Why God cannot be a God
of Compassion or want us to be truly compassionate
People confuse sympathy and compassion. Sympathy is a feeling of pain at the pain of another. By itself it is not compassion. It only becomes compassion in so far as you do something to help be it listening or something else. Compassion also includes feeling how vulnerable others are in life even if they are okay now.
Compassion may be a feeling of concern for the other but though compassion is not empathy it needs empathy. Thus you need to try and share in the suffering of the other to put yourself in their shoes so that at the very least they do not feel alone and misunderstood. Compassion is feeling for the other but to a lesser extent it is feeling with. You cannot feel for the other unless you try a little bit to imagine and link with what they are feeling.
Compassion is better than love. The two are not the same. If there is a choice between love and compassion choose the latter. A religion of love is as a result intrinsically flawed and thus must take the blame for the evil that people do even if it disapproves of it.
Love and compassion are always treated as simple answers and simple but they are not. That is why they cause so much trouble. The idea of God makes it far worse. God becomes a rationale for making it simple. God is thought to be there to make sure your love and compassion work for the good as he is love and compassion and all-powerful so they have to win! Those who give these simple answers do so for they do not really care and want to feel as if they are good people.
COMPASSION AND JUDGING
Compassion has a judgmental side. If Ann is made sick by
her husband or neglected by him when seriously ill then compassion says it is a
disgrace. A God who commands compassion is in some way telling us to judge
and risk hating the husband. He claims to be compassionate himself so that
says a lot about him.
GOD CANNOT SUFFER AND SO HE CANNOT SUFFER WITH US
God sends suffering but he cannot suffer as he is the all-perfect being. God
cannot suffer for to suffer implies that one is imperfect and does not have all
one needs or wants and God is perfect and has all he needs so he cannot feel the
pain of compassion. If God could suffer then since God is perfectly good without
suffering or even if he never suffers – he would not be perfect if he suffers –
it follows that God should not suffer. Compassion is suffering with those who
suffer. God cannot have compassion. The Church says that God's compassion is a
metaphor for he behaves as if he has compassion! A God like that is no
role-model or inspiration for us.
When God cannot feel compassion how could compassion be an ideal for us to
aspire to? To make compassion a virtue is to imply that you are better than
God.
It is better for God not to make people at all if they will bring him pain. He
owes his love to himself as being the perfect being so he can only love them for
his own sake which is not loving them at all. It is ludicrous to suggest that he
will become man to die for their sins and atone for them because that implies he
does it for them. He does not for he can be perfectly happy and let them all go
to Hell forever. He only does it because he can do it and it is not for them for
he doesn't need to save them and he only really loves himself. When God owes
himself all his love it follows that if he suffers because of our sins or if
they upset him, then he is doing wrong by making us for justice says the perfect
being should come first and be the only important thing for he is the origin of
all things and does not need to make what will bother him.
Even if hypothetically we say that God should suffer we mean that in a sense he
should. We say that we would agree if possible that there could be a suffering
God. But if God is all perfect then this hypothetical reasoning seems to be
forbidden. If God is perfect then this perfection deserves 100% adoration but
the hypothetical thing throws a but into it...
GOD COMES FIRST
Christians believe God only lets us suffer if it is worth it to try and make us
holier or more virtuous. This is what you could call the Discipline
Defence. What else could you expect them to say?
If we suffer to be made holier then God must come first. He must want all our love. If he did not then he could tolerate our wickedness but not let us go too far which might justify some evil but not evil to the extent that we have it in this world. So we are to love God alone and love others for his sake (not literally loving them then). Good is simply putting God first and nothing second. This means that we are here to simply choose between loving God and not loving him. So people do not suffer so that we may help them and be compassionate and patient or that we might not help God – for God is able to help himself – but please God. Then you are not thinking of the suffering so there cannot be compassion for the victim and why feel sorry for God when his happiness cannot be marred? You cannot. It is hard and cruel to turn your compassion off for a suffering person and transfer it to God. Only a monster could do that and that is what God religion as taught by the Bible and by Jesus wants you to do. It wants you to be a psychopath. Faith turns you into a psychopath and when that happens you will still be one if you lose your faith in God. Maybe you will be a less sick one then but you would be worse then if you continued to believe.
DISCIPLINE DEFENCE SHOWS LITTLE OR NO COMPASSION
The discipline defence teaches that evil and suffering are allowed to happen by
God because they are useful for disciplining us. Through suffering we can grow
in goodness and good character and through having people help us they can grow
in compassion and practice their virtues. This will supposedly improve them.
If you have to suffer to be a better person then clearly the most important outcome should be compassion for others who suffer. Why? It is obvious that if suffering helps improve you as a person then compassion, because it is so beautiful and painful and valuable and helpful, should be number one. There is an obvious connection.
But do not forget that once you say that the love of God
comes first you end up putting compassion for others down the scale. If
you say that you must only have compassion for God says so then it is about God
not the people you suffer for at all.
Compassion is suffering when you see other people suffer and suffering with them
in the process of helping them if possible. Compassion is a great thing but as
we are all flawed it has to be flawed too. It is not right to say that people
must be allowed by God to suffer in order that we may give them our faulty
compassion. In fact, the discipline defence is not about humility but faking
humility and pumping up our compassion into a greater thing than it really is.
The claim that evil and suffering and temptation are allowed so that works of
compassion might happen infers that you bring suffering on yourself by your lack
of self-discipline so it forbids compassion. It leads to the despised concept of
all suffering being punishment for sin or if it is not punishment it is still
your own fault.
Love is strict with regards to yourself and to others, as Christians delight to
remind us. God will be strict. But there are hardly any people like that so his
disciplining is a waste of time for he wants us to be like him. People just
don’t want to make others’ lives a misery through correcting themselves and
others from sunrise to sunset. Since love is strict and God comes first and
wants us to eradicate sin rigidity will be the supreme virtue. But if we do not
believe in God we will feel at ease with tolerating these things and we don’t
have to be strict. If forgiveness is wrong (and it is - it is not necessary
though it is necessary to try to avoid having painful feelings because somebody
has hurt you for too long) the discipline defence is meaningless for compassion
and patience would be sinful. Forgiveness is wrong for there is no free will -
free will is the teaching that when we made a choice we could have made another
one - so there is nothing to forgive.
It is impossible for you to be compassionate to a person and love God when the
compassion implies, “This should not happen at all. It is terrible and I feel
terrible about it.” That is really blaspheming God for sending the suffering.
Religion says that the love of God and people go together. If that is true, then
you are in bother whether you reject God for people or people for God. Anyway
back to your compassion. It is criticising God so the attitude is, “I feel
nothing for you and I only help you to please God who is right to torture you so
that I can prove that I am virtuous.” It is proved to you more than anybody so
this is self-righteous and arrogant and flippant. The discipline defence
destroys itself.
Religion may try to soften the disastrous discipline defence by saying that it
is true that the discipline should not happen for we should not have abused our
free will to make it necessary for God to do hurtful things for the sake of
chastisement to us. Some softening I must say - it only makes it worse. Religion
is saying somebody is to blame for the suffering. If it is not the sufferer it
is somebody else or both. It hardly makes for great charity and trust in other
people. Also, Christians are obligated to blame themselves rather than anybody
else and to worry about their own faults more than those of others. The victim
then must blame herself or himself. If I am to blame for my sickness, that is,
if I should assume the sickness is sent for me to develop MY compassion, then
clearly we must pressure the sick to carry out good works and donate as much as
possible of their money to the poor.
God sends suffering for the sake of developing compassion to a person under the
present circumstances. These circumstances are largely beyond our or the
victim's control. All we can do to alleviate the suffering or get it stopped is
let ourselves learn from it and do good works to fight it. Thus the victim
should blame us or herself or himself if there is no end in sight to the
suffering. We have not been responding correctly and thus we are keeping the
suffering happening. A doctrine like this means that when your compassion
improves so will your resentment. The victory over the evil of being
non-compassionate is a pyrrhic victory!
We know it is wrong to feel sorry for anybody who is suffering what they
deserve. Some people who suffer reason, "I have to suffer anyway. I take this
for my sins and will use it to heal myself of my sinful tendencies." They
consent to it. It follows that those who consent to their suffering are for the
same reason not entitled to compassion. This raises the question, “Should the
sick person consent to their own suffering and will it to happen to them even if
it is not their own fault?” The answer is yes if there is a God and if they
should give others a reason to have no sympathy for them so that others will not
suffer because of them – that is, have no compassion. Those who refuse to accept
their pain deserve to suffer so they cannot win. This tells us that suffering is
useless and cannot be intended to evoke compassion. What’s the use of any virtue
that suffering is sent to evoke and nurture without compassion?
Religion says that helping people spiritually is the best form of compassion. If
you give a person bread instead of telling them what they have to spiritually
improve about themselves then that is not compassion because it is expressing no
compassion for their spiritual need which is a more fundamental one. We are told
that God sends suffering to correct people but if we preached all the time we
wouldn’t be forcing him to send as much suffering. This at a stroke proves that
God does not like the vast majority of acts that express compassion. If he made
us suffer for the sake of compassion then why did he fail so dismally?
How could it be compassionate to advocate belief in and commitment to a God who
has a fault with nearly everything we do? He’s just like a policeman who wants
you to slip up.
Compassion needs an ingredient and that ingredient is called worry. If a
ship sinks and the survivors have not been recovered the Church will say it
finds this worrying. But since the Church says we should only want people to
survive for the sake of God and God could have done plenty of discreet things to
save the people if there were no survivors or save more of them it follows that
it is offensive to God to worry or to pretend to worry. You are really worrying
about God not being able to do what he wants. The inhumanity of Christianity and
Islam must be concealed no more. It is impossible to see how you could think it
is terrible for a baby to be born handicapped by an act of God when it was God
not man that let that happen without insulting God.
God promises us a perfectly happy existence beyond the grave so the virtues that
suffering is sent for us to gain will be no good there. This implies that the
virtues do not matter and only the suffering does. Compassion would be a
sin if suffering does not really matter or does not matter at all.
Compassion is based on the idea that happiness is good. You feel for people and
want to help them for they are not happy. So if happiness is a sin then
compassion is a sin.
How could you be compassionate when you know that if a person lives on in this
body that they will be more likely to remain alive than if they die and then say
that God is right to let that person die or increase the chance of death or
suicide be sending suffering?
If suffering is for the sake of discipline then how can you say that you
wouldn’t wish your terrible malady on anybody else if there is a God? It would
be insulting God.
When life is the most important value (for if it is not it makes no sense at all
to say that people should be happy) it is wrong to condone God’s actions.
When God could do plenty to prevent us being so bad without taking away our free
will he has no excuse for all the pain and suffering that happen unless he wants
them to happen in which case compassion would be evil.
There are plenty of reasons why belief in God is harmful and therefore it is
ridiculous to say that God makes us suffer so that we will love him more and be
more committed to him. The more commitment the further you drift from reason and
real goodness.
FINALLY
God cannot have compassion for us as God for he is like a mind without a body and too unlike us for us to be able to relate to or be inspired by his compassion. It is just a word where he is concerned. Believers run after a God like that because they don't like to be truly compassionate. It dehumanises those who suffer and thus the believer gets an ego boost from helping those "inferior" creatures.
