Posted by Helen on: 10.29.2007 /
I also posted this on Friendly Christian today
A few years ago I realized acceptance is essential to living a happy life. It also occurred to me that acceptance may be simpler for atheists.
When Christians encounter personal suffering or tragedy, there’s always a ‘why’ question that has to be dealt with, namely:
“Why did God, who is all-powerful and claims to love me, allow this to happen?”
When atheists encounter personal suffering or tragedy (any type which isn’t directly caused by another human), it’s ‘just the way it is’. There’s no person behind it to ask ‘why?’ to.
I think this makes such things easier to accept (not easy, but easier) than if God is in the picture. What do you think?
Comment by: benjamin ady
1Helen,
I think you kind of nailed something. I was telling Megan just a couple days ago that in one sense, I really admire her for sticking with the christian thing, because a big part of the reason I had stopped was because I couldn’t maintain that hope in the face of seemingly overwhelming evidence. Which is to say that for a while I was getting really pissed off at god all the time, becuase there was so much suffering, both my own and, more to the point, in the world at large. All that intense anger at god got to be a bit much for me to cope with/maintain. I think my corticosteroid levels were gradually increasing. I find it *way* easier now not having to constantly engage that. Yes, the world sucks in gargantuan ways, but at least I no longer have to try to reconcile that with a kind, gracious, all powerful, all knowing God. What a relief.
Comment by: Helen
2Yes…I think that’s very connected with what I posted.
I really think people are wired differently so some can believe in God and be content with “It’s a mystery - I trust God” and others continually struggle to reconcile the way the world is and the way they are told God is.
Speaking for myself I can’t help thinking “If I were God and had all God’s powers how could I bear not to do anything about this?” I suppressed that for years, though, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised if other people are able to suppress or otherwise manage not to be bothered continually by it.
Actually to be honest I am not continually bothered by suffering except when it directly affects me or someone very close to me. I don’t see this as good - I regard it as a lack of love and caring. This shortcoming wouldn’t apply to God since God is perfectly loving and made everyone so presumably he cares just as much about other peoples’ suffering as mine.
Comment by: Stephan
3I don’t think there is a one-size-fits-all Christian answer to this. I have a cousin (whom I dearly love) who is in a wheelchair for life due to an illness when he was 18 years old. He is a strong Calvinist. He believes God put him in that wheelchair for a purpose. I suppose that’s possible, but I disagree. He finds comfort in the fact that his suffering is for God’s greater good. I personally have a hard time with that, but I can’t be sure that he is wrong in his belief. I feel that God can use suffering to meet His ends, but not that He causes suffering to meet His ends.
I believe that God has a long term solution to the problem of suffering, and that I, as a Christian, am part of it. I am sometimes confused and bewildered by His seeming silence and inaction in a world full of suffering, but I still have faith that God will someday bring it all under His control.
I think you’re right, Helen, that some people are wired differently. Several atheists I have conversed with here can’t live with seeming contradictions between God’s character as portrayed in the Bible and what they see in the world around them. I sympathize this sentiment, but I also know that my perception is often wrong, and what I see as a contradiction may only be my misunderstanding.
Comment by: Helen
4Thanks for your comment, Stephan. I appreciate your honesty in saying God’s seeming silence and inaction can be confusing and bewildering at times. I think this is what I meant by the initial post: this confusion and bewilderment is one thing an atheist doesn’t have to deal with.
Btw I mentioned you over on ebay atheist (comment #27) - feel free to correct me if I said anything wrong.
Comment by: Stephan
5Helen, I saw your comment and did not disagree, so I did not feel the need to comment on your comment (which would only have drawn another comment, and we all know what that would lead to).
Regarding this:
I don’t see avoiding touch questions as a reason to abandon a belief. I never took any hard math classes in high school or college. I did not see the need to understand trigonometry or calculus. This does not, however, make them any less true. They are still entirely true, and by avoiding them (because they are hard) I am only avoiding knowing the truth.
Not having to deal with hard questions may be a side benefit of atheism, but it is hardly an argument in favor of it.
Comment by: Karen
6I never had any trouble reconciling these things as a Christian because I was of the “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” camp. ;-)
It seems to me, however, that there’s another dynamic at work here. Atheists don’t have to reconcile reality with god-belief, but we do have to accept the fact that we don’t know an awful lot. Like, why are we here, what happens after death, is there a pre-arranged purpose to life - y’know, the “big questions” that religion answers! So, we have to be very comfortable with the Hard Questions, too, and with admitting we don’t have firm, authoritative answers to them.
Comment by: Helen
7Stephan wrote:
Yes, I think of not having the “Why God?” question in the midst of suffering as a benefit of not believing in God.
My perception of what happened to me wasn’t exactly that I was avoiding the questions; it was more that the number of unresolvable questions I seemed to be finding drove me to investigate the whole system in case the problem was the system rather than the questions. So far I haven’t convinced myself it’s not the whole system, as you know…
Comment by: Helen
8Karen wrote:
Karen, yes, I wonder how it is for atheists who never were Christians - for me it was quite an adjustment going from having answers to not having them. But maybe people who never had them don’t miss them!
Comment by: Steve S.
9…depends on the God you are believing in. And for that matter, it depends alot on what you mean by ‘believe in.’
What if God were not aloof? Isn’t that the fundamental problem? Why doesn’t He do something? It seems that the life of Jesus is proclaiming, “God is involved!” And demanding that those who claim to know God are also involved in bringing heaven to earth.
This is how I was taught to see God, through the lens of Jesus; this means that God is intimately involved in suffering, taking it upon Himself, and inviting people to join Him in putting the world back together.
Comment by: Steph
10You have a Jack O’Neill picture!! Sorry, that’s totally random, but I’m used to only seeing that on my live journal friends page *g*. So I suppose I should say something relevant to your topic.
I think part of the issue with Christians and suffering is the health and wealth gospel that has been preached esp here in the US, promising people things that the Bible very clearly does not. The atheist side of the coin would be having never been promised anything , I guess.
Comment by: Helen
11Steve wrote:
I can see how that could work in a global and long-term sense but I’m not sure how it helps make sense of the individual terrible suffering some people go through.
Hi Steph, I didn’t know who the picture was of - I found it on a buddhist site actually :)
Right.
Comment by: Eliza
12Stephan said:
and Karen said:
Atheists’ Hard Questions may be different than Christians’ Hard Questions - A’s don’t have to worry about theodicy, but don’t have a solid lead on answers to the “what is the meaning of life” and “why are we here” type of questions.
Also, atheists, in general, may be more comfortable not having answers to Hard Questions, since - in their/our view - there’s nothing at stake, nothing eternal riding on the answers, nothing eternal riding on whether or not we/they get those answers “right”….
Or, at least, that’s how it looks from this side of the fence ;-)
Comment by: Kathleen
13Interesting. Just a couple weeks ago, I was at the funeral of a friend’s mother, who died young and after much suffering, and I remember thinking, “I don’t understand how he can deal with this without believing in God.” Of course, in a a situation like that, the pertinent question is more the existence and character of an afterlife than of God specifically, but the belief or hope of eventually being reunited with loved ones, I would think, can ease certain types of suffering. Not having been in a similar situation, I can’t guarantee that my faith would help me in any particular way, but I’m fairly confident it would change the way I saw things.
As for physical suffering (well, I’m not sure this even counts as “suffering”), I have mild chronic pain. Most of the chronic pain you hear about is debilitating, but this isn’t even close. It doesn’t change the way I do anything, I don’t have to avoid anything to keep from exacerbating it, it’s just always there, always bugging me. When I try to contextualize it, I sometimes tend towards the idea that it’s some sort of penance, though I can’t really think of for what. It’s not exactly a comforting idea, but at least then it’s not pointless, right? When I think of it, I sometimes do very Catholic things like “offering it up” for the souls in Purgatory…which wouldn’t explain why I have pain (but then, neither has any doctor, so I’m no worse off in terms of “why” than an atheist), but while I still can’t come up with a purpose for there being pain, at least I can do something purposeful with it.
Those are examples more concerned with religion than with God, and they still don’t answer the big question of
(Which is much more relevant to the first example than to the second - my personal philosophy on my own chronic pain is simply that no one - neither God nor anyone else - ever promised me (or anyone else) the right to be comfortable, so suck it up and stop complaining.)
Comment by: Kathleen
14I was at a meeting last week with one of my friends who’s going through RCIA, and they did an exercise where they were supposed to talk about an idea or insight from the faith that comforted or troubled them (almost everyone chose something comforting, interestingly), and one girl mentioned that the mystery was something she found comforting (and then I parroted what she had said, because I was there late and hadn’t realized I was supposed to have an answer, too - but I totally agreed with hers, so I didn’t bother trying to come up with something off the top of my head on the fly). You can’t have all the answers. No one has all the answers to all the big, important questions, not religion and not science. Accepting that some things are a mystery and it’s okay not to have all the answers is really freeing. It sounds like part of what I find freeing about being a Christian is the same as some of what Eliza finds liberating about being an Atheist:
Comment by: Helen
15Thanks for your comments, Kathleen. I’m sorry to hear about your chronic pain.
I’m not sure what to say to this except - if it makes you feel better (emotionally if not physically), go for it…
Good point. Eliza, I can affirm that many Christians are assured what really matters has been taken care of by God. Therefore there’s nothing at stake or eternal riding on any questions they can’t answer. My experience wasn’t angst that I’d ‘get the wrong answer’. It was more that once I stopped trying to make the whole Christian worldview fit together coherently - because I became unsure that it did and abandoned the quest - I found a burden was lifted and I had a sense of relief. I was very happy to be free from trying to understand why, say, a loving God is sending so many people to hell (yes, I know not all Christians believe that but many do, including the ones I used to mostly be around)