First of all, apologies for taking so long to respond. I got caught up with school stuff.
(happy birthday, btw. Did you have a good party?[hopefully with no illegal drinking, young man. (I said I wouldn't patronize you. That doesn't mean I can't tease.
)])
Homicidal_Cherry53 wrote:FinalEnigma wrote:
If what you say is true, then wouldn't this be impossible? by your standard, if somebody has never known love, then they could not know suffering by which to call the universe evil.
A person who has not experienced happiness would still be able to experience suffering. Milder suffering, however, would have little affect on them, as milder suffering would be much preferable to the much worse forms of suffering they have come to know very well throughout their life.
FinalEnigma wrote:
There are people in the world with a particular disorder that makes them incapable of experiencing pleasure, yet these people are capable of suffering. According to your axiom, this shouldn't be.
Again, my "axiom" states that an excess of suffering with little happiness lessens one's reaction to milder forms of suffering. People who have lead privileged lives often find it much more difficult to go through any kind of hardship than people who have dealt with hardship all of their lives.
Just so there is no further confusion, I will try to state my axiom, as you call it, as clearly as I can:
A great deal of happiness with little suffering will make any suffering someone experiences seem greater. A great deal of suffering with little happiness will make any happiness experienced seem much better (because the person is much more greatful for whatever happiness they can get). In addition to appreciating any happiness they experience, the person will also become more accustom to suffering. Smaller problems become much much easier to bare.
Love, as you describe it, is an unbelievably extraordinary feeling. If, for whatever reason, a person were to fall out of love, or, to simplify things, the person they love dies (not to say someone dying means you fall out of love with them), they will experience so much more pain than if they had not loved them. An evil God might make people love simply to make it all the more earth-shattering and terrible when that person is taken from them.
Not only that but, once a person has been in love, they understand how amazing they can feel. Knowing how much better you once felt can make a low point in one's life worse. It may appear that you will never be able to experience such a high again, and the rest of your life will be one gigantic low by comparison.
(I hope that helps somewhat. My first post very poorly explained this part of my argument, and, for whatever reason, the words to properly explain it just weren't coming to me)
eh? quite different from the original proposition, but lets work with this one for a while.
so your argument is that people will grow accustomed to suffering or to happiness, and that therefore subsequent suffering/happiness will have less effect on them. I am going to assume that you are still arguing that an evil God might have created happiness.
The problem with this theory s that yes, people do adapt. but slowly. lets do a thought experiment:
You are doing a study on pain and pleasure. two guys sign up to help out. You put each of them is separate rooms, blindfolded. then you walk in and punch one of them in the face(guy A), and ask him to tell you how much that hurt on a scale of 1-10. for the second guy(guy B), you send in a beautiful woman, who takes off his blindfold and kisses him passionately.
Okay, the next day comes around, and you do the same thing.
then the next day, and the next, for 28 days.(I don't know why the hell guy A keeps coming back. maybe you're paying the guys a lot).
on the 29th day, you walk in and punch guy B, the one who's been being kissed this whole time, then also go in and punch guy A. You ask each one to tell you how much it hurt on a scale of 1-10. Guy A, the guy you've been punching for a month, is going to report a drastically lower number than guy B. Guy B suffered way more from that punch than guy A, who was accustomed to it.
Okay, now tell me which guy you would rather be. The guy who got punched every single day for a month? or the guy who only got punched once? I think the answer is obvious.
But maybe you don't like that example. possibly it doesn't accurately reflect real life. Okay, lets use a real world example:
Have you ever spoken to someone who has lost a spouse or child? or listened to people who talked about them when they were gone? Now, I've (thankfully) never experienced either, but I do know how people react to such situation.
They become extremely sad and depressed. They grieve. But after a while something strange happens. They come to accept it, and then they look back, and see not the funeral, not the person's death, but the joy that person brought them.
Like a child with cancer. they have this means of reaching right into your chest and grabbing hold of your heart. When they die, its possibly the saddest thing in the world. But the people who knew them, they don't say "oh, I wish I'd never met him/her. they brought me so much suffering!" they say "it was a great blessing to know him/her for the little time he/she had. he/she really touched my life."
But what about people who work with that kind of sadness all the time? people with continuous exposure to such great suffering? In the medical profession, pediatric oncology has the highest burn out rate of all fields. The continuous exposure to such great suffering to the point where it overwhelms YOUR life, and YOU get no happiness because you are so depressed over the last beautiful, tragic child that died while you were caring for them, eventually takes over. Suicide rates are high among pediatric oncologists as well.
So we know then, that occasional exposure to suffering does not cause nearly the level of depression that continuous exposure does. people do not simply adapt to tremendous suffering like that. It compounds and can eventually overwhelms them.
And here's my last point on this one: if your theory is correct, that we become accustomed to suffering and it then affects us less, and that an evil God might create happiness so that when we do feel suffering it is worse,
So, that means happiness must necessarily cause us to suffer more, therefore, the best possible way to lead our lives, would be to seek out as much suffering as we possibly can, and avoid like the plague any happiness.
We know that happiness will only increase our capacity for suffering(since that's what the evil God designed it for), so we should do as much as we can to avoid ever being happy, because that way, we will suffer less.
If this is not true, if we should seek out happiness because well, it makes us happy, then an evil God creating happiness so that we could suffer more was a mistake, and a failure.
So, will you now do your damdest to become depressed and unhappy all the time? I intend to continue seeking happiness, myself, I'd much rather avoid going back to when all I knew was depression.
FinalEnigma wrote:
We have had this relationship for...almost two years now I believe. I knew her for a year or two before that. I have had time for the initial newness to wear off - I am not some teenager with puppy love, or a man obsessed with a woman, only for the fire to cool later. We are right.
Four years does not mean your relationship will last forever (God, my post is so negative
). You just can't know if or when your relationship will end and how you will feel about it once it ends (I admit, I'm not in a very good position to scrutinize your relationship, but time can drastically change the way in which you view things).
Yes, of course. And neither of us can speak to what it will be like years from now. and no worries about your apparent negativity, me bringing my beloved into this pretty much forced you to be negative about it. And don't worry - I am of the opinion that debating some aspect of the other debater or their personal life is wrong(it is against the rules, too), unless that debater brings it up first as an example. Then it necessarily becomes fair game for others to discuss(within the context of that thread of course), so no need to feel uncomfortable talking about my beloved. I won't get upset with you unless you go insulting her(so please don't, even jokingly).
Irrelevant. Some portion of people who experience love of some(I will not judge, but am skeptical) proportion behave in a particular manner. This does not invalidate the entire group of people who have experienced love. I said that people are capable of feeling love such as I feel. Not that everyone who loves will be the same as myself. There obviously are degrees, and differences.
So what is the love you experience? Can you define it so I know what "love" means in the context of this topic?
You ask me to define love?*laughs* Love is a feeling. an overwhelming feeling of joy, simply because the other person exists. its a deep and abiding respect for another individual. Love is what fills you to the brim with such joy that nothing else can find it's way in. Love is when you walk into a store and think first about how she would like that shirt on you(or off of you.
), and only second about how you like it. Love is that perfect moment when the sun rises over the ocean and the world stops, frozen between heartbeats and you could live there forever, and love is when you get off the plane and see her for the first time, and she takes your breath away, and you would swear that you stood there for an hour.
Poets have been trying to define love since the inception of language, You'll have to give me a few years to work on it.
Does it seem logical that the kind of love you experience makes people basically immune to suicide? Things such as chemical imbalances can make a person's mind into a prison from which they do not see any escape. Love will not save them in a place that is as bleak and hopeless as this.
To me? Quite so. it did. Love did save me from just such a bleak and hopeless place. In people who are depressed, the chemical imbalance is always there. in some people it's the cause, in others it's a result, which turns into a cause and keeps them stuck in their depression. That's why drugs work. they try to fix the imbalance so the person can function, while they take care of the initial cause through therapy or whatever, and eventually no longer need the drugs.
But love - there are degrees of love, and there are degrees of depression. Love releases chemicals in the brain, so does depression. If love is releasing happy-chemicals and sitting you solidly on cloud nine, you can't be depressed. Its true. Back when depression still had a hold on me, my worst times were late at night, lying in bed. But I could think of her, and it didn't matter. Nothing could, or can, touch how she makes me feel. It's just a great happiness that wells up and fills your chest, and you smile and curl up, and drift happily off to sleep.
I was assuming a standard definition of God. I admit, some alien could have created the human race with the intent to watch them suffer, but screwed up and allowed us to love. However, this would not be a God, merely an alien, and this would be ridiculously improbable. I would not bank on this theory.
The Bible states that God made us in his image, so it is within the standard definition of God to assume that God bares similarities to us. Is it not possible that among these similarities is the fact that God is not perfect?
Yes, the bible so states, but first, that statement is so vague as to be meaningless. It could mean that we physically look like God, it could mean that we are capable of love and hate, like God, it could mean nearly anything, but I think it would be hard pressed to mean that he made us imperfectly. "Oh, the baby is just the image of his father, they are both so imperfect!"
And second, when did we start assuming the bible? I thought we were talking about possibilities, not locking ourselves into something to narrow as assuming the bible was true. Be adventurous! play with philosophy itself, stand on your own feet rather than someone else's(even if it is God's
).
As before, I will not into the question of whether a good god is possible, but I will say that such things do not eliminate the possibility of a neutral or A-moral God. Either one seems quite possible by such standards.
I understand that it is only up to you to disprove an evil God, however, this alien civilization had many great things, but was evil just because of one terrible thing. Many terrible things exist in this world, so, because of those alone, God should be considered evil. Any good things he put into the world do not matter, just as the beautiful cities and lack of crime or hunger do not matter in the civilization you mentioned. They are evil simply because of the one terrible thing they have in their civilization.
Really? You would make such a snap judgment? Be careful before judging my alien civilization so quickly. What if they police the galaxy, preventing wars and saving millions? or offering the best medical technology to anyone in need? Are they still so evil, just because of the one thing they do wrong?
perhaps these good deeds edge them into neutral? or maybe, just maybe, they are outside morality. Have no concept of it whatsoever and are A-moral, like a snowstorm. To them, maybe 'good' refers to how yummy something is, and evil is a few meaningless syllables.
We do not hate others because of the flaws in their souls, we hate them because of the flaws in our own.
