Introduction

Cardinal George Pell’s opening statement in debate with Richard Dawkins:

“I do admit that suffering is one of the most difficult questions that a believer has to contend with and I myself have struggled with it. I think it’s a bigger question for the atheist to explain why there is Goodness and Truth and Beauty.”

All my sufferings will have been as nothing compared to the surpassing joy of the understanding gained in them of God’s holy Word- Romans 8:18

It is hard for me to imagine, or to write what it might be like to suffer outside the awareness of God’s presence, for whatever reason, I have never been in such a place. I do wonder whether the awareness of God is ever truly absent, for when one is helpless, many who have not previously considered it, find themselves praying to ‘whoever’s up there’. Consider this example from ancient Sparta, from a translation by B K Workman of the Spartan poet Tyrtaeus’ clarion call to arms on the eve of the second Messanian war written around 660 BC. Try as he might, the ancient lyricist cannot infuse any desirability to death. Although he makes a noble attempt, yet one cannot but feel that it is indeed a hopeless venture. There is nothing to be gained from not being around anymore.

“Young men, stand by each other and fight. Set no example of flight or fear, which bring shame, but make the hearts in your breasts string and courageous, taking no thought of your lives as you fight with men. Do not flee and leave behind the veterans, men older than who whose limbs are no longer supple. Disgraceful it is for an older man, with white head and grey beard, to fall and lie dead in front of a younger man, breathing our his valiant spirit in the dust, clutching his bloody stomach in his hands, with his flesh bared. Shameful it is for the eye and dreadful to see. All this is fair enough for a young man, while he has the possession of the glorious flower of his lovely youth. Men wonder to behold him, and women love him while he lives, and his death as he falls in the front of rank is noble. But let a man press on and suffer hardship with both feet firmly planted on the ground, biting his lips to stifle the pain.”

Free Will and the Source of Human Suffering:
I remember the time when I was a little’ un and raining punches on the back of one of my rather sturdy uncles in Kerala. “You’ll only hurt yourself!” he growled playfully back at me. Isn’t it true that men who attack God, his teachings, and his Holy Church, only end up hurting themselves, and in so many ways as to make life unbearable for themselves, even death brings no respite. Let us pray for them: “Pray for those who persecute you…”, just as my uncle had my interests at heart. As a side note, I did once try being like my uncle once many years later when I had my own 4- year old daughter, and she had decided to use me as her sparring partner on that day, but the pain was so great that I could not quite get the words out…

Free Will is nothing more than the ability to choose right and wrong in whatever state you find yourself. All men sin (except for Mother Mary, if you’re Roman Catholic like me). All the saints in Heaven, and all the saints that will ever be in Heaven, were all like us born sinners, but by grace, broke free from slavery to sin and were saved. The rest will die in the hatred of God and go to Hell. So suffering is caused by everyone. God wanted His created beings to be able to love freely and for this, they need Free Will, if love is indeed freedom. If love is truly free, then it follows that there will be those who do not choose it. It is in the constant exertion of one’s free will that the perfection of the lofty heights of love are attained. God did not create a sinful creature. He created a creature that was free to choose sin. Neither also God did create beings that loved perfectly, rather he created beings that he could teach how to do so.

Why Did God Create at all?

God created us even though He knew man would cause suffering. And even more than than that, He created us even though He knew that we would crucify Him. He creates us, inspite of the suffering that we will cause, and in spite of the Crucifixion. If God was to create a Universe without suffering, he would have had to create a Universe “without me in it”, so to speak, and the same for every other human being. He did create it because he loved me, as he loved every single other human being. God created a Universe with suffering because he loved me, the cause of that suffering. God created the Universe that crucified Him out of love, that is the authentic story of our Universe. Jesus lovingly created each of his torturers, though He knew that they would torture him, so that even they would have the option of repenting and going to Heaven.

Rom.8 29 For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.

2Thes.2 13 God chose you from the beginning to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth.

Evil and suffering come due to the exertion by men of free will. It is our choices that bring suffering into the world. A simple paraphrasing brings us to the startling truth: God chooses to created the world, but Man chooses to bring Evil into it. The Devil then would have no power in the world if we did not consent to his work. It is as though God, having made in the Angels a race of beings in a state of grace, yet some of which tended to sin, now in Man has created a race of beings to be born in sin that must strive for holiness. The demons created in life chose for themselves death. Now man, born in the death of sin, must choose for himself life. One rejected life, now the other must reject death. You would think that if there were another way for us other than suffering, God would have found it. Because this way was to cost Him His Beloved Only Son. An old Oratio goes as follows: “Thou hast made death glorious and triumphant, for through it’s portals we enter into the presence of the Living God.”

“Why am I suffering so much, what have I done wrong?” The question of course, is a non-sequitur. Although it is certainly possible to both suffer and sin simultaneously, it is not obligatory to do so. Humans have the freedom to suffer without sinning.

 

What of the ‘Unaware’?

Of course the issue of children who die before the ‘age of awakening’, ie before they can make decisions about right and wrong, and metally retarded people, remains unresolved and has vexed Church theologians for centuries. I would like to think, that this is the current view, that God takes them to Him nonetheless. “Can I not do what I want with my own money?” if you remember the parable of the workers in the field. A more objective example of this is the Holy Angels whom we believe that God created in a state of grace, not having to endure the temptations and torments of this world. Even then, a third of them le by Lucifer managed to fall away. What of the mentally disabled and of those who die as children? How many times, have I seen disabled children give a purpose the the parents’ lives. So many nurses who see these day in and day out say like yourself ‘surely there can’t be a God!’, but I haven’t seen one of these parents curse God. Rather those that do so are the ones that have able-bodied children! What are the temptations and the depravities that these children, by bringing together a family in loving labour so protect them from. What financial stresses and time constraints by imposing they do not save from occasion of frivolity and lisence. What love by engendering they do not, even in the godless bring service and sacrifice. These children I do not seriously ever doubt are in disguise God’s guardian angels that protect those who choose them to love. Those fathers who leave do release themselves form their aegis. There is no logical process which precludes God from showering these defenseless children with favour. Those of pagan leanings might ask how these children are different from animals. For one, many will be baptised. But all are endowed with an immortal soul and dignity of being human. Humans will never be food, and animals will never be stewards of Creation.

How Sin Enters

Human freedom is very broad: “Did God really tell you not to partake of the trees in the garden “, but even it has limits. Those limits are laid down by God “However,” Eve said, “we may not partake of the tree in the centre of the garden, or even touch it, lest we die.” To be God is to decide what good and evil is. However this does not work backwards: deciding what is good and evil does not make one a God- that, on the contrary is pride, and it is the Original Sin, it is precisely what the Satan teaches: “God does not want you to be like Him. For God knows that if you partake of that forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you yourselves will become Gods, knowing good and evil” (commenting on Genesis 3)

CCC 704 “God fashioned man with His own hands…and impressed His own form on the flesh He had fashioned, in such a way that even what was visible might bear the divine form.”-St Irenaeus. Disfigured by sin and death, man remains “In the image of God”, but is deprived “Of the glory of God”, of His “likeness”. The promise made to Abraham inaugurates the economy of salvation, at the culmination of which the Son Himself will assume that “image” and restore it in the Father’s “likeness” by giving it again it’s Glory, the Spirit who is ‘’the giver of life”.

Romans 5:12 “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned”

Psalm 51:5 ^“Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.

1 Corinthians 15:22”For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.”

CCC 403 “Following St Paul, the Church has always taught that the overwhelming misery which oppresses men and their inclination towards evil and death cannot  be understood apart from their connection with Adam’ sin and that he has transmitted to us a sin with which we are all born afflicted.” 404 “…Original sin is called a sin only in an analogical sense. It is a sin “contracted” and not “committed”- a state and not an act…. (409): “…By our first parents’ sin, the devil has acquired a certain domination over man, even though man remains free. Original sin entails “captivity under the power of him who thenceforth had the power of death, that is, the devil…”

There are passages in the Bible that seem to imply that Satan has authority on earth, like in Revelations “He was given authority for a short time..” And in the desert Satan says so specifically when he takes Jesus up to a high point and shows Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment. (Some eminent theologians say that he was lying, but how does one lie to God? I just don’t know) “I have been given power over all these. I will give them all to you if you will worship me.” Just as it was in the Garden, Satan continues to tempt us on to disobedience.

Job 18:14 “…he is torn from the tent in which he trusted,
and is brought to the king of terrors”.

Original Sin:

“We do not know how many of these creatures God made, nor how long they continued in the Paradisal state. But sooner or later they fell. Someone or something whispered that they could become as gods—that they could cease directing their lives to their Creator and taking all their delights as uncovenanted mercies, as ‘accidents’ (in the logical sense) which arose in the course of a life directed not to those delights but to the adoration of God… so they desired to be on their own, to take care for their own future, to plan for pleasure and for security, to have a meum from which, no doubt, they would pay some reasonable tribute to God in the way of time, attention, and love, but which, nevertheless, was theirs not His…” (Lewis, p.75))

“In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: ‘What are you asking God to do?’ To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary…” (Lewis 129)

Third one also needs to account for the fall of humanity. the current state of affairs was the result of humans electing to rule themselves instead of living under God. God desires for humans to live with him in an Eden setting and we elected not to and continue to elect that everyday we don’t love our neighbour as ourselves. Some have argued that they were not born into this world and didn’t have the same choices Adam did or Eve did. Clay Jones responds to this by saying that we didn’t individually vote to make that ahead of our race doesn’t matter because God knows who can best represent. Also if God knew that all of us would have acted similarly, he does no wrong in choosing one person to represent us. SO the current world is not what God wanted, but he’s allowing us to experience it in this dreamlike setting so that we can see the consequences for actions and fully see what rejecting of his lordship is like (…)

The Suffering of Illness and Death, it’s End:

The suffering of severe illness is nothing but the process of dying, and the end of our earthly sojourn. Jesus. when asked why a certain man was born blind, answers that it was so that God could be glorified through the sign of his healing. When the paralysed man who is lowered through the roof, when Jesus says to him ‘your sins have been forgiven’, without even healing his body. This clearly shows us where our priorities must lie. Rejoice not in bodily health, but in spiritual well-being. Didn’t Jesus heal everyone except Himself? Matthew Schellhorn, a British classical musician said in an interview on the story caring for his terminally ill mother when she was terminally ill and one the eve of a bill for assisted dying being introduced in the House of Lords, as reported in the Catholic Herald: “We lived the paradox that when there are limits to life, then the freedom is greater” and ends with “The life of a physically ill person is worth as much as that of a physically healthy person”. (I interject to say that if an ill person’s life is not valuable, then how can it be that a healthy person’s life is?) He ends saying, “Importantly, the person in question gains happiness from experiencing the truth.”

As for those who criticize God for allowing the suffering of illness, would they rather we be instantly burnt to a crisp by lightning once our time has come? That would not, for a start, stop people inflicting suffering. But how many families have been brought together by a loved one’s illness. How many have served mothers and fathers that they would otherwise not have cared for. How many have been forced to abandon the rat race and worldly pursuits to spend time with a loved one that was dying and thereby redeemed themselves. Is the price of physical pain not worth a loved one’s Salvation?

Training in an Eternal Discipline:

What God offers to man is the gift of eternal life, and to become His children. This is a gift that man never asked Him for. How could he have asked, he didn’t even know what this meant. “What no eyes have seen, what no ears have heard, what no mind has conceived, this is what the Father has prepared for His children”. And God doesn’t just want us to go to Him, God also wants us to be like Him! “Be Thou Holy, because I am Holy”. Because this is the only way we can actually experience the joy and splendour of eternal life. This adds, I feel, a third gift to the previous gifts of ‘eternal life’ (so what, eternal life!? What if we just end up being eternally miserable? Or even worse, eternally bored?), and ‘Divine Sonship’ (OK, I could go around telling everyone that my Father is so great, and enjoy all the perks, but I might get bored of that..). The third gift is to be like Him. Holiness. Surely this is worth some pain. Imagine the amount of discipline and training that goes into being a musical virtuoso, a top scientist, or a martial arts expert. You can have all the discipline and self-denial that you want, but it won’t make you Holy like God. But it will enjoin a certain inclination of the self towards God. And God will gift us the rest. But God is a Father, and like any other father, He doesn’t want His children to become spoilt brats. Like a good father or the best teachers, he wants to train His children and teach them discipline. The gift of Divine Sonship doesn’t mean being spoilt-bratty, sometimes-praising children. It means being His Holy children, to experience all the fullness of the joy of eternal life. Not to roam the streets of eternity like a zombie. That might be Hell.

God deliberately puts us into a situation where we feel the weight of our own weakness. So we are forced to call upon Him and discover how much stronger He is than we realised, and how much weaker we are than we realised. God doesn’t give us these tests to tell Him something He doesn’t know, He gives them to us to show us something we don’t know. Saint Gabriel of the Sorrowful Virgin, contracted Tuberculosis at a young age. In those days, a diagnosis of Tuberculosis was a death sentence. He merely thanked God for granting him a ‘lingering death’ as this would give him the chance to purify himself in preparation for eternal life. He died after about a year having suffered much, at the age of 25.

2 Peter 3:9 The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

Saint Ignatius in his ‘Spiritual Exercises’ says that we must ask God that we may also share in His suffering, but not by suffering that is caused by the sin of another man, which would sadden and hurt Him. Suffering illness would be one such way to suffer without requiring another man to sin (Getting mugged for example, would be not!) The way Saint Ignatius recommends, is wearing hair/ chord shirts, log beds, and using chord whips for self-flagellation, and many of the religious saints practised these methods at the time. Some of the saints, like Padre Pio asked prayerfully to be given to share in Christ’s suffering and were granted the stigmata, and transverberation and so on. They were often in constant pain and suffered loss of function from these wounds. There were about 16 saints who were granted the stigmata. Saint Gianni, who, when close to death from peritonitis, refused painkillers because she felt it would not be suitable to go before God without having suffered.

So who will suffer most? Those who sin most? Not so. There were two persons who suffered the most in the Bible. In the Old Testament, Job was a righteous, holy man who suffered tremendously. In the New Testament, it was the sinless one, Jesus Christ, who suffered more than any man. This dispels any doubt whatsoever that suffering is punishment. Suffering brings purification. Purification from our sins? No, that’s forgiveness. Purification of our sinful nature. Purification to attain Holiness. Thank God for the opportunity to suffer in His name, that you may feel His presence closer, and more than ever. When we suffer in Jesus’ name, all worldly temptations fall away and we are closest to God. This is purification. Not punishment surely, but grace! Thanks be to our Lord Jesus Christ through whose grace and sacrifice, we have gained a redemptive value for our own suffering when we call on His name, and join it to His suffering on the cross.

Of St Mary Magdalene de Pazzi, it is written: “In 1604, headaches and paralysis confined her to bed. Her nerves were so sensitive that she could not be touched without agonizing pain. Ever humble, she took the fact that her prayers were not granted as a sure sign that God’s will was being done. For three years she suffered, before dying on May 25, 1607 at the age of forty-one”

Even entry into this life is not possible without the pain of labor. Why does no one complain of this pain that rings forth earthly life, yet they complain of the pain that brings forth eternal life. It g because it is obvious that this suffering results in a greater good, which is the birth of a child. Similarly, no one complaints about the pains of giving a child his immunizations, that pain of a painful surgery, or treatment. Women will rarely even complain of the pain of breast implants, or the more painful buttock implants, sex-change operations and so on, if it is perceived as being for a greater good.

Luke 23:35-45 NRSV 39One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding^* him and saying, ‘Are you not the Messiah?^* Save yourself and us!’ ⁴⁰But the other rebuked him, saying, ‘Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? ⁴¹And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.’ ⁴²

“When we have the desire to endure immense pain with love for God and untold grief for our sins and those of others against the Infinite Good, this makes reparation for our sins.” (Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena). God does not delight in seeing us suffer. A loose parallel is: Does a father ‘enjoy’ seeing the tears in his child’s eyes when he has admonished him? But he does feel joy when his child corrects an erroneous behaviour having taken heed to this admonishment. The path of faithfulness entails suffering. But the greatest suffering is not the thorns along the path. The greatest suffering for the ardent lover is separation form the loved one.

When it seems that the weight of the world is on your shoulders, do ask yourself:

Have you suffered enough to atone for the sins of the whole world? Then why exactly are you asking for your sufferings to stop? Rather you have not even suffered enough to atone for your own sins, and you’d be better off not having it stop.

Fr Regi Mani states that Jesus has suffered an agony of love for us, and we respond to his friendship by suffering an agony of love for Him in return. The aim of the spiritual life is growing in love of the Lord, not mystical experiences etc. Those are a result of one’s growing relationship with God. Peter thought that he loved God, but in truth his love for self was greater than his love for God (Fr Regi), although he did love God, but his love is not yet perfect. As Fr Regi Mani says When God gives us virtues to increase it is through the practice of those virtues that we receive the increase. So for humility in us to increase, we must me humiliated. For love to increase we are given to love.

When Jesus was on the Cross the onlooker said “if you are God then come down from the Cross”. Could Jesus come down from the Cross? Certainly! However Jesus’ great strength of love is in this that he stayed upon the Cross. So sister Faustina and St Theresa of the Child Jesus considered their tormentors to be their “great benefactors” (he reads passages from both diaries). A priest who was struggling to forgive is given a vision: a stream of water flowing to a river, however the flow of the stream is blocked and the waters are stagnating behind the place where they are stopped. Jesus says to him “do not consider that you are to forgive but that you are to bring to my forgiveness” (paraphrase slightly), “so also it is not our love but the Jesus’ love that we bring to people”. The practice of patience is in being patient with impatient people. We are given the increase of the virtue in the practice of that virtue.

St Theresa of Avila says regarding prayer, that if I was to pray if I was feeling good in my life, I never would have prayed…it is deciding to do, making the will to do, what we know is right, we understand what the Lord, and we desire it. He then quote the love of the Father in Matthew 5:25 “for he sends his rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous…” Pain is necessary in order to be able to express love. “Pain is necessary to express love”.

Suffering and Instrumental Good

Inspiring Philosophy from a debate on Youtube: “…suffering itself is not necessarily evil. It is often logically assumed that suffering is entirely evil and bad, but there is an epistemic gap between the two. As Richard Swinbourne says: pains and other sufferings are bad states of affairs, but it is odd to call them evil. For example when I workout I experience suffering but we would say  this is healthy and instrumentally good. raising my daughter I have to allow suffering so she doesn’t become spoiled (…) but such discipline is actually instrumentally good (…) going through these hard processes are instrumentally good. likewise allowing suffering in this life might actually be useful in soul building and allow us to mature into more enlightened individuals (…) a lot of the arguments from evil and suffering presuppose a consequentialist view of good: that God is obligated to bring about a result that reduces overall suffering and increased pleasure. but if deontology or virtue ethics is the correct theory of moral rightness then God may have other goals or internal obligations that must be achieved in order for him to be the good. in other words it’s possible it would not be right for God to remove significant human freedom even though that indirectly creates suffering as long as what is good is not defined in terms of consequences; namely increasing pleasure but actions. so we have to make sure we’re not presupposing a consequentialist view of right and wrong as that might not be the case (…)”

God Suffering with us

On Sunday afternoon, when it was quiet in the stable, I heard Reb Moishe pounding his chest in prayer. “He is perfect and dealeth truly with the pure in heart. And all believe that his work is perfect.” In the pits of existence, he still believed deeply in the Divine. I could hear the church bells ringing outside. Birds flew in formation in and out of our “fortress” with ease. I wished that I could share their freedom.

In “The Dentist of Auschwitz”, Benjamin Jacobs (available on the Nizhkor project)  having witnessed the brutal tortures of the death camps describes an incident where a starving man is treated mercilessly and executed for robbing some potatoes he had to load onto a truck and asks the question: Did God ever go hungry? This question is answered only by Jesus Christ, when he said from the cross ‘I thirst’. He had probably not been given anything to eat or drink from the time of his arrest in the garden after the Last Supper. This question would possibly have been going through the minds of many pious Jews in the death camps. “Does God know what it is like to suffer?” The answer was all around them in Poland, a largely Christian country. Mr Jacobs relates in his memoir how Christians seeing praying to the Black Madonna, a popular Marian icon in Poland, by the roadside as he was being driven off to the camps. The answer form Christianity is as reqounding as it is comforting:

“Yes!”

1 John 3: 2-3  ..when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. And every one who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.

God Calling

You don’t need to feel hypocritical about praying to God only when you need Him. God does not care why you came back to Him, only that you did come back to Him, as He clearly describes in the parable of the prodigal son.  It does not matter how grievous your sins are as long as you are truly repentant. But if you pray more now, and you prayed less then, are you not a better person now and closer to God just because of that? So then how can that be a bad thing? If your illness has actually served to purify you, what is there to despair? On the contrary, must not one be thankful? Because isn’t that the whole purpose of life? To purify ourselves to make us presentable to our heavenly Father when we stand before Him. “To present us without stain or blemish…”

Do you not think it possible that God sent you this suffering, if only to draw your attention to Him! Look at your illness. Even the Neurologists at Birmingham, who are state-of-the-art, cannot comprehend it. Pulmonary embolism, a stroke, and profound hypoglycaemia  and you’re only in your 40s. God sends a powerful sign, which is obvious to the discerning but to those who know Him not, incomprehensible. I do not know, of course, but maybe you had left God out of the busy schedule of your rat-race keep-up-with-the-Joneses life (I do deeply apologise if you were not actually leading a rat-race keep-up-with-the-Joneses life!) and He wanted to spend some quality time with you. Like any father would. And look, now He has you. More than He did before, by your own admission. Maybe He tired of watching you run from pillar to post like a crazy chicken is saying ‘Be still, and know that I am God’. He had to give you a stroke just to keep you still! Honestly, can you think of a better way?! It is not very different from how He called me to come back to Him when I was astray, only he sent me troubles, not illness. God’s plans are wonderful. They only require our ‘Yes’, or ‘Here I am, Lord ’ (From the Psalms), or ‘your servant is here, Lord’ (from Samuel in Kings) and then they always work. For our salvation.

What was Job’s mistake…to protest, to question, was it not? Do you think you make the same mistake? When you are depressed, aren’t you ‘not happy’? Doesn’t that mean you are not happy with God’s plan for you? (I mean his plan to give you Divine Sonship, Eternal life and Happiness, of course!) Shall I not say to you the same thing that Job’s angelic friends said to him? (My favourite one: ’15: 7 ‘Are you the firstborn of the human race? Were you brought forth before the hills?!, and from God, ‘Were you there when I laid the Earth on its foundations?’). And point to the thing that finally comforted Job. It was not any explanation of what was happening to him, because none was offered. It was the mere presence of God. For that is one of the greatest signs of love, is it not? When we make ourselves present to those we love. Feel God’s presence, for that will surely be enough to satisfy you also. Make yourself present to God. And then you will be ready for your inevitable recovery, like Job was. 

What does it benefit a man never to have suffered

For if God were to snap His fingers and heal you this very moment, what good would it do you?  Take the people who go to faith healers and get healed of cancer, and various ailments. What good is that really to them? Cancer would have killed them in a few years time, old age will get them in a few years more. If they have taken no spiritual fruit from the healing, they will benefit nothing at the end of their days. And no faith healer saves them from Judgement Day.  Indeed to all those who ask “Why does God allow suffering in the world?”, one might well retort: “What does it benefit a man never to have suffered?”

“Iwill showhimhow muchhemustsufferforMyname.” (Acts 9:16)

Christianity Embraces what the World Abhors:

I never fully understood the religious life. I understood even less the lives of the cloistered religious. But once I had my conversion I started to realise the spiritual fruits of their witness of their lives. As I carry the daily cross of family life, I embrace with rejoicing, both the spiritually enriching as well as the mundane drudgeries. I am mindful of the treacheries of evil spirits. And I embrace the suffering caused by that in my job which is separated from God. The Simeon stood on a pillar in the desert for 30 years? St Simeon the younger for 60. St Alypus only managed 57 before his feet gave away, then he reclined on his side for 14 years. So I think if them when I feel that my own life is suffering, and I am made steadfast, not by them, but by the same Power that gave them strength. Saint Maria Faustina of the Divine Mercies was once going through a prolonged period of spiritual desolation. She had been given by God an excellent confessor in Fr Sopocko, who was fully aware of the special graces that Sister Maria had received. But even he was unable to relieve her desolation. She says “Evidently God wanted me to give Him glory through my suffering”. Finally, the priest consoled her saying that in her present situation she was more pleasing to God than if she were filled with the greatest consolations. “It is a very great grace”, He said to her, “that in your present condition, with all the torments of the soul that you are experiencing, you not only do not offend God, but you even try to practise virtues..”

Think of those saints who suffered for witnessing to the truth and to remedy social evils. And think of those missionaries who suffered for trying to bring to people the comfort of the good news.

People would rather read books and watch movies about sadistic serial killers and supernatural demons, and play violent video games than read books about the World Wars,  the Nazi holocausts and large swathes of human history which are more terrifying by far. The horrors are more terrible, but the true horror is that it is real. The true horror is that men are actually capable of more evil than can be imagined of daemons. This is not actually true, it is just that we cannot actually imagine the horrors that daemons are capable of. The descriptions of the horrors of Hell are even more actively avoided as reading material. The true horror of these is not only that they are real, but that they haven’t happened yet, lying in wait, unlike the horrors of the past which can hurt no more, except through mental scars.

We all feel the need to ‘season’ ourselves to suffering, faced with the inescapable apprehension that we will one day face it ourselves in uncertain measure. Yet we like to bottle it up in fiction where it is well controlled. It’s like preparing for a boxing match. The tougher your sparring partner, the harder you get hit. But the better you get. Or like preparing for war. Yes, you can practice diving on the grass and crawling in your backyard, but you get better if you actually train with the army.

Through many hundreds of years of innovation, resource, hardwork, enterprise, expenditure, and animal experiments, periods of accelerated innovation through the world wars, and now stem cell research from killing embryos, man has advanced medicine to a level where we have managed to prolong the pointless existence of the middle class, so that 1 in every 4 children today will live to be more than a hundred. That probably includes most middle class children, doesn’t it? Nobody’s quite sure whether to pat themselves on the back or not. In fact many are having to look for ‘get-out clauses’ like euthanasia and ‘do-not-resuscitate’ agreements. Because they know that just because you live longer doesn’t mean that anyone actually cares about you. In the old days, people got sick, they suffered, often they died. If you gave birth to 8 children, 2 or 3 died as children. But there weren’t as many abortions. Or embryos lost through contraception. Which one is better. To prolong life at all costs? Killing a few ‘research embryos’ along the way?

You have seen how the world is. People spend their whole lives trying to avoid suffering. They accumulate wealth, try to live in safe areas, take out medical  insurance policies, spend tonnes of money doing research into disease, kill human embryos and torture little animals along the way. Physical suffering is what man fears the most. We spend our whole lives building walls of security around us and our families, trying to improve our health, health insurance, all to try and avoid suffering, or to keep it to a minimum. But we still live in fear of it. In fear of the thief who may break into our house, hurt us, our loved ones, the mugger who may attack us on the streets, and so on. When we hear of war and suffering in Afghanistan, we say ah!, what a backward, barbaric people. I am lucky to be in England, so far away from the madness. When we hear of the tsunami in Japan, we say, ah! So sad, so many people lost everything, what lucky I wasn’t born near a fault line! And such nice people, so dignified etc etc. When I heard of the London bomb blasts, I lived in London, and was on a plane back to Heathrow. What luck I wasn’t already in London, I may have taken the bus! And the same day that I left Bombay, the airport was closed because of the terrible floods in which hundreds lost their lives. What luck! Then I heard of the rioting on looting in Tottenham and Enfield. I now live in Sutton Coldflield. What uncouth people! I am glad I don’t live in London anymore. The other day, my neighbor challenged a group of youths who were drinking and then urinated on his fence. They beat him, kicked him in the head and gave him two black eyes. He has a 5 year old son. He was lucky not to suffer brain injury. What luck! I knew shouldn’t have brought that house which adjoins the alleyway! I’m safe where I am, no alleyways adjoining. Might just take out a maintenance contract for my burglar alarm, though, just in case… The apostles and did saints did exactly the opposite, though. They rushed towards suffering. These saints are venerated only by Catholics. This philosophy is very Catholic.

Remember, the concept of ongoing purification itself is Catholic. Only Catholics have purification in Purgatory. Protestant denominations believe that they will end up in Heaven the second they die. Because Jesus won us that right by ‘removing our sins’. And we are saved by ‘Faith alone’, not works (sola fidae of Martin Luther). But Catholics seem to rejoice in struggling along in this life, and the more misery and suffering you throw at them, the happier they seem to be! At this stage let me make my position clear, if you ask me how Protestants deal with suffering-“I don’t know!”. That is not to say, of course that they do not seem to deal with it.

Appreciate the Enormity of our Sin in the Cross

Focussing on our sins, which crucified Jesus, we must seek Mother Mary’s  intercession for forgiveness, the very Lady who watched her son die because of us. She was at the same time, overcome by love for us, and willingly participated in this necessary work for our salvation. She had already consented to this participation at the annunciation, when she saw the excessive love of the Father and the Son for mankind, that he would take flesh as a helpless babe to save us, she was also overcome by this same love for us. So we are not asking for the intercession of an angry Mother, but a mother who wanted to save us all along, from the time of the Incarnation.

When I first began contemplating the Passion, it is natural to imagine oneself going through the pain that Jesus did, and feeling sorrow for one’ sins. Indeed this is how a Protestant must contemplate the Passion, and it is a powerful contemplation indeed. However when one contemplates the Passion during the course of the Rosary, one contemplates the sorrow of a mother for her child undergoing the Passion.  I find it impossible not to look out of the widow and imagine my own child at the mercy of Roman soldiers, and myself watching, prevented from helping. Mother Mary’s Son was more sweet and innocent than your little child, no matter how adorable that child may be. The point of contemplation is to lace yourself mentally in the person’s shoes in order to correctly experience and draw fruit from the event.

And the ultimate fruit of this contemplation is not an increased respect for Mary, who like any mother seeks nothing for herself, but what I will call a ‘Sufficient Sorrow’. When one contemplates the sorrow of Mary, one might feel a ‘sufficient sorrow’ for one’s own sins which have caused this suffering of this innocent Child. One might feel the ‘deep contrition’ that one is exhorted to feel in the Psalms. The point of the Sorrowful Mysteries is after all, that one should feel a great sorrow for one’s own sins.  Thus the more we love Jesus, like a mother would her innocent baby, and the more we are aware of his great suffering, the more sorrow we are likely to feel for our sins which inflicted this suffering on Innocence himself. This is the power of the Rosary which words fail to describe. This passage from the Dialogue of St Catherine of Siena sums it up. Remember, the Father speaks in the first person to St Catherine:

“Cut off pride’s horns and so dissipate the hatred you have in your hearts for those who do you harm. Compare the harm you do to me and to your neighbours with what is done to you and you will find that in comparison to what you do to me and them, your hurt is nothing. It is easy to see that by harbouring hatred you insult me because you violate my commandment, and you hurt your neighbours by depriving them of loving charity. I commanded you to love me above all things and to love you neighbour as yourself. This was not qualified in anyway that might say: if they hurt you do not love them.”

A contemplation of the Passion helps us approach an appreciation of the extent of our offence against Him. Compared to which a hurt caused not only to us, but to any human being is as nothing. The gravity of an offence is related to the innocence of the victim. For example, it is always more terrible to beat a child than it is an adult. This is not because, as is often erroneously stated that a child is defenceless. (Having a defence does not in itself merit a beating). It is because a child is sweeter.  And then when you remember that Jesus is infinitely sweet, then one starts to appreciate the extent of the crime. Even the smallest transgression when committed against infinite goodness, merits infinite punishment. It is only by grace that we are all spared this. I thank the Lord for my child that I may contemplate innocence, there is so much that we may learn from children. We thank the Lord for giving us his Child that we may contemplate his goodness.

The suffering that we encounter is neither an injustice perpetrated by God, and neither is it an injustice on his part that he does not intervene to stop it. Rather the injustice of our own sins, the sins that crucified him, the sins that deprive our neighbours, far outweigh anything that anyone might do to us.

How does one Pray when one is Suffering?

I can imagine that through the thick veils that mental exhaustion and depression must cast on your mind, you may think it is hard to make a meaningful prayer to God. Bishop Thuan of Vietnam, put in solitary confinement for 5 years by the nation’s military regime in appalling conditions. He was often so exhausted by the rigors of his incarceration, that all he could do in terms of prayer was lie on the floor and say ‘Jesus, I am here’, and he would hear Jesus’ voice calling back ‘Thuan, I am here’. One does not need to formulate elaborate prayers when one is ill. With the morning offering, one sanctifies all the hours and minutes of the day ahead, so that a person’s every action is a prayer. So don’t worry if you are too tired to pray. Make every second of your life a prayer. It’s not difficult. It is beautiful. God does not want to make prayer difficult. So don’t worry about prayer having to be perfect all the time. A priest once spoke about how when he was a child, he would gather a bunch dandelions (or some sort of similar weed) from the field for his dear mother, and how this would make his mother beam with gladness, although she had hay fever! God does not expect perfect prayer, then. Only perfect love (which is possible only through His grace). So do not measure your accomplishments using the measures of this world. When you have suffered for a whole day, do not for a minute think that you have wasted the day or accomplished nothing at the end of it. Sleep easy, knowing that you have accomplished more than your neighbour who has been to work 9 to 5 to earn money for himself.

I cannot, obviously tell you how to manage your day-to-day affairs, I cannot know, maybe only guess what responsibilities you have and stresses you may be feeling as the father of a young family. But a broad outline of the kind of outlook I would recommend would be this: Do not fret that because of your illness you cannot be the ‘perfect’ man that you have strived to be all your life. But strive to love perfectly. That’s all that God expects.

It comes down to this, I think, because although it was a years ago, this was the reason I first wrote about suffering. Because I didn’t think I would cope. The way to cope in the midst of suffering, is to offer your sufferings to Jesus, to lift them up to the Father. Offer from your own sins, offer for the sins of the world. Offer them as kisses on his bleeding and tortured feet as they gently  quiver in agony.

It’s become a bit of a million dollar question, hasn’t it? Jesus said “Ask and you shall receive” and to most people it seems like he had made the most reckless promise of any man in history! But if you find this all confusing, this is all you need to pray for. In terms of your sufferings, merely offer them up as a fragrant offering along with the merits of Jesus’ sufferings on the Cross. You can offer these directly to your High Priest, Jesus. In terms of gifts, or graces ask for the gift to love more, and ask for the gift to persevere in this love until your death. You can as these directly from his Mother, who is full of Grace.

“Complain as little as possible of the wrongs you suffer; for, commonly speaking, he that complains sins, because self-love magnifies the injuries we suffer, and makes us believe them greater than they really are.”

(Plaignes vous le moins que vous pourres des tortz qui vous seront faitz ; car c’est chose certaine que pour l’ordinaire, qui se plaint peche, d’autant que l’amour propre nous fait tous-jours ressentir les injures plus grandes qu’elles ne sont) —St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622), Introduction to a Devout Life, III, 3.

“When assaulted by any vice we must embrace, to the extent able, the practice of the contrary virtue.” —St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622), Introduction to a Devout Life, III, 1.

Rejoicing in Suffering: The Victory!

So I can only start with one of the landmark verses in the Bible:

Romans 5:3-5 (NRSV) ³And not only that, but wealso boast (rejoice in NIV) in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, ⁴and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, ⁵and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

Jesus Christ certainly did not seem to rejoice in his suffering at his Passion, or to give any outward indication of this. In the Garden of Gethsemane, He said “My soul is sorrowful unto death…” I recall a conversation I have with my two younger sisters. I was trying to point out to them how Catholic Saints seem to rejoice and in fact rush toward suffering. One of my sisters promptly said “But Jesus said ‘Father, if it be possible take this cup from me”. I was actually taken aback for a bit, but my other sister incredibly pitched in almost immediately and said “But Jesus was innocent”. We do not fully understand Jesus’s conversation with the Father at Gethsemane, and what made him say “My soul is moved with sorrow unto the point of death”. Sorrow is not fear, grieving is not despairing. And Jesus was not despairing, for he says to the ladies of Jerusalem “Weep not for me”, and to his Father “Forgive them”. But the lesson of Gethsemane for us is one of obedience “Not my will be done, but Thine”. And there is no doubt as to what Jesus’ advice to us is in terms of how we face suffering when he says “happy are those who are persecuted..” and “Rejoice in the day and leap for joy…” This is theme is consistently maintained over two millennia since Christ’s death by the apostles and saints.

We should rejoice if we are given the grace to suffer along with the Princes of Heaven, and the King. God does not inflict suffering upon you because He thinks it will break you. He will allow you to suffer because He counts you capable of accepting His Grace that upholds you. I think that the only merit that a man of Faith has is his assent, a mere ‘Yes’.

Romans 8:28 We know that all things work together for good^*( Other ancient authorities read God makes all things work together for good, or in all things God works for good) for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.

Romans 12:21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good

It was man’s sin that caused suffering, which for some will spell Damnation, but out of this very suffering also, for some will be fashioned Redemption. Is this not a marvellous exchange? We exchange death for eternal life. We exchange the stripping of our earthly possessions for the inheritance of an everlasting Kingdom. We exchange the torment of violence for the comfort of a Father’s arms and a mother’s bosom. We make no payment, we offer to God nothing that we possess for we possess nothing, and nothing that He needs, for He lacks for nothing. It is our very sin, and those of others inflicted upon us from which is fashioned our redemption. Injustice makes payment for Eternal life. That which cannot be bought is gained by that which can never be sold. I have here with me that to offer you which cannot ever be bought. You have nothing that you can give me for it, however in exchange I will take from you that which no one else will, and that which no one desires. I will take your suffering.

So that we might not love the gift while forgetting the giver, you united both in the form of your only begotten Son.- Dialogue

St Paul offers us a sense of proportion in our attitude to suffering when in 2 Cor  4:17 he calls our sufferings slight/momentary, and in 2 Cor 11:23 goes on to list the “slight/momentary” nature of those sufferings.

How Does One Die

The martyrdom of Justin preserves the court record of the trial.

“The Prefect Rusticus says: Approach and sacrifice, all of you, to the gods. Justin says: No one in his right mind gives up piety for impiety. The Prefect Rusticus says: If you do not obey, you will be tortured without mercy. Justin replies: That is our desire, to be tortured for Our Lord, Jesus Christ, and so to be saved, for that will give us salvation and firm confidence at the more terrible universal tribunal of Our Lord and Saviour. And all the martyrs said: Do as you wish; for we are Christians, and we do not sacrifice to idols. The Prefect Rusticus read the sentence: Those who do not wish to sacrifice to the gods and to obey the emperor will be scourged and beheaded according to the laws. The holy martyrs glorifying God betook themselves to the customary place, where they were beheaded and consummated their martyrdom confessing their Saviour.”

Although coping with death was my initial motivation, to cope has a sense of playing catch-up, and being reactionary. My aim though, is no more to merely play catch-up, knowing what I now do, but an outright victory, so I can say with St Paul “Death where is thy victory, where is thy sting?” Remember, when we pray in suffering, our victory is already begun. But pray also for the grace of perseverance in prayer for you haven’t won until the moment of your death.

One’s greatest fear, is, however that one will ‘break under torture’. A Templar knight relating the time when he had been tortured related “I would have willingly killed God to make it stop.” I hesitated to even put this on paper, as it is so terrible a thing even to voice. As St Paul says, we must approach with fear and trembling. But it is not fear of the pain that need be our concern. But St Thomas of Villanova discounts this saying, “There is one fear that afflicts me, O beloved Queen, and that is that I may one day, through my own negligence, lose confidence in you”. Don’t forget to recommend yourself to Our Lady at the hour of final Agony. As we recount the words of the angel Gabriel, ‘the Lord is with her’.  When she comes to ‘pray for us…at the hour of our death’, then her Son is with her too, He is always by her side.

Suffering is a mystery and we cannot hope to explain it fully. But when we suffer, we can trust God fully. Because on the cross, He suffered more than any man did. Surely He understood why it was necessary. That should be explanation good enough for any man, that God decided that it was right that HE should suffer.

If you remember nothing else of my presentation, but this one thing, then I will have achieved my objective. Every explanation for suffering begins with the Cross. This may be difficult to perceive in good times when we are ridden with millions of other worries and worldly concerns. But if we remember this one thing, then when we do suffer, it’s purpose will not escape us. Because when we suffer, we think more clearly, and worldly concerns melt away. For myself then I hope that when I suffer, I will cling to the foot of the Cross. For I am confident that it is here I will be comforted and saved. Everything is answered here, all of man’s confounded questionings and his frantic inquisitiveness, all lines of investigation end here. All the searchings of the soul and it’s restless wanderings here find their fulfilment. SSo do all words and rituals find their object in this complete abandonment at the foot of the Cross.

To further simplify it, for those who are not familiar with the Cross, so that I can make this explanation more universal, the Cross is a symbol of the sacrifice of love. The meaning of suffering is love. Love is the answer to every theological problem there is.

Why does God allow suffering? Because he loves us.

Christianity is not complicated as some people make it out to be. Don’t be afraid to look for love in every mystery. For every mystery is a mystery of love.  Trust in Infinite Mercy:

It is for a man to bear the yoke from his youth,

Let him sit alone and in silence when it is laid upon him.

Let him put his mouth to the dust; there may yet be hope.

Let him offer his cheek to be struck, let him be filled with disgrace.

For the Lord’s rejection does not last forever;

Though He punishes, He takes pity,

in the abundance of His mercies.

Lam 3:27-32

Know your enemy

The most frightening thing in life is pain. The most frightening thing about pain is the unexplained and unjust. If your affliction is neither unexplained nor your predicament unjust, then life is not frightening anymore. The best battle to fight is in a war you have already won. What I am saying, is that justice provides the explanation. When I die I do not want to hear “He had so much more to give” or “He was struck down in the prime of his life” as if death itself were an injustice to my debtors and to myself. The justice of my life and the justice of my death, all came from the Lord. What I had to give, was from the Lord. What more you need, you can obtain from Him. These clichés are not so much untruths, as they are platitudes. If you merely say “He endeavored to do his duty”, I will have had my rightful epitaph and high praise at that.

As I sat down for my flu jab at work a couple of weeks ago, I had an epiphany of sorts. My thoughts shifted to a certain Templar knight who, describing the excruciating pain he had endured on the rack later recollected blasphemously “I would have readily killed God if it would make the pain stop”. As I volunteered my shoulder to the nurse’s needle, for but a fleeting moment I experienced what it might be like to volunteer one’s limbs, one’s body to torturers, confessing the Name of a person one never even met. As the needle neared something inside me involuntarily screamed “God is dead!” I was horrified and instantly felt an intense humility at my own inadequateness to stand up for God on my own strength. Praise be to God who has given to us the examples of the Holy Martyrs to help us experience his power.

As those of us who saw the video of the White Tiger eating  the boy gradually recover from our jangling nerves (don’t worry, video not included), I would like to share this beautiful letter of St Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch written in prison while he awaited death by wild animals. “My love of this life has been crucified”. He’s very concerned that the whole thing might be called off…Praise God!

St. Ignatius’ Letter to the Romans
I am God’s wheat and shall be ground by the teeth of wild animals. I am writing to all the churches to let it be known that I will gladly die for God if only you do not stand in my way. I plead with you: show me no untimely kindness. Let me be food for the wild beasts, for they are my way to God. I am God’s wheat and shall be ground by their teeth so that I may become Christ’s pure bread. Pray to Christ for me that the animals will be the means of making me a sacrificial victim for God. No earthly pleasures, no kingdoms of this world can benefit me in any way. I prefer death in Christ Jesus to power over the farthest limits of the earth. He who died in place of us is the one object of my quest. He who rose for our sakes is my one desire.

The time for my birth is close at hand. Forgive me, my brothers. Do not stand in the way of my birth to real life; do not wish me stillborn. My desire is to belong to God. Do not, then, hand me back to the world. Do not try to tempt me with material things. Let me attain pure light. Only on my arrival there can I be fully a human being. Give me the privilege of imitating the passion of my God. If you have him in your heart, you will understand what I wish. You will sympathize with me because you will know what urges me on.
The prince of this world is determined to lay hold of me and to undermine my will which is intent on God. Let none of you here help him; instead show yourselves on my side, which is also God’s side. Do not talk about Jesus Christ as long as you love this world. Do not harbor envious thoughts. And supposing I should see you, if then I should beg you to intervene on my behalf, do not believe what I say. Believe instead what I am now writing to you. For though I am alive as I write to you still – my real desire is to die. My love of this life has been crucified, and there is no yearning in me for any earthly thing. Rather within me is the living water which says deep inside me: Come to the Father.I no longer take pleasure in perishable food or in the delights of this world. I want only Gods bread, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ, formed of the seed of David, and for drink I crave his blood, which is love that cannot perish.

I am no longer willing to live a merely human life, and you can bring about my wish if you will. Please, then, do me this favour, so that you in turn may meet with equal kindness. Put briefly, this is my request: believe what I am saying to you. Jesus Christ himself will make it clear to you that I am saying the truth. Only truth can come from that mouth by which the Father has truly spoken. Pray for me that I may obtain my desire. I have not written to you as a mere man would, but as one who knows the mind of God. If I am condemned to suffer, I will take it that you wish me well. If my case is postponed, I can only think that you wish me harm.

The greatest difficulty in time of suffering is not with believing in God or not. My greatest fear for if and when I am called to suffer for the NAME, is whether or not I will be brave enough not to deny Him. I mean as Peter denied knowing Jesus though he did know Him. I’m talking not of the loss of belief, but the loss of courage. The mere presence of suffering cannot shake one’s belief in God. And being present, He will surely supply the strength to stand firm. For we are wretched beings. But we put all our Faith in Him.

Freedom in Randomness

God creates in freedom, he creates what is really not God. Were it God, it would be perfect like him and it would be him, it would not be created at all. being given that freedom involves inherently a randomness in the very conception, because freedom is true when the choice is truly not “loaded”. So it is not as though God infuses pain into creation as though as an external injection into what could have otherwise been pain free. Randomness is a natural accompaniment a of a free creation. This randomness is inherent in and indeed constitutes all aspects of creation, right from its probabilistic nature of subatomic and quantum realms, to the distribution of noxious stimulii we perceive as pain.  An ultra-famous Indian Movie has a scene of teenage love that is burned into the minds of every single Indian.: a girl walking away, about to board a train, the boy stood on teh channel is thinking “if she loves me, she will turn back and look”, this gives rise to the most intense 15 seconds of cinematic history while he is waiting and commanding her mentally “turn! Turn!” There is a reason he chooses this rather than run up to her and beg her to put him out of his misery. Because when she does turn, it is she who realises that she loves him, he already knew he loved her.
That same story was told years ago in the parable of the Prodigal Son where the father stands apparently upon the mountain, willing the son to turn to him. You can hear the old man think “Turn!” The Love of  God is the only condition under which disinterested love is possible. If nature did not preserve the impression of being arbitrary, then we could say that conclusively prove that God existed purely from observation and scientific experiment. Randomness means that neither science nor religion yields conclusive results. There would not be any Free Will choice, it would be like choosing God because we had seen him.  

Does denying Heaven not signify also the denial of any hope for justice? and how do you deal with the enormity suffering once we have switched off hope? God understands that your feeling of injustice. He wants you to be comforted: that same world was unjust to him too. Humans’ iniquities reach up to the highest Heavens but Jesus breaks that cycle of pain perpetuating more pain, by showing that love cancels pain, even as he loved those that crucified him. Jesus showed we can love unconditionally, because love is divine, it does not suffer from human restrictions which lead to hate. God showed that we can love unconditionally in spite of injustice and therefore there is no need for the pain that you feel. Even linguistically, the remedy of indiscriminate pain is only unconditional love. Because of Christ, hate does not rob the world of love. So you also do not rob yourself of hope

It is probably a fact that the problem of suffering never really occurred to me until I had an atheist point it out. Dostoevsky states the problem I feel most clearly Brothers Karamazov, when Ivan asks: “If you were God, would you have created the world if even one single child should suffer because of it?” Now Dostoevsky leaves the answer unstated and lets the book do the talking, but I posit that the answer to this question is another question: “If you were God, would you allow the sum of all the suffering in the word, if only for the redemption of one single soul?”

A person can be said to be redeemed when he is able to freely choose to love. If love is freedom, then that choice must be free. Secular society’s attempt at redemption is freedom’s opposite- the prison system. Now the atheist himself argues that there is nothing in creation, in its randomness, arbitrariness, capriciousness and its cold impersonality, that could ever cause one to conclude God existed, and he is right, nature does not point us toward God in the manner of an empiric scientific conclusion. When we do investigate it scientifically, we find nothing but random mutation, natural selection and survival of the fittest. What we do not find My Little Pony, Bambi the Deer, Eeyore and Winnie the Pooh all living happily ever after with Tig the tiger Had this truly been the case, we would certainly have concluded that the world had been created by Disney. It is this very randomness of nature that preserves the freedom in man’s choice. It is because nature irreducibly preserves the impression of being arbitrary that man’s decision is not, and neither need it be mercenary, rather man can make an authentic decision in love.

What do I mean by mercenary love? Mercenary love is a favour given for a favour returned. God on the contrary in his Wisdom has made it possible for love to be truly “disinterested”. the atheist might well object saying “you Christians only love God because of the rewards you expect”, but they undermine their own argument when they equally also assert that no rewards can be expected. But God’s love for a single individual is indeed even greater than his own revulsion for sum of all pain and suffering, yet neither in unthinking nature did He think it fit to prevent, and nor in rational society, for the sanitisation of either would have precluded his planned sanctification of man.

Now I have heard atheists assert that a child is first an atheist, so also one will hear Muslims assert that a child is first a Muslim. Both of these are faith claims, they are untestable scientifically. All we can say with any confidence is that a child at the age of reason is probably confused. We are aware of two mysteries, both of the immense grandeur of nature and also of the mystery of life itself. A theist assigns the mystery to God, and in the absence of any received revelation becomes a pagan, while in its presence he/she becomes a Christian, like I did.

An atheist analysing the pattern of suffering mathematically so speak, deduces randomness. Now notice that this deduction has nothing to do with morality, nor with God. The atheist merely observes pain, both directly sensed as well sensed indirectly “sympathetically” in others, and from the seeming fact that it is non-discriminatory concludes that it is a random occurrence. He might then join it up as a coherent part of a bigger picture of the overall randomness of the entire physical system, and thereby dispel for himself the notion of mystery in nature. But not in a child, no child changes their word-view because they were conflicted by the suffering the world.

We must not however confuse randomness however with a problem, because randomness is only a problem when there is that which is not random i.e. morality, just like physicists do not see random probability as a problem, but rather as an answer, if only a random one. Neither also do animals see life as a problem although throughout their lives they are aware of their mates being eaten. It is, as C S Lewis states, only because of Christianity that pain actually becomes a problem, when morality becomes a reality:

“Christianity in a sense, it creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and loving…”

Why is pain inbuilt into a moral system? Once again I particularly enjoyed C. S. Lewis description: “..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 (…) demands the presence to the self of something other than the self. 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? (…) What we need for human society is exactly what we have—a neutral something (or “a neutral field”), neither you nor I, (…) 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…(souls can) exploit the fixed nature of matter to hurt one another.

Is it logical for God to prevent evil, and does wisdom lie in this? “No doubt Pain as God’s megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul. If the first and lowest operation of pain shatters the illusion that all is well, the second shatters the illusion that what we have, whether good or bad in itself, is our own and enough for us…” CS Lewis

To summarise, you may already have heard and rejected the argument of evil being present because of man’s free will choices involved in perpetrating it, because it does not explain the suffering of illness and of animals in which there seems largely to be no choice. I posit that it is not evil, but the randomness of pain, and that as part of randomness of the entire physical system that serves to preserve our free will. For if there is a God, it is not only that we love each other through a free choice, but that we are called to also love Him freely.

Emotion of Pain

The problem of pain is troubling because it is emotive, in fact it is traumatic. This is because a normally functioning human has “sympathy” or empathy (Gk: syn=with em= “in”,+pathos=feeling), whereby we re-enact in ourselves the perceived suffering of another. When I see someone in pain, I put myself in their place, and re-enact their suffering in me. Even though that it be only a pictoral depiction or even just a movie plot I have heard of, It feels like a hole has been drilled into my head for days, and I carry that memory with me for years. Sympathy or empathy of themselves are of no benefit whatsoever, in fact they can destroy a person who has witnessed sufferings, as in post-traumatic stress as seen in soldiers. Did Mother Theresa feel more empathy than any of us, or did she merely act upon it more. But what sympathy can certainly do, is cloud the mind and instead of producing in it the required altruism, produce the unrelated and unhelpful result of atheism.

But we can imagine a couple of scenarios by means of which this lack of objectivity can in fact be overcome. For example, imagine a person in the depths of suicidal depression. Were such a person told: “don’t you know that at this very moment there’s deer being eaten alive by packs of hyenas in the Zambesi” he is unlikely to be relieved of his pain. The state of depression is one in which the human person feels the full weight of human suffering and of the despair of human existence itself in an unmitigated manner and crumbles under it. This is hardly an imaginary state, in fact it is more likely that our own state be imaginary when we consider that the both fact that of our limited existence and the fact we live in relative comfort while a significant proportion of the world does not, is a happy state. So I was happy to be able to say something about mental suffering here so that it does not get left out of the argument.

Inspiring Philosophy in debate: “The topic is a very emotional and touchy subject and it is very easy for any of us to get very passionate about instances of evil because it emotionally affects us all. But in order to derive meaning from the issue we have to look at this logically and not rely on only our emotions. But I think that alone reveals an inherent problem with the argument because the objection is often  based on emotional standards of when evil was too bad for God to allow, and not based o nlogical parameters. A lot of the objections from evil reduce down to “Oh that feels bad I don’t see how a loving God would allow that, therefore God probably doesn’t exist” (…) How are we rating this beyond appeals to emotion.

Suffering of Animals

The suffering of animals? No one can tell exactly what the perception of pain is for an irrational creature. It could well be that their pain perception is purely pain impulses with none of the fear, despair that accompanies pain in humans. In human beings, every instant of pain brings the fear of the next instant of pain and the memory of past instants, and only compounded by the pain inflicted on any loved ones. So also no one can deny the possibility that God alleviates that suffering in a way known only to him. If the suffering of the world is truly so great,  do we yearn that it will be one day be set right in Heaven?

Let us examine pain more closely: I would say that humans are more cruel to animals than animals are to themselves, and yet where humans really exceed themselves in cruelty is in their treatment of other humans. Humans turn evil into an artform, for the appreciation of which one need look no further than the nearest movie theatre and popular literature. Human cruelty however can take less obvious forms of sins of omission, for do we not have a world where a significant proportion live in hunger and under the threat of war while the other portion in self-imposed denial of their plight?

Now the vast majority of the non-human lifeforms certainly do not possess sentience, and pain and pleasure are simply noxious and pleasurable signals respectively. There is no “I” or “self” that receives these signals, the primitive brain even if there is one is simply not complex enough to construct such an image. We do not need feel sympathy for the ant, beetle or praying mantis anymore than we do for electric circuitry when it sparks and shorts. The reason that we do, is because we personify things especially those that have a face. Our brains are wired to identify faces as one of the very first impressions of the external world when we are babies. Perhaps this is why we do not feel the pain of a damaged coral reef, a sea anemone or even a worm or a slug, these not being humanoid.

Higher animals might well have some degree of sentience, however to what degree this is, and even what it is qualitatively is purely guess-work, we simply cannot get into the animal experience. What we can say is that a human being is acutely aware both of the future which he can therefore fear, as well as his or her memories of the past which can fuel that fear, as well as add sorrow, regret, resentment jealousy and anger, and all of these again in relation to any loved ones threatened or harmed. My point is this, if suffering is linked to sentience, which it must be, then it is linked to the degree of sentience, which is vastly more developed in humans. For all these reasons, though animal suffering is duly acknowledged and to be prevented, the argument from pain should never be based on it.

Again imagine that your house was on fire and you had the choice of saving either your baby or your dog which one would you choose? Again imagine you were stuck on a desert island with people and animals which one would you eat in order to stave off starvation? I’m sorry about those gruesome examples but the point is that it is possible to see suffering and specifically human suffering objectively by putting it into specific contexts which cancel out emotional overlay.

Any Viable Alternatives to Free Will?

A critique is not really valid unless there can be shown to exist a workable alternative. This is the hidden fallacy in the atheist critique of religion, and I want you to notice that we never get one from an atheist. The question we put to them is: “If you were God, what you would do differently?” I’ve already, offered an alternative, which is for the world to be sanitized, and I used the example of the magical cartoon world in which as though miraculously no one ever gets hurt precisely because it is a written script. Exactly the same thing happens in a Bollywood or Hollywood action film where camera tricks and graphics magically come to the rescue of the good guys. What’s wrong with that? well, it’s a virtual existence which is programmed. Its real world equivalent which is rather more sinister is the Communist state which is utopian on paper and total disaster in every real instance, which is essentially caused through the attempted negation of an individual’s free will. I know someone who spent a month in the Chinese villages apparently on the lips of all is present like a creed, the mantra: “follow and obey”. China is in the process of installing its “social credit system”, you can look up what that is for yourself.  You’re basically writing everyone’s thought bytes like a script. We won’t even begin talking about North Korea or the disaster history of Communism here, but the book by Daniel Pipes is an excellent summary and anything by Solzhenitsyn is gold. All we really accomplish through the sanitization of nature is a factory production model, whereby every car that comes out is quality controlled. All of this is industrial terminology, and for a reason: it and philosophies like it belongs in industry, not humanity. But where does happiness come from in such a model, cars aren’t happy!

The whole thesis of suffering being eradicated from creation rests on the question of what exactly it is that God is creating. Were it truly God’s plan were to create atheists then the sanitised process works perfectly, but that doesn’t make sense. But Omnipotence is the ability to have a plan that works, not necessarily a plan that’s pain-free, and benevolence the ability to do that which is good for us, not necessarily that which is pain-free for us. Later I quote a beautiful passage from Lewis wherein He speaks of the difference in what it is to be good and to be kind, and perhaps what the atheist is expecting is for God to be “omnikind”, rather than omnibenevolent. We simply use pain as a marker because it hurts, although there is no imperative on benevolence that it must eradicate pain, this is a hypothetical claim and we have shown why the hypothesis does not work. Further, all pain is temporary anyway and it ends at death. God allows us to have pain, even though it hurts him to see us in pain, because its good for us, that is benevolence. God definitively ends pain at the end of our lives, and that is omnipotence.

Can it he still held that God is omniscient? Well of course, God knew that that He would create would kill him but he created it anyway, which also tells us of His mercy and love. Here again we can ask the question of “Why did God create”, and do so at three levels: the first level question is “Why did God create at all?” is answered by out of love” as we have shown above. The second is “Why did God create those who would do evil?”, we will show below that we are all morally deficient, and so the conditions of the first question are recreated: God would not have to create at all by this rule too. And finally perhaps the extreme end of that question: “Why did God create those that He knew would go to Hell?” This is an extension of the previous level and so is answered in the same manner, but we will investigate the “necessity of Hell” in much more detail later.

This amply answers the Epicurean objection. There are as has been shown quite a few assumptions that have to be made before it can be asserted that pain negates omnibenevolence. But there is no a priori reason why pain temporally is undesirable when viewed from an eternal perspective.

A Moral Standard in the Argument

An atheist assumes themselves as the moral standard from which the Christian world-view is criticised. This again is just a dry fact because you have to compare with something in order to criticise. The Christian on the other hand, accepts the inadequacy of any moral standard that man is capable of and the real possibility that a better standard might exist that does not in fact lie within his capability at all. In the closed world view of an atheist, man is necessarily the highest moral agent, by dint of being the only moral agent, but not so in the theistic world-view, not even close. So the atheist must presume that man is a finished moral product, there is no inherent difference between the morality of God and man, and that the best that a man can be is not less than what God is, and finally that were there a God, he too would be like an atheist, sharing his own local view of morality and happiness.

An atheist might object to this and contend “hang on, what’s the big deal about morality anyway? I know right, I know wrong, what else is there?” Now even an atheist does not seriously believe that atheism is a perfect moral system based on what we see around us in the world, atheism is not even a system. I will merely offer this consideration: there is no worldly morality that is truly disinterested. All worldly morality is loaded with self-interest, even the love of the mother for a baby, because in the human condition we cannot escape self-interest, and we cannot separate altruism from it. But self-interest is inherent to our condition of dependent living and contingent existence. Every breath we take is out of self-interest.

But if there is truly a God then he has no self-interest, because being eternal he is self-sufficient. And having complete lack of self-interest, God is morally perfect. The existence of God, the Goodness of God, the Happiness of God are all the same thing, God is Happy because God is Good, He would have no Bliss otherwise, He is Good because he is completely self-sufficient. So this whole proposal of “if there is a God, there would be no evil in the world” is based upon the assumption that God is good, and perfectly good. If the topic were “Does the Existence of Evil Disprove the existence of an Evil God”, then that would be a separate debate. It would also be a very short debate. So we are necessarily  presuming the Goodness of God in this debate which topic correctly stated would be “does the existence of evil disprove the existence of a good God?” or “Does the problem of evil prove that God is evil?” God cannot be evil for this reason that evil is illogical or at least a foolishness. But God being the greatest, then would be the greatest fool, and he would therefore do the most foolish or illogical thing, which is to self-destruct. So we needn’t worry about him. So we come to the point of trying to describe what exactly it is that God is trying to create. Now if indeed God is good why ever would he desire to create anything but the morally perfect, rather something like us, a moral defect instead?

It would be erroneous to presume that God had no desire that his creature enjoy the same bliss as him. And so it is safe to assume that he might want to rise us up to him not only in location (as it the common misconception in many world religions), but in “sanctity”. Even an atheist would not contend that he has infinite happiness, if anything, it is far more easy to prove that the state of atheism is constituted at least in part by a latent depression or sadness, given that the clinical symptoms of depression like a sense of purposelessness are exactly the same as the philosophical axions of atheism. But if there is a God then God does not have this same problem and God is not faced with extinction, so the latent state of God is perfect bliss. So if indeed God is God it would seem erroneous to presume that God had not desire that his creature enjoy the that same bliss that were his. But the bliss of God could only be enjoyed in the state of God since the bliss of God is the same as the state of God which is the perfection of goodness (we could for our purposes of understanding state that the bliss of God is “consequent” to the Goodness of God, as long as we keep in mind that in God there is strictly no antecedent and consequent) And so our creation is a moral journey, which involves pain. Here therefore we can face-off these two concepts of “sanitization” and “sanctification” to see them for what they are.

However if indeed there is a moral agent that far exceeds the morality of man then we can contend that there is simply no reason why our journey from lack of virtue to virtue should not involve pain, if only the pain of the loss of whatever it was we were antagonising others for. Increase in virtue involves the pain of loss at least of the loss of self-interest.

The whole argument therefore is based upon love. The atheist feels that it is due to a lack of love that suffering is not prevented, whereas the theist believes that it is because of love that suffering is permitted. The only difference is as to whether the view is local or eternal.

C.S. Lewis says: “it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator’s eyes. It is certainly a burden of glory not only beyond our deserts but also… beyond our desiring..”

Herbie McCabe a Dominican of the English Province he says “when confronted by suffering we are liable to two apparently contrasting reactions : we may reject God as infantile and as unable to comprehend or have compassion on those who suffer and are made to suffer in this world or on the other hand we may find as Job did that it was our own view that was infantile and we may in fact come to a deeper understanding of the mystery of God”. The introduction the Chesterton wrote to the book of Job where he says you know when God shows up in book 38 of the book of Job after all of these different kinds of dialectical engagements with these four men have tried to reason with job, God doesn’t come with answers he comes with questions that are even more agnostic than the ones that we ourselves have posed.  St. Pope John Paul says at the end of Salvafici Dolores, “…For Christ does not answer directly and he does not answer in the abstract this human questioning about the meaning of suffering. Man hears Christ’s saving answer as he himself gradually becomes a sharer in the sufferings of Christ”. Fr. Gregory Pine says(this whole paragraph from “Henry McCabe…”is probably from him, I’m not sure where I got it): “when we evaluate whether or not God is defective or guilty of neglects we need to be cognizant that God creates the very conditions under which it is possible for there to be a defect.”  (on Pints with Aquinas YouTube channel). No matter how terrible the suffering in the world might seem, if there is a God, we would not have any standard to compare him against.

Self-Improvement through Science Alone?

In reply to the contention that science through reason has brought about moral improvements to the human race I respond: In the whole o human history there has been demonstrably one single paradigm shift in the moral life with repercussions on all of life’s aspects. This was brought about by one Man, in three years, using absolutely nothing to begin, and finishing with even less on the Cross. For the first time a human being could have the conviction of one God to worship unconditionally, yet not in exclusion of the unconditional love of one’s spouse nor of one’s neighbour equally. Love which man could hitherto only sense to be eternal he could not confirm to be eternal just as he received the confirmation that he was eternally loved. Thanks to the philosophy that this Man brought, humanity down to even the common layman could now convincingly argue for that which not even Plato or Aristotle could convincingly on their own: a higher dignity than the lesser beasts and of there being a purpose to life.

So how exactly can Science claim the moral ground here, we still struggle to attain to Jesus’ moral standards through he preached them 2000 years ago. Few would say that they were even as good as St. Theresa of Calcutta, and even she would not equate herself with Jesus. Who in today’s word can say “blessed are the meek”…do we not celebrate loudmouths? and who can say “if you so much as look at a woman with lust you have committed adultery in your heart”…do we not in fact celebrate lust? Who can say: “ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” (Matt. 5:44-46) All we see celebrated in today’s world is revenge, there is not a single movie on forgiveness. If forgiveness is ever taught, it is as a therapy, to make you feel better inside and to heal your wounds and so on …and what exactly was Science’s plan for world peace again?

C. S. Lewis speaks of a world “inside which minimum decency passes for heroic virtue and utter corruption for pardonable imperfection (62)…If, being cowardly, conceited and slothful, you have never yet done a fellow creature great mischief, that is only because your neighbour’s welfare has not yet happened to conflict with your safety, self-approval, or ease…”

Unfairness in the Schema?

In response to the important question of why some persons are likely to be pushed into a life of criminality, and also whether some persons are “born that way”. There are some limited case studies which show that psychopaths have some differences in their brain structure and function, possibly smaller hippocampi, but I would urge caution in this matter because we could easily have a chicken and egg situation. We do know about a commonly used drug among women that causes brain shrinkage (Oral contraceptive pills to be precise). So if a child is emotionally deprived since an early age, or even if someone consistently makes bad choices it might be the case that certain parts their brain might end up being less developed. Some of the world’s worst monsters have had abusive childhoods. But whatever might be the case, we believe that God apportions justice taking all this into consideration, because from a divine perspective, we all have a limited perspective to do good anyway. We also know that in the depths of despair, on death-row, hardened psychopaths have reformed due to faith. David Wood, on YouTube, a convert to Christianity is a certified psychopath and he quite readily admits this on his channel, and that he had “several prison sentences” prior to his conversion.

So yes, there is a push to reformative prison sentences, but it is a shot in the dark really, there are high rates of reoffending and you never know if the guy is truly reformed, or he just does not want to come back to prison. It is only possible in affluent countries, which loe crime rates and massive resources. There are some Netflix documentaries that give a good perspective of this, same is true of the so-called “deradicalization” programmes in Islamic terrorism, its always worth a shot one might say, but failure can be deadly.

Anil asked about the question of primitive hominids, and the fact that some of their populations may have intermingled with homo sapiens and so forth. Again this is difficult, we are attempting to speak sense into a shadowy era of which we only possess a few scraps of knowledge, but I would say that a hominid species would have gained an eternal soul at the same time that it could know and worship God. Scientists think Neanderthals had burial rituals, based on the fact that pollen was found with some of the skeletons, suggesting the presence of flowers. Does this mean that they could worship? I cannot say nor can anyone.

Were we given enough reason to believe? I would have to say yes, I came to believe didn’t I? Obviously I can only speak for myself here. But only takes a second to say “Yes”, so I would say there are thousands of opportunities each day. Take the example of someone who sets out to commit a premeditated murder, there are several points in the time between the planning and execution that the plan can be curtailed as indeed it must at least occasionally be.

How those of other Religions are Saved

I exclusively preach the Christian faith, with the best of intentions, because I believe it works. God discerns the heart, and God is aware of any extenuating circumstances that may have prevented you from coming to the true faith. Love is the only compass for arriving at Christianity for as we well know Christ had nothing to offer you on the Cross, were his hands not empty? So when we ask “if there is hatred can there be God?” the answer is yes, where there is love. God looks at the heart, his mercy is not bound, he will have mercy on whom he will have mercy, and you cannot you cannot hide behind a religion no matter what that religion is, including Christianity.

“I the LORD search the heart and examine the mind, to reward each person according to their conduct, according to what their deeds deserve.” Jeremiah 17:10, Psalm 7:9, Prov. 17:3, 1 Thess. 2:4, Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign LORD. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live? Ezekiel 18:23 Say to them, ‘As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, people of Israel?’ (Ez 33;11)

Hell

In response to the challenge that religion only draws followers only through offering a sort of reward and punishment system. I now I will not argue against the provision of Heaven since going there cannot possibly be a bad thing. But what about Hell, do we really need this and is this a justifiable deterrent? Through, media control and corporate and trade law there is the cultivated impression that atheism engenders happiness for society, when in fact in the global society it has become impossible to feed the hungry sue to the necessity to arm soldiers and pamper to the rich and other “decent folk”. Hell is the same, Being a spiritual world, Hell also contains spiritual creatures exactly the same feelings. So there too “might is right”, and the more powerful and influential prevail just as on Earth, at the cost of the human souls that are unfortunate enough to be there. What protection there remained on Earth through divine providence, and Christian principles is no longer available and so there is no mitigating factor, like life in a Calcutta gutter without Mother Theresa. Because if there is one thing that everyone in Hell agrees upon, it is the rejection of God- on this issue spiritual creatures share exactly the same sentiment as the human atheist. Even in the death camps and Gulags on Earth there is hope of the kind smile and the caring word from fellow sufferers, and occasionally the light of love shines through brightly indeed like Maximillian Kolbe or a Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However in  Hell there is nothing but self interest, and there is no reason for these either. Lewis speaks of how on earth the one who rejects God “has tried to turn everything he meets into a province or appendage of the self.?”…so that in Hell, “…the characteristic of lost souls is ‘their rejection of everything that is not simply themselves’.” (Lewis PoP, 125)

Could you really conceive of a scenario, where the unrepentant rapist of God forbid someone in your family sat beside you at the dinner table in Heaven? If God did not permit that it is hardly out of a lack of mercy rather it is precisely out of mercy that he does not place the innocent in such a situation. It is to the mercy of God that even in a man’s last moments he may repent, as it is to the same mercy that beyond those moments he cannot. God loves us so much that he sets up the strongest possible deterrent against hatred, which is eternal damnation in appalling conditions. Were it clear that he were lying, would the torture of innocents not be encouraged?

Lewis describes his own struggle with the doctrine and how it is resolved: “I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully ‘All will be saved’…We are told that it is a detestable doctrine—and indeed, I too detest it from the bottom of my heart…The problem is not simply that of a God who consigns some of His creatures to final ruin. That would be the problem if we were Muslims…” (the belief that should one not believe in their religion then Hell is the outcome) Christianity, (presents) (…)—a God so full of mercy that He becomes man and dies by torture to avert that final ruin from his creatures… I said glibly a moment ago that I would pay ‘any price’ to remove this doctrine. I lied. I could not pay one-thousandth part of the price that God has already paid to remove the fact” (PoP 120,121). So I would agree with the interlocutor that it seems a bit unfair that God would just dump persons into Hell for not believing in a particular religion. Christianity is not that religion.

Now the greater the sentience the greater the awareness of suffering because sentience is awareness, this is why we were able to state convincingly that humans do suffer more intensely than animals with lesser degrees of sentience and the least sentient animals suffer the least. And Jesus being God, possesses in a perfect mode the sentience of a human being, and being thus perfectly aware, suffers perfectly the violation of that sentience. Further being perfectly good, he has perfect sorrow for evil, and as Man, suffers greatly for it emotionally. So also being aware of all times, he is able to suffer sorrow for all evil at all times, and as God to suffer them personally as a parent for their child. So in reply to my initial question in part one, it is Jesus who suffers the sum of all the grief in all the world, and Christian apologists would say that so also he suffers the sum of all the pain in the world. This is best described in Aquinas, where because Jesus’ Body is also physically perfect and being physically perfect is able to experience pain in the most acute degree, so also his mental sufferings do not assuage this pain in the manner that they would in another human through the clouding of the consciousness produces in states of extreme stress, but he would have sustained the most acute degree of awareness humanly possible. He is after all the Creator of that Body. Lewis reminds us in his essay that the sum of all the pain in the Universe  is only equal to that maximum amount of pain that a single human being can experience, great as it may be. Once that point has been reached, though a million should suffer pain, it does not add to that suffering. There when a person suffers maximally, he has literally suffered all the pain in the Universe. In sense we can also say that it is Jesus who suffers that “sum of all pain”.

When I once asked an atheist, “what exactly is it that you would have God do for you, anymore than what he has already done?” the reply was “I want God to hold my hand and walk me through life”. Well if the point was for God to hold your hand then you would still be attached to him never to be born on Earth, i.e. an angel. In any case this apparently does not work either, since a third of the angels rebelled. Which brings us to the next topic…

The question is often asked of whether it would not have been suitable indeed that God snuff the reprobate soul out of extinction rather than cast it into eternal torment. God creates eternal souls, so this would be a contradiction to the soul’s eternality. The whole condition of life on Earth is that it be lived in the belief through faith in an eternal consequence, so this would also be a violation of that Faith, precisely the faith that is rejected by the atheist. Lastly God creates a system, a system that is based in the freedom of loving choice and the freedom because of that same love, of its rejection. When God is rejected it is that which is opposed to God which is accepted, and so to then not receive it, terrible as it is, is to not respect that Free choice that was bestowed upon the soul in its very creation. This is how Lewis describes it:

“…And people often talk as if the ‘annihilation’ of a soul were intrinsically possible. In all our experience, however, the destruction of one thing means the emergence of something else. Burn a log, and you have gases, heat and ash. To have been a log means now being those three things. If souls can be destroyed, must there not be a state of having been a human soul? What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is ‘remains’…To be a complete man means to have the passions obedient to the will and the will offered to God: God: to have been a man—to be an ex-man or ‘damned ghost’—would presumably mean to consist of a will utterly centred in its self and passions utterly uncontrolled by the will. It is, of course, impossible to imagine what the consciousness of such a creature—already a loose congeries of mutually antagonistic sins rather than a sinner—would be like…” (126,7 PoP Lewis)

(…)To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity (…) (the damned) certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good (…) heaven is the home of humanity and therefore contains all that is implied in a glorified human life: but hell was not made for men. It is in no sense parallel to heaven: it is ‘the darkness outside’, the outer rim where being fades away into nonentity. They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and  are therefore self-enslaved: just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free.” (Lewis PoP 129)

Is the suffering of Hell “proportionate”?  A sin is not committed primarily against your brother, it is committed against God. So when someone sheds innocent blood, for example, he was really dealing with the person’s Father standing behind them, although he did not realize it. God is infinitely good and holy, so the numerator is infinity, and you get infinity in the denominator yielding a proportionality of 1. So this seems to satisfy any question of mathematical proportionality.

Omnibenevolence

“the possibility of pain is inherent in the very existence of a world where souls can meet (…) I described this in the C S Lewis Quote. Elsewhere he describes how even in a game, take chess for example, laws and consequences are necessary without which there is no game. He therefore concludes: “…fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once 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” (CS Lewis Problem of Pain, 25)

Let me ask this direct question: What quantity of pain is commensurate with omnibenevolence, is it necessary for the Universe to be completely anaesthetic? Even a scientist knows that pain is necessary as a noxious stimulus. Anhedonia is a rare and terrible medical condition. But if you admit the commensurability of a mild or moderate amount of pain, then now you have to decide how much pain is allowed for God to allow, and as you can see that the position gets increasingly ridiculous.

“Love is something more stern and splendid than mere Kindness (…) There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it. (…) Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering (…) It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes…”

“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing”.- Blaise Pascal

(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.)

“You cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it. You cannot fight without something to fight for. To love a thing without wishing to fight for it is not love at all; it is lust. It may be an airy, philosophical, and disinterested lust; it may be, so to speak, a virgin lust; but it is lust, because it is wholly self-indulgent and invites no attack. On the other hand, fighting for a thing without loving it is not even fighting; it can only be called a kind of horse-play that is occasionally fatal.”- G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study

“Free Will in Heaven”?

An interesting question is there free will in Heaven. This is related to the possibility of there being unfulfilled desires in Heaven, which there isn’t, unfulfilled desires are experienced on Earth. That is the whole point of God being infinite, He is the sufficient fulfilment of every desire. There’s no point saying that God is infinite, and then saying that he cannot even fulfil for the soul even the routine things that a human can fulfil with earthly pursuits. God fulfils every desire and in a manner that you are both fully satiated and yet hunger for more eternally. So there is no problem for the will in Heaven. God, himself in what we call the Beatific vision. God is so beautiful that the vision of Him is the fulfilment of the will. But to appreciate that one has to get out of the mind-set of human sensual ie desires related to the five pathetic senses which is very difficult to appreciate for us in our present state and some even find it impossible, hence the objections and misunderstandings will arise. When the will finds the object of its desiring, it rests. The whole point of having a will, is to get what it truly wants. This is what people like Buddha and Mahavira yearned for. When it gets it, then the original problem does not exist does it? God satisfies the will completely. But positing an impersonal force like the karmic force is like replacing a nothingness with another nothingness.

There are many great divorces to endure. The divorce of a rift in a relationship, with family or friends much loved. The divorce of one’s spouse. The divorce of ones children who are no more to live at home, through rift or flying the coop. The divorce from the Church of one’s spouse who chooses no longer to stand at one’s side rather stay home. The divorce of great distance from loved ones that only money saved for years can travel. The divorce of a beautiful place, a holiday destination no more to be lived in or perhaps never visited. The divorce of death. All are reconciled in Heaven, for those who seek the Lord.

Are those who do not understand the meaning of suffering the same as those who do not appreciate the value of discipline, for are they not one and the same thing?

“(Oh men!)…Your principal maladies are pride, which cuts you off from God, and sensuality, which binds you to the earth. And they (your philosophers) have done nothing but foster at least one of these maladies. If they have given you God for your object, it has been to pander to your pride. They have made you think you were like him and resemble him by your nature. And those who have grasped the vanity of such a pretension have cast you down in the other abyss by making you believe that your nature is like that of the beast of the field and have led you to seek your good in lust, which is the lot of animals.” Blaise Pascal, The Mind on Fire, ed. James M. Houston (Multnomah Pub, 1989), page 115.

If Christianity has successfully convinced us that we’re too sinful for Heaven, then the cosmetics industry has also convinced us that we are also too abhorrent for the Earth. Thus it is clear that the road to salvation consists in repenting and giving up perfume.

There are two types of people: Those who want to conquer the World, and those who want to conquer Heaven. The first quest is futile, and is the pursuit of power and money. The second is worthwhile, and requires neither.

There’s two types of persons. Those who would give up everything for God, and these are saints; and there are those who would give everything up to themselves, these are scoundrels.

Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-16, 2:23-24

 because God did not make death,
and he does not delight in the death of the living.
For he created all things that they might exist,
and the generative forces of the world are wholesome,
and there is no destructive poison in them;
and the dominion of Hades is not on earth.
For righteousness is immortal.

But ungodly men by their words and deeds summoned death;
considering him a friend, they pined away,
and they made a covenant with him,
because they are fit to belong to his party.

for God created man for incorruption,
and made him in the image of his own eternity,
but through the devil’s envy death entered the world,
and those who belong to his party experience it.”

Death a Different Plane of Existence

My gardener once asked me the eternal question himself: “if there is a God, how come he let the Jews die in concentration camps?” “Tell me Mark” I replied, for that was his name, “if there is a God, then where do you suppose those Jews are now?” “Well, in Heaven, I suppose…” he replied. “And do you think that where they were, they were likely to be complaining to God about their situation”, (silence) “then why are you?”

Now one of my biggest objections to the problems of evil is that the objection is almost stated with tunnel vision: skeptics will attack Christianity with evil but they do so without including the whole picture of Christianity. So skeptics will bring up examples like children who suffer from disease and die young  and then say from their subjective standpoint that a good God would not allow this. But they ignore that the child’s consciousness will continue on in the heavenly experience. So if we’re going to use evil to attack the Christian God and must do so by looking at the whole picture of the Christian world view. So I’ll presents 6 aspects of Christianity that put evil on perspective and argue for compatibility. 

number one is the afterlife: the truth is we cannot judge Christianity without the acknowledgement of the afterlife, meaning that the suffering of this life is only temporary and will pale in comparison to eternity. an analogy can be drawn from your childhood as compared to your current adult life and I realise analogies about perfect but think of the limited knowledge you had as a child in the things used to cause you suffering I remember crying over lost toys which I’ve now forgotten about. on a more serious note my mother suffered from serious depression when I was a young kid and as a result I suffered from severe verbal and physical abuse now thankfully she got the help she needed in his healthy now and I can’t say I suffer from any long term effects however in those moments moments decades ago it felt like my world was ending and I would never recover most of the suffering we had as children pales in comparison to the lives we live now ,again I understand analogies are not perfect but most of the suffering we experience as children had no long lasting effects even though in those moments it felt excruciating analogously the present suffering of this life will be outdone by eternity with God so the argument is simply that the suffering in the present life will be swallowed up by the joy of heaven and will have no lasting effects when compared to eternity. Evidence in near death experiences seems to support this. reports from people have been revived report that the next life is more real than real. this world feels more like a dream when compared to what is to come. now I’ve had some dreams where horrible things have happened and then I wake up and the pain does not last. in fact I can’t even remember most of my nightmares. if upon death will wake up to a more real existence which makes this life feel like a dream it could hardly be said the suffering of this life will have any real lasting damage.

Also many argue with unfair for God to allow people to die from diseases or natural disasters, but from God’s perspective no one died per se. When when a human kills someone they remove that person from their plane existence for selfish or hateful reasons since. God is on all planes of existence it’s logically impossible print a murder someone the way a human life instead he is just moving people from one plane of existence to another. So we should think of the suffering in this life from gods perspective analogous to how this happens in a dreamworld in the movie Inception. so when you kill someone in a dreamworld you’re not ending their life but moving them from one plane of existence to another. if someone is suffering a dream it’s not that big of a deal because you know they will wake up the pain will be a fading memory is something less than real. likewise is not necessarily immoral for God to end a life or allow suffering because our current suffering is more dreamlike than real from gods perspective, it may not be as bad as we emotionally feel at the moment.

Experience of the Consequences of Sin

IP: If God is going to create free creatures but then limit how far they can go from his Will, then there really is no freedom because we are set in some sort of giant cosmic playpen, we don’t know what life without God would really entail because God would not allow us to really experience it in this life. If that as the case we would never really see the consequences of our rebellion, and so we’d have God as some sort of overbearing mother who is supposed to take care of us when it is needed but doesn’t allow us to learn the horrendous consequences of what happens when we abandon him,  and choose to live in a natural world without his Presence. The point is that unless we see what the evil in our hearts does to ourselves and to our fellow humans, we will never learn. And so God’s message is simply that our rebellion must be fully realised so that hopefully we will return to him.

The Suffering of God

IP: “Any attack from the existence of evil cannot ignore the suffering of Christ. now I know this is a bit of an emotional argument but since the sting of evil is more emotional than logical it makes sense that Gods answer to evil should be to heal our emotional wounds as well. so the Christian answer to a world filled with torture and murder is a God who was tortured and murdered. Atheist Albert Camus admitted: Christ the God man suffers too. evil and death can no longer be entirely imputed to him since he suffers and dies.  (?) is so important because the divinity ostensibly abandon his traditional privilege and lived through to the end, despair included, the agony of death.

Jesus is also united to the present suffering of his people. When he appeared to Saul on the road to Damascus he didn’t say “why are you persecuting my people” he said “why are you persecuting me?”.  Jesus said in Matthew 25 that when we feed and clothe the helpless we’re doing it to him and if we reject these people we are rejecting him. The implication from the Bible’s is that when we suffer, God experiences this suffering as well. He doesn’t have too but he’s plunged himself into our reality and feels the pain that we do. as Timothy Kehler pointed out “since got off his throne and plunged himself into evil and suffering with us the reason he allows suffering cannot be because he was in love us”.  so given Kehler’s point we have evidence that God is good despite the evil in this world.

So in summary Christianity answers evil by reminding that the afterlife will turn all our misfortunes in the joy. God is ontologically different than us and therefore has different obligations (…) suffering can be allowed for instrumental good, and soul building or creating more virtuous individuals. suffering is not a good that is necessarily defined in terms of consequences or outcomes, and God has chosen to allow evil to affect him as well.

A Greater Good is Wrought

IP: (…) I would like to talk about something I’ve been working on I’m calling the love triumph which I’ll basically define as if or when suffering arises it can always ultimately you overcome by good it’ll be intrinsically more valuable and worthwhile than the intrinsic badness of the initial suffering. in other words God has created a world where suffering happens it can always be outweighed by good.

now I don’t want people to think this is a trivial point visit might sound trivial at first but think of the Lord of the rings for example let’s just say that in that world I Eru Eluvitor didn’t create any suffering this may sound trivial but would anyone want to read that book? I think the answer is no it would sound quite boring, and I think the reason for that we recognise there is some sort of intrinsic goodness in the triumph of that story of people overcoming the badness. that the triumph basically outshines any sort of suffering and puts it in a far better perspective that creates far better virtuous creatures than if it was a world just devoid of any sort of suffering. so you’d all say that God has put in place something like a law of nature which causes virtuous good to emerge from any from evil that can occur (…) Saint Augustine said it like this: since God is the highest good,  he would not allow any evil to exist in his works unless his omnipotence and goodness were such to bring good even out of the evil.

Higher Virtues vs Amoral Universe

IP: (…) I would think it would be better if a world exists whether a virtuous people and suffering versus a world of no virtuous people in their superior pleasure or no suffering. (…) this world of lacking of pleasure or this world that only has pleasure and doesn’t have suffering is far less intrinsically good than a world that does employ suffering to create far better interesting, far better interesting far better acts of triumph, in creating virtuous creatures in that sense (…) the point of what God is doing here is to build souls (…) God is basically saying I’m not going interviewing the suffering terrible though as it is because I know you can make it through it and I want you to have experiential knowledge of this fact as well. So no I don’t think God is directly causing the suffering I think God is sort of created the universe to create more mature soul building things, and he has imbued the law of triumph in it that if suffering it does arise it can be used defeated and it will ultimately turnout more instrumentally good in creating more virtuous souls, better souls in the long run. so the essence of the soul building theodicy is that we find the kind of evil and suffering in the world that is precisely the kind of evil and suffering they will lead to souls afraid character or multidimensional persons of great virtue (…)  

IP gives a synopsis from John Hicks’ God of Good and Evil “suppose contrary the fact that this world were a paradise from which all possibility of pain and suffering were excluded the consequences would be very far reaching. For example no one could ever injure anyone else the murderers my foot turn paper or his bullets to thin air; the banks safe robbed of millions of dollars would miraculously become filled with another $1,000,000 without this large scale providing inflationary problems. so again no one would ever be injured by accident the mountain climber or a playing child fall from a height would float unharmed to the ground the reckless driver would never meet its disaster. there be no need to work since no harm would come from avoiding work. There would be no need to call to be concerned for others in times of danger for in such a world that could be no real needs or dangers. to make possible this continuous series of individual adjustments nature would have to work by special Providences instead of running according to general laws that men must learn to respect on penalty of pain of death. the laws of nature would have to be extremely flexible- sometimes gravity would operate sometimes not sometimes an object would be hard or solid sometimes soft. There could be no real Sciences for there would be no enduring world structure to investigate, In eliminating the problems and hardships of an objective environment with its own laws life would become like a dream in which a delightfulness but aimlessly would float and drift at ease. One could at least imagine such a world it is evident that are present ethical concepts would have no meaning in it. if for example the notion of harming someone is an essential element in the concept of a wrong add action, in our hedonistic paradise there could be no wrong actions nor any right actions and distinctions from wrong. Courage would have no point in an environment in which there is by definition no danger or difficulty Generosity or kindness or the agape aspect of love, prudence unselfishness and other ethical notions which presuppose life in an objective environment could not even be formed. consequently such world however well it might promote pleasure would be very ill adebt for the development of moral qualities of human personalities. in relation to this purpose it might be the worst of all possible worlds. so basically point is it if you’re going to have this kind of world you’re not developing virtuous individuals. now I’m not saying that God is causing the suffering to get there. I think that God has created a world which two things: randomness and free creatures. now God being omnipotent I think this is a far better way to build souls because he’s not directly determining certain things, he’s allowing souls to develop through a universe imbued with randomness, have their own freedom to guide their own paths, that can create far more interesting souls in the long run

I think we’re not defining good to same way and this is when I talked about a little bit my open statement it good is just pleasure it’s good it’s just that in suffering is just bad then I don’t think we’re going agree because I don’t I’m not a utilitarian I would define good more in terms of virtual things that a deontologist woul define good more terms of actions so if goodness’s about virtues and not about pleasure and pain or pleasure and suffering those are in a sense kind of side issues in the main goal I’m not saying that they are not included in this I definitely don’t want people to think that the main goal is to build virtuous creatures. now we’re also assuming pleasure is the best possible world, I would not at all agree I think a world with virtuous people and suffering is far better than a world without virtuous people and just pleasure. I feel like that is a far less interesting world, a far less complex multi dimensional nuanced world. It just does not create what I think God’s aim is, which is to create virtuous individuals for relationships (…) you’re setting up is a world of the stepford wives where everyone doesn’t have to worry about problems or pain everyone just sort of goes along their happy to never have to experience suffering they just go along with their daily tasks (..) I ultimately think that we would reject that like a world even though it’s filled with pleasure, no one has worry about any dangers or anything with regards to that (…) we’re trying to become intelligent individual as well as virtuous individuals is not just about pleasure I mean it’s saying be far better to be like a stepford wives (…) Clay Jones brings up extensively and spoke on the problem of evil is that he highlight examples in science fiction that we talked they set up these worlds where everyone is happy there is pleasure is wonderful come join us but there’s no freedom in order to think and everyone rejects that we recognise intrinsically pleasure to be in best possible world (…) so I think it really depends on what we mean by good I don’t think pleasure is necessarily the best possible world I think that is an aspect of it but I think it is secondary to the main goal create virtuous good people in that sense.