Bruce Willis Retires from acting due to aphasia

[McAvoy]

You don't even need to suffer to understand those in suffering.

For many, yes, they do.

The same goes for mental health issues. Barbara Bush is an example who admitted she was critical and looked own on those with depression until she found herself struggling with it.

Suffering is there because it's part of the world in which there is pain receptors and a brain to have mental distress. That's it.

There's more it beyond that level of being. We as people do not operate on that level, we operate on the level of meaning. The whole issue of justness/unjustness is a part of this.

Why would a just God have a mother lose her child to some horrible childhood cancer to just teach her a lesson?

Who says God made that happen? Who says it was a lesson?

If there was no pain then we wouldn’t have very effective means to avert death. I at least thought that much was obvious lol.

Pain and suffering are different.

Pain is what we experience and suffering is how we deal with it.

Anyway pain is needed. Look up people who have no pain. They are constantly injuring themselves without knowing it. Even to the point of permanent disfigurement.

Suffering is needed as well, but it is the crossroads at which people find out who they are. Some suffering and find the suffering betters them, others do shit like go on a mass shooting out of resentment.

Not going to argue. You do you.

[TGLS]

Why would a just God have a mother lose her child to some horrible childhood cancer to just teach her a lesson?

Who says God made that happen? Who says it was a lesson?

Well let's look at where we started:

Sad as f-k. And people wonder why you are an atheist when you live in a world that can rob a man so cruelly.

OK, let's start there. This invokes an argument that goes something like this.
1) God exists
2) God is defined as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being.
3) There are horrible, pointless tragedies that happen in the world. (i.e. Bruce Willis getting Aphasia, half a dozen stillbirths, children dying, etc.)
4) An omniscient being would be aware of premise 3.
5) An omnipotent being could construct or alter reality such that premise 3 would not happen.
6) An omnibenevolent being would care about premise 3.
7) Premises 2 & 3 are contradictory, as premises 4, 5 & 6 prove that such a being would have the means, motive, and awareness to stop premise 3 from happening.
8) Therefore, premise 1 is false.

You could argue that premise 2 is false, but that clashes with the general Western interpretation of god. You could argue that premise 3 is false, but that would be tricky, given that's an uphill battle against all the pointless and horrible things that happen in the world. I don't think premises 4 thru 6 are debatable. Premises 7 & 8 basically link together the first 6 premises into an argument, so I don't think you can really argue with them

Now let's go back here:

Who says God made that happen?

Literally? Probably not. As metaphor for responsibility? Yeah that sounds about right. Unless you're going to say someone who watches a flashing "Avert Catastrophe" button and does nothing is totally not responsible for the catastrophe.

Who says it was a lesson?

Apparently you:

You don't even need to suffer to understand those in suffering.

For many, yes, they do.

[Beastro]

Literally? Probably not. As metaphor for responsibility? Yeah that sounds about right. Unless you're going to say someone who watches a flashing "Avert Catastrophe" button and does nothing is totally not responsible for the catastrophe.

I'd would rather paint it as a parent who isn't always there helicoptering and snowplowing to remove all trouble and obstacles from the path of their child. We are not pets nor should God be in our pocket to be whipped out to make what we don't like in the world be removed and ignored when not needed. Many people wish the relationship was the other way around from how it is.

As for doing nothing about it all, well, your talking to a Christian here. We have this big thing central we obsess about, about how Christ actually has done something big about taking responsibility for the evil of the world.

Apparently you:

No. While I don't discount that such lessons come into people's life, I'm not saying all are so. Many just are because because that is how the wold is. I'm not speaking from the position that God's sitting back and deciding to throw tragedies around to do so as a universal in the stereotypical Newtonian conception of God as a mechanical watchmaker ("I'm gonna snap this rope so that piano falls on Jimmy Brown to put him in the hospital. That'll teach him!"). We can learn lessons from things on our own nonetheless.

Many things stem from fallenness and malevolence which goes to our choices as human beings while other things are a part of life and have their place though we hate them, such as mortality. It is hard to deal with things like the latter, but they are there for a reason. A deer doesn't like that their forest has wolves in it wanting to eat her, but all are there to keep the ecosystem alive and in check through the cycle of lie and death. That stands in contrast to, say, people moving in and clear cutting the forest and ripping out every natural resource they can leaving a wasteland behind. The symbolic essence of the Fall is Man's collapse from that relationship and how we have changed the paradigm with which we relate to the world and God over hundreds of thousands of years.

Willis' condition here is like the deer and the wolves, it is an outcome of the complexity of the world and that complexity causing disorder. Malevolence might have played a part if you want to be pedantic depending on how exactly how this arose in him given the impact modern life has on us.

I feel your presumption is that the tragic elements of life are intrinsically malevolent, similar to how people see chaos is intrinsically malevolent. That is not my position. Those tragic elements serve only to make life more living. Life doesn't really feel real if we never are prone to loss and suffering. To never experience that would be to cut us off from the real depths of living. It is like playing a video game all the time with console commands open and file editing. It may be fun in a way, but it's never as fun as playing the game as it's intended where the chances of losing beyond your control are very real and you suffer to improve.

You can say that this just shows he isn't benevolent, I disagree. You want things a certain way and I say you conceive of Man's relationship with God as the opposite of what it actually is, and expressing that is a sign of our Fallenness: God isn't here to cater to us or shield us from the harshness of the world but to be a parent to guide those children willing to listen and follow to grow to be more.

[McAvoy]

OK I won't argue but I am going to provide the popcorn for this though.

[clearspira]

Literally? Probably not. As metaphor for responsibility? Yeah that sounds about right. Unless you're going to say someone who watches a flashing "Avert Catastrophe" button and does nothing is totally not responsible for the catastrophe.

I'd would rather paint it as a parent who isn't always there helicoptering and snowplowing to remove all trouble and obstacles from the path of their child. We are not pets nor should God be in our pocket to be whipped out to make what we don't like in the world be removed and ignored when not needed. Many people wish the relationship was the other way around from how it is.

As for doing nothing about it all, well, your talking to a Christian here. We have this big thing central we obsess about, about how Christ actually has done something big about taking responsibility for the evil of the world.

Apparently you:

No. While I don't discount that such lessons come into people's life, I'm not saying all are so. Many just are because because that is how the wold is. I'm not speaking from the position that God's sitting back and deciding to throw tragedies around to do so as a universal in the stereotypical Newtonian conception of God as a mechanical watchmaker ("I'm gonna snap this rope so that piano falls on Jimmy Brown to put him in the hospital. That'll teach him!"). We can learn lessons from things on our own nonetheless.

Many things stem from fallenness and malevolence which goes to our choices as human beings while other things are a part of life and have their place though we hate them, such as mortality. It is hard to deal with things like the latter, but they are there for a reason. A deer doesn't like that their forest has wolves in it wanting to eat her, but all are there to keep the ecosystem alive and in check through the cycle of lie and death. That stands in contrast to, say, people moving in and clear cutting the forest and ripping out every natural resource they can leaving a wasteland behind. The symbolic essence of the Fall is Man's collapse from that relationship and how we have changed the paradigm with which we relate to the world and God over hundreds of thousands of years.

Willis' condition here is like the deer and the wolves, it is an outcome of the complexity of the world and that complexity causing disorder. Malevolence might have played a part if you want to be pedantic depending on how exactly how this arose in him given the impact modern life has on us.

I feel your presumption is that the tragic elements of life are intrinsically malevolent, similar to how people see chaos is intrinsically malevolent. That is not my position. Those tragic elements serve only to make life more living. Life doesn't really feel real if we never are prone to loss and suffering. To never experience that would be to cut us off from the real depths of living. It is like playing a video game all the time with console commands open and file editing. It may be fun in a way, but it's never as fun as playing the game as it's intended where the chances of losing beyond your control are very real and you suffer to improve.

You can say that this just shows he isn't benevolent, I disagree. You want things a certain way and I say you conceive of Man's relationship with God as the opposite of what it actually is, and expressing that is a sign of our Fallenness: God isn't here to cater to us or shield us from the harshness of the world but to be a parent to guide those children willing to listen and follow to grow to be more.

Here's the elephant in the room my man: it was your God who decided how harsh the universe should be. It was your God who decided to give cancer to children. It was your God who designed the reproductive process to frequently be lethal. It was your God who decided that seawater would be lethal, it was your God who created plagues, and locusts, and mosquitoes. It was your benevolent God who decided that his beloved children should have to suffer any of that. ''Let me guide you through the shit that I am inflicting upon you'' sounds like victim blaming to me.

If you were trying to convince me that the Greek gods exist - a group of murderous, selfish, petty, misogynistic rapists - then I would be all for it. I can see their influence all around me. But God being a lover? A teacher? A friend? Nah, mate. You are describing an abusive relationship that I wish to have no part in.

[Thebestoftherest]

clearspira what the heck does that have to do with the subject at hand?

[TGLS]

clearspira what the heck does that have to do with the subject at hand?

We've moved on to arguing about religion, keep up.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

None of those are really contradictions in what religion addresses.

[Beastro]

clearspira what the heck does that have to do with the subject at hand?

Tragedy and pain happen in the world and he's angry because he derives his values from the same deity of the belief system that he is condemning.

''Let me guide you through the shit that I am inflicting upon you'' sounds like victim blaming to me.

And it is interesting that is your reaction to suffering.

Should we just have bless and no pain? Only enough pain to make a point and nothing really bad? Like I said, without that is life really living? We can all deny so many things in the world, but no one denies pains and suffering. To me, the reason why it's there is because it's undeniable. It is humbling through it's undeniablity.

I'm reminded of someone I know who admitted to me after being repeatedly sexually assaulted in their young life that they were overwhelmingly tempted to go out and find a toddler to abuse so someone else would know fully the pain they felt. I helped encourage them to seek help, which they did finding a therapist and being freed of that desire. Now that person is working towards becoming a trauma counselor specifically because of what they went through.

And let me tell you, this little bit that I speak of is just the tip of the iceberg of the misery they have suffered in life. I have known no one else who has had such a raw deal, but they have still faced the utter malevolence that was inflicted on them and gone in the direction of using it to better themselves and the world rather than repeat the evil of the people who chose to molest them (and I have at times wondered what was done to them to have done that).

But no, just give us pure bliss and no challenges, cater to us please, oh Lord?

If you were trying to convince me that the Greek gods exist - a group of murderous, selfish, petty, misogynistic rapists - then I would be all for it. I can see their influence all around me. But God being a lover? A teacher? A friend? Nah, mate. You are describing an abusive relationship that I wish to have no part in.

Of course you see them all around you. They are the aspectual representations of the world within it. Forces above us on a higher level of being, but still a part of the world.

Pagans saw the world as amoral, a meta-divine realm which nothing created of which the gods were just more powerful beings in a constant swirl of struggle and infighting. In such a world there is little room for moral outrage at the harshness of life, that only came with the Christian Era. Yet as much as you say you'd be all for it, you're not. You hold that there is something more, an "ought" that should make this "is" better. You might not know where that came from, but your outrage is well known, Nietzsche already encapsulated it by saying Christianity set a standard for itself that it couldn't meet and you're just yet another Modern taking that standard up with rage.

You have a part in it, though you deny it. Had you not you'd not express such bitterness in your words.

clearspira what the heck does that have to do with the subject at hand?

Apparently a lot given the last bit of the OP.

As for Willis, it's just a shame he had to finish his professional career doing these movies, especially now that anyone who watches these films will now know the depressing context of why he's in them and why he's behaving so strangely,

[Madner Kami]

But no, just give us pure bliss and no challenges, cater to us please, oh Lord?

Oh spare us this BS. If God would want that, he could instill humility in us without the need for suffering to begin with. He designed us, after all, did he not in your belief?

In all seriousness, start looking at the world through your own eyes, not the eyes of a belief-system someone forced upon you, even though you certainly don't feel that way. Pain and suffering are shit, but they are part of living and thus can be a (sometimes necessary) humbling experience. But at the same time they are horrible experiences that noone should have to get through and that we all should work to solve for future generation's sakes. I do not need a God or a god to create this drive in me. It's the sensible thing, a thing empathy is capable of teaching you just as much as going through the same suffering.