eg, homework). As far as programming, I do alot of stuff in Haskell, my other blog, lowlymath.net, details some of the stuff I do, but it is sporadically contributed too, as is this one. Recently I’ve been working alot on an Email Client and also some new software for editing newsletters like the Haskell Weekly News (see also, sequence.complete.com, where the HWN is published). I’m the editor for the HWN, and the current tools aren’t particularly awesome, so I’ve been working alot on that.
As for the other stuff, I’ve played Classical, Jazz, Blues, Folk, Whatever-other-style-you-can-think-of-here Guitar since I was eight years old, I haven’t played in a while (due to finals and stuff), but I like to think I’m pretty good. I play alot of stuff by Kaki King, Antoine Dufour, Don Ross, and similar, in addition to what I write myself (You can youtube any of those three people and find plenty of stuff, it’s pretty much all instrumental guitar, so it’s SFW).
As far as video games, I like slow-paced, grand strategy games, the occasional FPS, RPGs of all sorts, and I also have the internet-disease they call “World of Warcraft” — it’s typically in recession during the school year, but I have small bouts around summer and winter vacation.
Comment by jfredett — December 16, 2009 @ 7:41 pm
What’s your favored race? Mine is Blood Elves. I have tried WoW, and am most intersted in the Death Knight Class. I would probably mix it with the Paladin Class.
Comment by Thomaslee — December 17, 2009 @ 6:27 pm
I play pretty much everyone, strictly for horde (because honestly, who wants to be a human in a MMO?) I have a 80 (well, 500k xp short of 80) DK, it’s pretty fun, DKs are still a touch OP, but generally okay. I’m blood spec, so DPS, though I can tank okay in a pinch. I have a 55 hunter and a couple cheapy alts for testing out other classes (a mage, warrior, and sham). My DK is a blood elf, my Hunter is an Orc.
I play on Gilneas.
Comment by jfredett — December 17, 2009 @ 6:32 pm
Gilneas? I had barely started, and I don’t recognize the name.
Comment by Thomaslee — December 17, 2009 @ 6:36 pm
It’s a realm. WoW typically tosses you into a low-pop realm automatically when you start, I have (or had, he seems to have stopped playing) a buddy on the gilneas server/realm, so I picked that. In the character selection screen, above your character list, you can select “change realm” and pick the realm you prefer.
Comment by jfredett — December 17, 2009 @ 6:44 pm
I have a question, how long does a player have to leave their character inative, before WoW deletes the character?
Comment by Thomaslee — December 17, 2009 @ 6:53 pm
I left mine inactive for about a year, I think the policy is that they don’t delete (the amount of data involved is tiny anyway, so it’s not much of a load on the servers…)
Comment by jfredett — December 17, 2009 @ 6:55 pm
Good because I wont be able to play agian for about 9 months at least.
Comment by Thomaslee — December 17, 2009 @ 7:06 pm
If you are, let me recruit you, I’ll get some perks — whats your account name?
(feel free to email me if you don’t want it spread around the interwebs, jfredett at gmail dot com)
Comment by jfredett — December 17, 2009 @ 7:29 pm
What perks, and how would you use my blood elf magic-user?
Comment by Thomaslee — December 17, 2009 @ 7:35 pm
When you “resurrect” an inactive account, you get some free game time, and if we played together we’d get double experience.
I’m not sure what you mean by “use” your BE, I imagine I would do quests and instances and try to pwn mobs…
Comment by jfredett — December 17, 2009 @ 7:56 pm
Sorry, if that was the wrong way of putting it, I was wondering what use he would bee for you with you other characters, or will you solo him.
Also like I said I will not be able to play for about 9 months, so we wouldn’t be able to double up.
I’ll see what I can do, (a friend helped me put together an account), I’m not even sure I still have it the account information down, I’ll try having the account information sent to my email.
Comment by Thomaslee — December 17, 2009 @ 8:15 pm
I think we’ve misunderstood each other. If you decide to come back to playing wow, and I send you my player-code thing, then you restart your account, I get free play time (at no cost to either of us) and if I have a lower level alt and we play together, we get double XP and other small perks. So there is no sense restarting an account without getting someones referral code, since it’s no extra cost to either of us, and we get perks out of the deal. Hope that makes sense.
Comment by jfredett — December 17, 2009 @ 8:18 pm
Yes it does, sorry I couldn’t help.
Comment by Thomaslee — December 17, 2009 @ 8:42 pm
Is one of these skeletons the failed banking venture made by the early church, that involved Joseph Smith trusting someone with certain responsibilities, but the person uses this trust to steal from the members of the church?
Or Plural Marriage maybe, which is a case of the church being so persecuted, that the president had to tell the church that they need to stop or the members would have all been killed or put in jail.
Comment by Thomaslee — December 21, 2009 @ 2:24 pm
I meant president of the church.
Comment by Thomaslee — December 21, 2009 @ 4:46 pm
As I mentioned, I don’t feel right airing someone’s dirty laundry, I’ll point you in the direction of the Frontline documentary (it’s available online for free), but my conscience simply won’t allow me to expose skeletons that aren’t in my own closet.
My point was simply that in any organization, there are always skeletons, mistakes made, problems ill-solved, etc. It happens in the Atheist world, in the Christian world, in every world.
Comment by jfredett — December 22, 2009 @ 4:36 pm
Hello jfredett are you here?
Comment by Thomaslee — February 8, 2010 @ 11:43 am
Indeed I am, just busy. School started up for me earlier than expected, so I have quite a bit of work on my shoulders (on the order of 7 classes, 3 math classes amongst them). Thus my recent reticence. I’ll get back to posting soon (I hope) once I get into the rhythm of getting this much work done, but for now I’m on a bit of an impromptu hiatus.
Was there anything in particular you needed, or were you just curious as to where your favorite blogger went?
Comment by jfredett — February 8, 2010 @ 12:21 pm
Would you be willing for me to use the words of C. S. Lewis from books like ‘Mere Christianity’ and the ‘Problem of Pain’?
Comment by Thomaslee — February 11, 2010 @ 5:35 pm
Feel free, any quote is fair game to use; keep in mind though — it’s also fair game to criticize.
Comment by jfredett — February 11, 2010 @ 5:37 pm
And yes I was curious as to where my “favorite” blogger went, I thought you had either disappeared of the face of the internet or decided to stop posting (for whatever reason).
Comment by Thomaslee — February 11, 2010 @ 5:38 pm
I will, if you keep in mind he is a skilled writer, and a former atheist that knows how you think.
Comment by Thomaslee — February 11, 2010 @ 5:39 pm
Hehe, I’ve just got busy, this is my last semester. Soon I should be done, then I’ll just have a job (and then grad school) to do… Nothing particularly stressful about those, right?
Comment by jfredett — February 11, 2010 @ 5:41 pm
The Problem of Pain is a book where Lewis considers the problem of suffering from a purely theoretical standpoint.
This is how you pretty much argue “If God were good, He would make His creatures perfectly happy, and if He were almighty He would be able to do what he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.”
“The possibility of solving [the problem] depends on showing that the terms ‘good’ and ‘almighty’, and perhaps also the term ‘happy’, are equivocal: for it must be admitted from the outset that if the popular meanings attached to these words are the best, or the only possible, meaning, then the argument is unanswerable”
There follows a compelling picture of a universe filled with futility and chance, darkness and cold, misery and suffering; a spectacle of civilizations passing away, of human race scientifically condemned to a final doom and of a universe bound to die. Thus, “either there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit indifferent to good and evil, or else an evil spirit”. On the other hand, “if the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator? […] The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have been ground for religion: it must always have been something in spite of which religion, acquired from a different source, was held”.
This I got here http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0032.html Please read it will give you the bases for the book, and prepare you a bit, also if you have time, which I doubt, read the book itself.
Comment by Thomaslee — February 11, 2010 @ 5:53 pm
There is also this, the introductory for The Problem of Pain, just click next after reading first page, and continue until excerpt of introductory ends.
http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books/product_slideshow?sku=2969X&actual_sku=2969X&slide=5&action=Previous
Comment by Thomaslee — February 11, 2010 @ 6:03 pm
I bet your stressed.
Comment by Thomaslee — February 11, 2010 @ 6:08 pm
And here’s the complete book.
http://books.google.com/books?id=hZykVqpl1iIC&lpg=PA374&ots=dgWGDACBRj&dq=about%20nature%20which%20the%20progress%20of%20science%20has%20since%20dispelled.%20For%20centuries%2C%20during%20which%20all%20men%20believed%2C%20the%20nightmare%20size%20and%20emptiness%20of%20the%20universe%20was%20already%20known.%20You%20will%20read%20in%20some%20books%20that%20the%20men%20of%20the%20Middle%20Ages%20thought%20the%20Earth%20flat%20and%20the%20stars%20near%2C%20but%20that%20is%20a%20lie.%20Ptolemy%20had%20told%20them%20that%20the%20Earth%20was%20a%20mathematical%20point%20without%20size%20in%20relation%20to%20the%20distance%20of%20the%20fixed%20stars%20%E2%80%94%20a%20distance%20which%20one%20medieval%20popular%20text%20estimates%20as%20a%20hundred%20and%20seventeen%20million%20miles.%20And%20in%20times%20yet%20earlier%2C%20even%20from%20the%20beginnings%2C%20men%20must%20have%20got%20the%20same%20sense%20of%20hostile%20immensity%20from%20a%20more%20obvious%20source.%20To%20prehistoricman%20the%20neighbouring%20forest%20must%20have%20been%20infinite%20enough%2C%20and&pg=PP10#v=onepage&q=&f=true
Comment by Thomaslee — February 11, 2010 @ 6:10 pm
Sorry for so much posting.
Comment by Thomaslee — February 11, 2010 @ 6:11 pm
Stress is a woefully inaccurate word for the experience I am currently undergoing. I’ve read some C.S. Lewis before, while I’m not convinced by his arguments, he is an interesting read. I don’t know if I’ve read the Problem of Pain before, but I have read Mere Christianity (albeit a long time ago). I’ll have to get them on my kindle.
The fundamental issue is, the arguments I made follow from the axioms I laid out, any argument C.S. makes will necessarily be from a different set of axioms. Via my axioms (which codify my view of reality), the proof is unassailable (unless it is flawed) — so in a sense, any argument he makes is by it’s nature inapplicable.
That said, it’s fun to read other points of view, and see how they stand up within they’re own process theological/philosophical frameworks.
Comment by jfredett — February 11, 2010 @ 6:14 pm
That’s a cop out! What should matter is his axioms make logical sense, and shows evidence for the potential proof of his (and the Christian world’s) ideas. Just about every argument one can make to disprove the idea of God, and later the Christian religion itself, he counters in a logical and rational way. How far along in the reading are you anyway?
Comment by Thomaslee — March 26, 2010 @ 6:48 pm
I am not, currently, reading any C.S., because I have far more pressing things to deal with then that. Further, you assume that his axioms do make logical sense, since I do not know them, I cannot tell for sure whether they do or don’t, perhaps they do not, then his ideas are flawed. My point was that his theory doesn’t apply to _my own_, that is, any argument he makes stands separate from any theory I make, unless his and my axioms are the same (up to isomorphism, at least). It is a misconception to assume I meant that his arguments were irrelevant because they were not based on my axioms, perhaps I was unclear.
Thus, it was not a cop out. In fact, I am saying _exactly_ what you are saying, his reasoning stands alone. His reasoning cannot affect mine unless it is based in the same theory as mine, since it is likely not, then I cannot judge his work based on my theory.
I agree, it is easy to construct a theory to prove anything, however, it is hard to produce a _cogent_ theory to prove something. The benefit of my theory is that it is cogent, the axioms are obvious facts — logic _does_ work, science _does_ work. I should qualify, they are obvious to me, and I think obvious to any rational person with a scientific outlook. Since my axioms are cogent, and my proofs similarly cogent (eg, using standard proof techniques), then my theory (not, notably, that God doesn’t exist, simply that — if he or she did — that it would not be dissimilar from an advanced lifeform, eg, a “super” version of us) remains cogent.
So, the _only_ way CS’ theories could pose a threat to my cogent theory is if it is simultaneously cogent, based on my axioms (or something equivalent to my axioms), and indicating that a Supernatural God (eg, a classical notion of God) could exist. Since this is _terribly_ unlikely, our theories are likely to be _independently true_ (assuming benefit of doubt, that CS has cogent, valid proofs) which means whatever he says (again, assuming benefit of doubt) and whatever I say would both be true, assuming you accepted our sets of axioms.
As I said, though, I have more pressing things to deal with then argue against dead men and their theories, especially since, if they was a cogent contradictory theory (as described above), we would have _far_ greater problems to deal with then whether some silly man-in-the-sky was watching us. Namely, the breakdown of, y’know, all math…
Comment by jfredett — March 26, 2010 @ 8:18 pm
Could you at least answers this then?
According to Lewis, the problem of pain in its simplest form is as follows: “If God were good, he would wish to make his creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty he would be able to do what he wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either the goodness, or power, or both”. To answer this, he says, we need to look more closely at erroneous assumptions built into the words “all-powerful” and “good” when ascribed to God.
The “all-powerfulness” of God is often taken to mean that God can do anything. But, says Lewis, he cannot do what is against his nature or choice. For example, even God cannot make 2+2 anything other than 4. Having made the world to work in certain consistent ways, like the force of gravity, he does not arbitrarily change these whenever potential harm rears its head. Though this does not rule out what we call miracles, if God kept changing the way things normally operate in the world, it would be impossible for us to rise to genuine challenges or act with real responsibly within it.
Unfortunately, fashioning such a reliable world opens up the possibility of people hurting each other in various ways. We might be able to conceive of a world in which God would correct every overstepping of a risk or abuse of the free will through constantly intervening in our affairs. However, such short-circuiting of all harmful actions and evil intentions would involve the destruction of human responsibility and freedom.
Lewis then examines how people tend to understand “divine goodness”. He argues that if the difference between our human and a divine view of goodness is too great, we would not be able to distinguish God from an evil fiend. Also, unless we have some sense of God’s standards, Jesus would not have been able to call us to repent from our ways.
The trouble is that we frequently water down the meaning of goodness. We do this when we view love as merely showing kindness or as seeking other’s happiness. We need to see that for God love is “pure giving” and that ultimately for us, love is not about others’ kindness to us, about our happiness, or even about our love for God, but instead God’s love for us as sacrificially demonstrated in Christ.
Having clarified what God’s goodness and power are, Lewis is then in a position to address what lies at the root of the problem of pain. He says modern people need “a recovery of the old sense of sin”. Sin must be reclaimed from the way in which it has been sentimentalised, psychologised, and statistically relativised in favour of what is allegedly “normal”. At the root of this sense of sin is the abuse of our free will by disobeying God—what we describe as the Fall, which for Lewis was an historical event passed on by heredity.
Therefore much of the problem of pain stems from wanting “some corner of the universe in which we could say to God ‘This is our business, not yours’”. A direct consequence of our self-centredness is our causing pain to others. It is people, not God, “who have produced racks, whips, prisons, slavery, guns, bayonets, and bombs: it is by human avarice or stupidity, not the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork”.
In order to bring us to our senses, he says, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world”. Lewis does not say that pain is God’s direct judgment upon people, meted out according to how much they have offended him or others. Often it is something we bring upon ourselves because of our selfish actions, and sometimes it falls more on people who are more decent and caring than others. Nor does he say that God only calls to people when they suffer; he also calls them through their sense of right and wrong, and through what gives them pleasure—both of which ultimately come from him. In and through all such things, God is reminding us that the good things in life—indeed our earthly life itself—do not give us what we desire.
By the way, when the philosopher C.E.M. Joad eventually came to faith, he credited C.S. Lewis with helping him to overcome the final obstacle to faith presented by the problem of pain. So have many others since.
Comment by Thomaslee — March 30, 2010 @ 6:08 pm
Alright, so — if I am reading correctly, CS argues the following:
1. God is “bound” by logic (essentially, this comprises my Axiom of Logic and Axiom of Consistency, eg, Logic is infallible in the sense that if something has a logical proof, then it is true. In other words, a Consistent logic reigns supreme in the universe).
2. People misunderstand “Divine Goodness”
3. Therefore, God is all-powerful (for whatever value of all-powerful) and Divine Goodness works out.
The reason I skimmed over the rest of the argument is because the only part that matters to my rebuttal is the conclusion. CS argues that God is all powerful, but (at least from your summary, perhaps I am incorrect in this) never elaborates on the specifics as I did. Furthermore, he assumes the two core axioms from my proofs, the only one he does not take is the Axiom of Physics (or whatever I called it, I’m talking about the axiom which says that if God interacts with the physical world, it is in a scientifically consistent way — eg, that any god’s actions are fundamentally _naturalistic_, and thus explainable by the tools of science). Now, I think that this last axiom follows from the other two, but I don’t have a proper proof for it, so if we simply assume that the first two hold (as Lewis does) then my proof from before still holds, up to the point where the AoP is required, which (still) means that it is impossible for any logically-bound deity to be truly “all powerful”, so the problem of evil/problem of divine benevolence/whatever is still true — though perhaps vacuously — in that, since the implied thing is true (eg, god is not allpowerful (at least not in any proper sense)), everything implies it. So whether or not god is omnibenevolent or not is irrelevant, he’s still not all powerful.
For me, the problem of evil is a nonstarter, I actually agree with CS’s reviewing of the problem, namely that it is _people_, and not god, who cause evil. However, I would add, that it is _also people who cause good_. Thus, god doesn’t really come into the problem-of-evil picture at all, he’s a useless hypothesis here. In fact, in general I find simpler explanations for things where god is a common hypothesis.
By the way, just because some random philosophy came to faith, doesn’t mean he was right.
Comment by jfredett — March 30, 2010 @ 6:32 pm
I will let you judge if this is the case. Now for the details, this is what you will be debating against. This is the 2nd Chapter of the Problem of Pain, and if I understand your argument about the impossibility of Omnipotence. After this Chapter we will have Devine Goodness, I would suggest having this on a new thread. If you cannot post an answer right away, post that you cannot, and also an idea of when you can possibly post an answer.
DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE
Nothing that implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God.
THOMAS AQUINAS. Summ. Theol., Ia Q. XXV, Art. 4.
“If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.” This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form. The possibility of answering it depends on showing that the terms “good” and “almighty”; and perhaps also the term “happy” are equivocal: for it must he admitted from the outset that if the popular meanings attached to these words are the best, or the only possible, meanings, then the argument is unanswerable In this chapter I shall make some comments on the idea of Omnipotence, and, in the following, some on the idea of Goodness.
Omnipotence means “power to do all, or everything” (Note: The original meaning in Latin may have been “power over or in all “, I give what I take to be current sense.) And we are told in Scripture that “with God all things are possible”. It is common enough in argument with an unbeliever, to be told that God, if He existed and were good, would do this or that; and then, if we point out that the proposed action is impossible, to be met with the retort, “But I thought God was supposed to be able to do anything”. This raises the whole question of impossibility.
In ordinary usage the word impossible generally implies a suppressed clause beginning with the word unless. Thus it is impossible for me to see the street from where I sit writing at this moment; that is, it is impossible to see the street unless I go up to the top floor where I shall be high enough to overlook the intervening building. If I had broken my leg I should say “But it is impossible to go up to the top floor” - meaning, however, that it is impossible unless some friends turn up who will carry me. Now let us advance to a different plane of impossibility, by saying “It is, at any rate, impossible to see the street so long as I remain where I am and the intervening building remains where it is.” Someone might add “unless the nature of space, or of vision, were different from what it is”. I do not know what the best philosophers and scientists would say to this, but I should have to reply “I don’t know whether space and vision could possibly have been of such a nature as you suggest “. Now it is clear that the words could possibly here refer to some absolute kind of possibility or impossibility which is different from the relative possibilities and impossibilities we have been considering. I cannot say whether seeing round corners is, in this new sense, possible or not, because I do not know whether it is self-contradictory or not. But I know very well that if it is self contradictory it is absolutely impossible. The absolutely impossible may also be called the intrinsically impossible because it carries its impossibility within itself, instead of borrowing it from other impossibilities which in their turn depend upon others. It has no unless clause attached to it. It is impossible under all conditions and in all worlds and for all agents.
“All agents” here includes God Himself. His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say “God can give a creature free-will and at the same time withhold free-will from it,” you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words “God can”. It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.
It should, however, be remembered that human reasoners often make mistakes, either by arguing from false data or by inadvertence in the argument itself. We may thus come to think things possible which are really impossible, and vice versa. (Note: E.g., every good conjuring trick does something which to the audience with their data and their power of reasoning, seems self contradictory.) We ought, therefore, to use great caution in defining those intrinsic impossibilities which even Omnipotence cannot perform. What follows is to be regarded less as an assertion of what they are than a sample of what they might be like.
The inexorable “laws of Nature” which operate in defiance of human suffering or desert, which are not turned aside by prayer, seem, at first sight to furnish a strong argument against the goodness and power of God. I am going to submit that not even Omnipotence could create a society of free souls without at the same time creating a relatively independent and “inexorable” Nature.
There is no reason to suppose that self consciousness, the recognition of a creature by itself as a “self”, can exist except in contrast with an “other”, a something which is not the self. It is against an environment, and preferably a social environment, an environment of other selves, that the awareness of Myself stands out. This would raise a difficulty about the consciousness of God if we were mere theists: being Christians, we learn from the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity that something analogous to “society” exists within the Divine being from all eternity - that God is Love, not merely in the sense of being the Platonic form of love, but because, within Him, the concrete reciprocities of love exist before all worlds and are thence derived to the creatures.
Again, the freedom of a creature must mean freedom to choose: and choice implies the existence of things to choose between. A creature with no environment would have no choices to make: so that freedom, like self consciousness (if they are not, indeed, the same thing) again demands the presence to the self of something other than the self.
The minimum condition of self consciousness and freedom, then, would be that the creature should apprehend God and, therefore, itself as distinct from God. It is possible that such creatures exist, aware of God and themselves, but of no fellow-creatures. If so, their freedom is simply that of making a single naked choice - of loving God more than the self or the self more than God. But a life so reduced to essentials is not imaginable to us. As soon as we attempt to introduce the mutual knowledge of fellow-creatures we run up against the necessity of “Nature”.
People often talk as if nothing were easier than for two naked minds to “meet” or become aware of each other. But I see no possibility of their doing so except in a common medium which forms their “external world” or environment. Even our vague attempt to imagine such a meeting between disembodied spirits usually slips in surreptitiously the idea of, at least, a common space and common time, to give the co- in co-existence a meaning: and space and time are already an environment. But more than this is required. If your thoughts and passions were directly present to me, like my own, without any mark of externality or otherness, how should I distinguish them from mine? And what thoughts or passions could we begin to have without objects to think and feel about? Nay, could I even begin to have the conception of “external” and “other” unless I had experience of an “external world”? You may reply, as a Christian, that God (and Satan) do, in fact, affect my consciousness in this direct way without signs of “externality”. Yes: and the result is that most people remain ignorant of the existence of both. We may therefore suppose that if human souls affected one another directly and immateriality, it would be a rare triumph of faith and insight for any one of them to believe in the existence of the others. It would be harder for me to know my neighbour under such conditions than it now is for me to know God: for in recognizing the impact of God upon me I am now helped by things that reach me through the external world, such as the tradition of the Church, Holy Scripture, and the conversation of religious friends. What we need for human society is exactly what we have – a neutral something, neither you nor I, which we can both manipulate so as to make signs to each other. I can talk to you because we can both set up sound-waves in the common air between us. Matter, which keeps souls apart, also brings them together. It enables each of us to have an “outside” as well as an “inside”, so that what are acts of will and thought for you are noises and glances for me; you are enabled not only to be, but to appear: and hence I have the pleasure of making your acquaintance.
Society, then, implies a common field or “world” in which its members meet. If there is an angelic society, as Christians have usually believed, then the angels also must have such a world or field; something which is to them as “matter” (in the modern, not the scholastic, sense) is to us.
But if matter is to serve as a neutral field it must have a fixed nature of its own. If a “world” or material system had only a single inhabitant it might conform at every moment to his wishes “trees for his sake would crowd into a shade”. But if you were introduced into a world which thus varied at my every whim, you would be quite unable to act in it and would thus lose the exercise of your free will.
Nor is it clear that you could make your presence known to me -all the matter by which you attempted to make signs to me being already in my control and therefore not capable of being manipulated by you.
Again, if matter has a fixed nature and obeys constant laws, not all states of matter will be equally, agreeable to the wishes of a given soul, nor all equally beneficial for that particular aggregate of matter which he calls his body. If fire comforts that body at a certain distance, it will destroy it when the distance is reduced. Hence, even in a perfect world, the necessity for those danger signals which the pain-fibres in our nerves are apparently designed to transmit. Does this mean an inevitable element of evil (in the form of pain) in any possible world? I think not: for while it may be true that the least sin is an incalculable evil, the evil of pain depends on degree, and pains below a certain intensity are not feared or resented at all. No one minds the process “warm -beautifully hot - too hot - it stings” which warns him to withdraw his hand from exposure to the fire: and, if I may trust my own feeling, a slight aching in the legs as we climb into bed after a good day’s walking is, in fact, pleasurable.
Yet again, if the fixed nature of matter prevents it from being always, and in all its dispositions, equally agreeable even to a single soul, much less is it possible for the matter of the universe at any moment to be distributed so that it is equally convenient and pleasurable to each member of a society. If a man travelling in one direction is having a journey down hill, a man going in the opposite direction must be going uphill. If even a pebble lies where I want it to lie, it cannot, except by a coincidence, be where you want it to lie. And this is very far from being an evil: on the contrary, it furnishes occasion for all those acts of courtesy, respect, and unselfishness by which love and good humour and modesty express themselves. But it certainly leaves the way open to a great evil, that of competition and hostility. And if souls are free, they cannot be prevented from dealing with the problem by competition instead of by courtesy. And once they have advanced to actual hostility, they can then exploit the fixed nature of matter to hurt one another. The permanent nature of wood which enables us to use it as a beam also enables us to use it for hitting our neighbour on the head. The permanent nature of matter in general means that when human beings fight, the victory ordinarily goes to those who have superior weapons, skill, and numbers, even if their cause is unjust.
We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free-will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principle were carried out to its logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame them. All matter in the neighbourhood of a wicked man would be liable to undergo unpredictable alterations. That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behavior of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of the Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore, stable, world, demands that these occasions should be extremely rare. In a game of chess you can make certain arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature. You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you conceded everything that at any moment happened to suit him - if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board was not to his liking - then you could not have a game at all. So it is with the life of souls in a world: fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once the limits within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any such life is possible. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.
As I said before, this account of the intrinsic necessities of a world is meant merely as a specimen of what they might be. What they really are, only Omniscience has the data and the wisdom to see: but they are not likely to be less complicated than I have suggested. Needless to say, “complicated” here refers solely to the human understanding of them; we are not to think of God arguing, as we do, from an end (co-existence of free spirits) to the conditions involved in it, but rather of a single, utterly self-consistent act of creation which to us appears, at first sight, as the creation of many independent things, and then, as the creation of things mutually necessary. Even we can rise a little beyond the conception of mutual necessities as I have outlined it - can reduce matter as that which separates souls and matter as that which brings them together under the single concept of Plurality, whereof “separation” and “togetherness” are only two aspects. With every advance in our thought the unity of the creative act, and the impossibility of tinkering with the creation as though this or that element of it could have been removed, will become more apparent. Perhaps this is not the “best of all possible” universes, but the only possible one. Possible worlds can mean only “worlds that God could have made, but didn’t”. The idea of that which God “could have” done involves a too anthropomorphic conception of God’s freedom. Whatever human freedom means, Divine freedom cannot mean indeterminacy between alternatives and choice of one of them. Perfect goodness can never debate about the end to be attained, and perfect wisdom cannot debate about the means most suited to achieve it. The freedom of God consists in the fact that no cause other than Himself produces His acts and no external obstacle impedes them -that His own goodness is the root from which they all grow and His own omnipotence the air in which they all flower.
And that brings us to our next subject - the Divine goodness. Nothing so far has been said of this, and no answer attempted to the objection that if the universe must, from the outset, admit the possibility of suffering, then absolute goodness would have left better than not to create: I am aware of no human scales in which such a portentous question can be weighed. Some comparison between one state of being and another can be made, but the attempt to compare being and not being ends in mere words.
“It would be better for me not to exist” - in what sense “for me”?How should I, if I did not exist, profit by not existing? Our design is a less formidable one: it is only to discover how, perceiving a suffering world, and being assured, on quite different grounds, that God is good, we are to conceive that goodness and that suffering without contradiction!
Comment by Thomaslee — March 31, 2010 @ 7:56 pm
Firstly, I have no time nor desire to argue with this, I’ve made my point clear, CS’s theory either doesn’t apply to my proof, or is independent of it. Furthermore, arguing against parroted arguments is not the purpose of this blog. If _you_ have an argument to make, I’m happy to respond, but these arguments have been seen, argued with, and taken care of. If you want to hear arguments against CS’s theory, go do a JSTOR search about it.
It is _not_ okay to cut and paste arguments without thought, furthermore, I remind you that this is _my_ blog, and not yours, nor is this a class, you can’t assign homework. I’m considering this conversation over. I feel we have reached the limit, my argument (in my opinion) remains unassailed, evidently you are unwilling or unable to cease a pointless conversation. The _fact_ is, for me, my axioms are clear and present, my proofs are well-formed, and thus my theory rests on solid foundation. You don’t have to like it, you don’t even have to accept it, but if you take my axioms as fact, then you must accept their results (by consequence, no less, of those self-same axioms). If you do not like my results, then you must take one of my axioms to be false (or, at least, to not hold).
If you’d like to continue commenting, that’s fine, but come up with your own argument, or talk about something else.
Comment by jfredett — March 31, 2010 @ 8:52 pm
Sorry I haven’t been on in a while… I apoligize if I offended you. That was not my intent, I was just using what I had felt ‘fit’ the argument. I will not continue this discussion, though I do hope we may continue talking, what do you think?
Comment by Thomaslee — June 28, 2010 @ 2:27 pm