Latter Day Sinner

I have an online friend who wants to eliminate suffering. All suffering if possible. I reject the idea that this is possible. She and I for instance agree that we live in a war universe. We also agree that war is chocked full of innocent bystanders. So my argument is that we would have to live in a different kind of universe to avoid all the suffering of all the innocent bystanders.

I am often amazed at people who judge God because there is suffering in the world. They want a world nothing like ours and imagine that they could have done better if the world was made according to their principles instead of His. The equal and opposite error is to think that God has already made such a world and that if we worship Him here He will allow us into a version of existence where suffering does not exist there. I reject both extremes.

Can we eliminate suffering? Sure, but I suspect our attempts to fix one problem will create another. She is a vegan. That choice is a privilege most people don’t have. I am aware that factory farms create suffering among animals but they also create an abundance of food for humans.

By now you know Ben loves his chicken nuggets. I am willing to make the deal with the universe that his comfort is more important than the discomfort of those chickens. If I could magically eliminate all the suffering of all the animals that humans eat by simultaneously reducing the aggregate supply of food I would not do so. I believe she would do so if she could, so we remain at an impasse.

Her paradigm as I started by saying is to eliminate suffering. That is noble but I think it is misguided. I am convinced that a universe with no suffering would not have anything else in it either. There is a saying that: A man who will not allow himself make any mistakes will not do anything at all. Such is a universe without suffering.

She flirts with Christian Gnosticism. She sometimes finds it compelling that the physical world is an evil one and only the spiritual world is a good one. This in my mind is just imagining a heaven that is unlike reality and favoring the world in that only exists in the Gnostic’s imagination. In the LDS tradition all things are a compound of the temporal and the spiritual. Both are essential and as near as I understand Church doctrine neither is superior to the other.

So I occasionally propose the paradigm that: The struggle is real and necessary but so is the gratitude. As far as I am convinced that there is a next world I am also convinced that it also operates on the same principles of struggle and gratitude. I hope to someday convince her of that, but I am not completely convinced there is an afterlife, so she doesn’t find my testimony compelling of what it will be like if there is one at all.

But maybe I am just being irrational. I have another internet friend who likes to point out my logical fallacies. What he rarely sees is that deep inside all of my arguments are an Appeal to Emotion. I want people to love me more than I want to win a fair argument.

Stay Awesome, Stay Weird, or Stay Away.