Everybody Hurts - and everybody wants to tell you why.

Before, we spoke about Weird Shit. Today, I’d like to talk about Shit that’s actually…well, Shit.

I doubt you’ll find it controversial if I suggest that a strong candidate for poster child of the personal power of religious belief is the respite it can bring from suffering. One of the mainstays of debates on religion is the so-called Problem of Evil. In the abrahamic context, the Problem is the alleged inconsistency of a (one would really, really hope) benevolent god - who also happens to be omnipotent – and the existence of a world that quite patently, when you come down to it, isn’t all gumdrops and roses. I’d rather not get into the details of the centuries of philosophical wrangling that have occurred around this topic, but I do recommend this – by turns calculating, funny and insightful - wiki on the solutions  that have been put forward for this very sticky wicket. Indeed, I would say the real problem is one of Inconsistent Evil, rather than Evil per se. But that’s not our topic. For today at least.

What I draw from the boundless popularity of this trope is not the power of the argument itself but its topic – suffering, both in terms of specific unpleasantnesses and that more general, existential booboo lurking in all our souls – and the fact that any system of thought that wants its time in the sun has to grapple with its existence. Most religions seem to havethe same general responses: You deserve it (it’s your – or better yet, her - fault); it’s good for you; it doesn’t really exist if you would only look at it the right way. You pays your money, you makes your choice. I would say even ‘Science’ has its ideas on the subject. If you are partial to a bit of evolutionary psychology, you might contrast the environment Homo Sapiens sprung up in and the one in which it now finds itself. Take our appetite for sugar say, arguably adaptive in one context but ripe for maladaptive abuse in a context where such goodies are all too readily available. Or the ideas at the core of cognitive behavioral therapy, where anxieties and phobias are understood as the entraining of biological safety mechanisms like ‘flight or flight’ - that broadly and in aggregate are probably not a bad thing to have – to inappropriate stimuli or appropriate stimuli to an unhelpful extent.

Riffing on the theme that traditional doctrinal hooks are often not all that revealing about the beliefs of those that purport hang their hat of on them, do you find any of these answers – including the evolutionary one – all that convincing. At best, they might be – if we’re being charitable - explanations. But are they any of them consolations? 

I don’t know about you – and I would very much like to hear about you – but the perspectives that have helped, be they religious or not, have had some common features. They help you to see the hurt as not personal, not something that you have to worry about or register beyond the time in which they happen. They get you to count your blessings. There but for the grace of god go I. They let you submerge your ego into something, someone or some way bigger that yourself. They provide you with vistas that put your hurt into perspective, to count – carefully and with fuller knowledge of the alternatives – your lucky, lucky stars.

On the personal level, I suppose an explanation isn’t much use even supposing one or any is right. After an explanation, you still have to ask yourself - what now? At that point, I’m willing to let you have your life jacket, if you’ll do me the favour of letting me have mine.   

Photo by Agnonymous.

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