SAYING "IT COULD BE WORSE" IS CRUEL WHEN THE PERSON IS IN GRAVE CALAMITY

Compassion is when my trouble is taken by you to be made yours too.  It is about people trying to not be alone.  It is hard to see how compassion is really that good when you want me to suffer!

The debate about why we want others to suffer with us as in get compassion from them is an interesting one.  We are hard-wired for fear and fear hides behind a lot of things we think it is not involved in.  I think my suffering is special and that bothers me so I want others to be in it with me.  Then I don't feel so vulnerable and different.  I don't want to be alone.

Fear comes from our biology so we cannot blame it all on so-called original sin.  Blame God then if you believe in him.

Compassion may be less of a virtue and more of a vice than we think if fear is using it as a cloak.

We often refuse to admit nasty truths about ourselves and yet we know they are true.  So we deal with them by thinking they apply to others not us or others more than us.  We project.  If we lack compassion we want others not to notice and to give us their compassion.

The guilty one feels less bad if they tell themselves that many others are as bad as them.  Yet rationally, if evil is evil, it should be loathed and the numbers do not matter.  This is a form of projection too.  I think that if a group can have the badness in me it somehow means I am relatively okay.  It is an attempt to diffuse, to distract from myself.  I want others distracted from me and I want me distracted from me to some degree.  This protects me and my evil.

Some think they have sinned or there is some evil lurking in them.  People want compassion for this which means they have to sense the sins and evil in others.  Many seek the relieving feeling that they are bad maybe but at least they could be worse.

These things suggest that the quest for compassion may be less noble than we pretend.  We have form for trying to involve others to benefit from that even at their expense.

Why do we find it unhelpful and even offensive when someone tells us that a huge loss at least is not a worse one? Do we really not want to know that it is less of a deal than it seems? Why do we want our loved ones and ourselves to suffer with us and see only the bad? As for the divine plan ideology, we would not even tolerate Jesus himself telling us it's not all bad.

One reason is we need to work through the suffering to learn from it and to use our strength to accomplish this. Being strong enough to ask for help when needed is being strong.

Another is, it is easy for them to preach when I'm the one that lost an arm. They want me to win strength like a gift but they wouldn't wish to part with an arm to get this so-called gift themselves. So they do and don't regard it as a chance for finding a greater good.

We sense that nobody can really show how harm or evil can change into a greater good.  Or even if they ever do. Good always follows disaster and disaster always follows good - eventually.  Maybe you have to be dead a century.  It is offensive then for people to infer that they don't care for some good will come after the bad anyway.  It is also offensive for them to say that the evil has the power to benefit us.

In religion the greatest gift is not measured by us being able to have its fruit.  An engagement ring worth millions is a great gift for a female even if she loses her fingers before she can wear it.

So in religion the greatest gift is God's love no matter how we feel about it.

If God alone matters as Jesus said, then it is indeed right to tell Job after he loses all that at least he still has his God. As it is the law that we must put God forefront in every situation that is exactly what we have to do.

When we think of terrible disasters befalling a person we think of things such as ill-health and so on.  Jesus' teaching is simply irrelevant to human beings.

Mercy is passive-aggressive. Justice is what you have earned and asked for. Mercy means you get less punishment than you deserve or need.  Christians say you need to ask for it or somebody has to ask for it for you whether you want it or not.  This is strange.  Yet nobody wants to think John who deserves twenty years in jail for robbery will serve every minute of it while murderer Jack instead of a life sentence gets two years.

When something as basic as mercy has a dark side it shows that the dark side is partly behind all we do.

Christians hold that God's spirit is with us and he has no hands on earth and no mouth on earth but ours.  So while it may be wrong to lie to a person that their trouble does not matter as much as they say, what if divine grace is sending a message like this?  "I am intervening here in ways you do not know to carry you and inspire you.  I will do such a good job that your misfortune will become a mere bad memory."  If you believe in God you have to speak this message. He will be sending it and authorising it.  So it is not a lie then.  This is the difference between you saying that the situation will forcably be turned around and that it is not that bad anyway and God saying it.  Actually you can affirm both at the one time.  Either way the person is going to feel unimportant.

It gets worse.

So God if he is about relationship will be personally communicating with you though it is not like a voice or a vision.  Also you will be deducing things from him and learning that way.  In religion God is the pure good and the source of all things and of all good so he cannot make evil.  Evil is seen as a good that is faulty and thus it is not a thing that is created. It is a lack of a good that could be there and is not. We see harm as evil but this says harm is just a good that is not good enough and as horrible as it feels, it is not that bad....




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