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ORIGINAL: dcnovice

FR

An excerpt from one of my medical updates might be pertinent to the topic.


September 30, 2013 | The Patience of Job

Few of you will be surprised to read that I do not have the patience of Job. Neither, it turns out, did he.

In my life, the Book of Job has been something of a classic in the Mark Twain sense: a work I’ve read about but never troubled to actually read. That changed last night. I was feeling particularly Job-like. Weariness had consumed the bulk of yet another weekend, and my bowels’ increasingly maddening antics included moving without warning in the middle of a Wilson House tour. After frantically excusing myself, I left the guests standing in the President’s bedroom—a no-no, I’m sure—and tore up to the fourth floor bathroom. Only the knowledge that I had to go finish the tour kept me from melting down. Mercifully, the guests were very kind and don’t seem to have pocketed anything.

With that weighing on me, my thoughts turned to my litany of woes: the depression, the diabetes, the mobility issues that have harassed me all year, and of course the cancer. And second and third thoughts about my choice of surgical procedures. Out of that toxic brew emerged my first “prayer” in days or even weeks: “Why, O God, do you hate me?” A flood of tears followed. No surprise: They were days in coming. I found myself wanting to read William Safire’s provocatively titled reflection on Job: The First Dissident. But before that, I figured, I should really, finally wade into the primary source itself.

So I did. At about halfway through, I confess it’s a bit of a trudge. That’s partly because it’s essentially a play, and simply reading flattens its power. Also, the characters do go on a bit. Actually, a lot. There are three cycles of speeches that all pretty much say the same thing. Job insists that God has wronged him—an innocent man. Then the original Job’s comforters scold him, saying he must be guilty of some sin to be punished so brutally.

I took to Job immediately and adored his supreme impatience. He has the gall to bewail his birth—a shocking thought both then and now—lamenting that he wasn’t stillborn. And he has no plans to suffer in silence. “But I will not hold my peace,” he says, “I will speak out in the distress of my mind and complain in the bitterness of my soul” (Job 7:11). Wow, I thought, this is a guy who gets it! There are times—we’ve all had them—when life truly sucks, and no rosy lens can disguise that.

I already knew the ending, so I didn’t feel bad about peeking ahead. To be honest, it’s a disappointment. God shows up and blasts Job, demanding to know if Job was there when God created the universe and chastising him for the effrontery of questioning the divine design. And then, I’m sorry to say, Job caves. “I have spoken of great things I have not understood…. Therefore I melt away; I repent in dust and ashes” (42:3,6). Ugh. God basically bullies Job into silence and never answers his perfectly valid points. What began as a tale of amazing honesty and power shrivels into the ancient Hebrew version of The Taming of the Shrew.

I haven’t yet read Safire’s reflections, but I did recall—and dig out—an interesting perspective from Bishop John Shelby Spong. In Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism, he cites the Book of Job as an example of “protest literature”—“stories that provided a counterpoint to a prevailing attitude.” That attitude was one we still encounter today: “If [people] were poor and afflicted, they deserved it. Likewise, if they were rich and healthy, they deserved it.” Including Job in the scriptural canon, Spong argues, was a way of spurring the community to pause and consider things from a different angle, to stop assuming God shared their mindset.

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Or to ask the question differently, why didn't God create a pink padded universe as a "safe space" for his little snowflakes?

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Existence is commonly held to be that which objectively persists independent of one's presence.

Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as of the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, (for instance: "Does the stellar structure UDFj-39546284 exist?"), and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences.

Materialism holds that the only things that exist are matter and energy, that all things are composed of material, that all actions require energy, and that all phenomena (including consciousness) are the result of material interactions.

Life is a characteristic that distinguishes objects that have self-sustaining biological processes from those that do not[1][2]—either because such functions have ceased (death), or else because they lack such functions and are classified as "inanimate".[3]

In mathematics, existence is asserted by a quantifier, the existential quantifier, one of two quantifiers (the other being the universal quantifier). The properties of the existential quantifier are established by axioms.

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ORIGINAL: WickedsDesire

No whoremods and you know that to be not true why say it less I missed sarcasm

MrRodgers

Even I do not believe them to be purely fiction and I fell from grace a long long time ago but you went on to say our problem today where more than 2 billion humans act upon, some moderate...far too many, with violence.

I can neither prove or disprove a god, much like the tooth fairy. But one must logically conclude should a god exist then so must the toothfairy

What is existence - energy - probably, who said that. Which is why I like my hotwater bottle but those fukers can burn....personally I find the notion of a god(s) absurd...oh dear - hmm and do not all those crap greek god films utilise that argument....ack energy cannot create energy even I know that

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ORIGINAL: WickedsDesire

No whoremods and you know that to be not true why say it less I missed sarcasm

MrRodgers

Even I do not believe them to be purely fiction and I fell from grace a long long time ago but you went on to say our problem today where more than 2 billion humans act upon, some moderate...far too many, with violence.

I can neither prove or disprove a god, much like the tooth fairy. But one must logically conclude should a god exist then so must the toothfairy

What is existence - energy - probably, who said that. Which is why I like my hotwater bottle but those fukers can burn....personally I find the notion of a god(s) absurd...oh dear - hmm and do not all those crap greek god films utilise that argument....ack energy cannot create energy even I know that

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ORIGINAL: Real0ne

effects are the result of a cause

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ORIGINAL: bondageerone

WHY did he/she make;;;;

diseases, the Nazis, do not go back too far, it could all be b/s.

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ORIGINAL: freedomdwarf1

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ORIGINAL: Nthrall

Why did we make god/s?

Because weak-minded people need something to believe in so they can blame things on something else when the shit hits the fan 'coz they won't hold themselves to account.
It's also a way to blame/explain things they don't understand.

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ORIGINAL: dcnovice

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Or to ask the question differently, why didn't God create a pink padded universe as a "safe space" for his little snowflakes?

As I awaited sleep last night, I found myself musing over who those "little snowflakes" are.

A few examples from my own experiences:

-- Friends who just buried a six-year-old son, lost to a rare form of cancer.

-- An ICU roommate whose brain had been battered years earlier by electroshock, robbing him of the ability to read and his teaching career.

-- His distraught wife, vainly trying to help her confused, stubborn husband understand the need for a lung procedure he kept refusing to consent to.

-- A colleague frantically seeking a blood-marrow match for her 11-year-old son with leukemia.

-- ER nurses who needed to don masks before approaching the bed of a high/drunk patient who kept spitting at people.

-- Another roommate, who cried plaintively through the night for his wife, not comprehending that she'd simply gone home for the evening and would return in the morning.

-- A man and woman (brother and sister, I think) in the lounge on one unit, clashing over whether the time had come to remove a loved one's feeding tube.

-- A friend's husband, paralyzed from the neck down by MS.

-- A pair of colleagues who perished aboard the jet that hit the Pentagon on 9/11.

-- The families of the children my colleagues were shepherding on an educational adventure.

-- My grandmother, a brilliant, troubled soul who basically drank herself to death.

-- A fellow radiation patient who'd had 30 cancerous nodes removed from her lung five years earlier and was now battling tumors in her brain.

-- Rehab patients struggling to relearn how to function after losing limbs.

-- A first-time hyperbaric-oxygen patient terrified of being sealed in a tank for two hours.

-- A friend who faithfully and daily visits a husband who no longer knows who she is.

-- A father in the ER waiting area, his face gripped in helpless sorrow, trying to comfort a son who kept pleading, "Please Dad, make it stop! It hurts so much."

Those are some of the "little snowflakes" I've encountered.

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ORIGINAL: thishereboi

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ORIGINAL: freedomdwarf1

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ORIGINAL: Nthrall

Why did we make god/s?

Because weak-minded people need something to believe in so they can blame things on something else when the shit hits the fan 'coz they won't hold themselves to account.
It's also a way to blame/explain things they don't understand.

Then it is all good, they have all that and the athiests have someone to call weak-minded and stupid so they can feel better about themselves. Sounds like a win win situation

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Those are not the kind of people who are referred to as "little snowflakes", at least by sane people.

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ORIGINAL: tamaka

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ORIGINAL: thishereboi

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ORIGINAL: freedomdwarf1

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ORIGINAL: Nthrall

Why did we make god/s?

Because weak-minded people need something to believe in so they can blame things on something else when the shit hits the fan 'coz they won't hold themselves to account.
It's also a way to blame/explain things they don't understand.

Then it is all good, they have all that and the athiests have someone to call weak-minded and stupid so they can feel better about themselves. Sounds like a win win situation

Very good point.
And honestly... not weak- minded. Just people who seem to have accepted one possible answer. Everyone else that doesn't accept it is satisfied with "we have no clue". One isn't necessarily better than the other... unless of course...

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ORIGINAL: Real0ne
or people with a broader understanding of academics, in which there is more to life than materialism

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ORIGINAL: WickedsDesire

No whoremods and you know that to be not true why say it less I missed sarcasm

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ORIGINAL: tamaka
And honestly... not weak- minded. Just people who seem to have accepted one possible answer. Everyone else that doesn't accept it is satisfied with "we have no clue". One isn't necessarily better than the other... unless of course...

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ORIGINAL: freedomdwarf1

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ORIGINAL: tamaka
And honestly... not weak- minded. Just people who seem to have accepted one possible answer. Everyone else that doesn't accept it is satisfied with "we have no clue". One isn't necessarily better than the other... unless of course...

So what would you call people who believe in something that has never been proven to exist since inception??

It's a blame game.
Can't take responsibility for self - blame something else.
Can't explain something - credit/blame your imaginary friend.

I don't see an imaginary friend as '...a possible answer'.
It's a cop-out.