a question of the human condition.....

[Peter Kropotkin]

How can one believe in god when the world created by him,
is so full of suffering?

where is the mercy of god when a child of 3, dies a painful death
from a brain tumor?

One looks about the world and what do we see? suffering and agony
and disease and death.... the question of god is a question
of why is there suffering and evil in the world?

for me anyway, the answer to this question of why is there evil
and suffering in the world, comes from the random, chaotic
nature of reality.... at best, life is nothing more than a crap shoot.....

why is there being instead of non-being? chance, probability,
chaos, randomness......

but the question then becomes, if life is random, probability,
chance.......and all our life plans come to naught,
or as one said it best....

''Life is what happens to you when you had other plans''

how do we fit this randomness, this chaos into our working
philosophies? What would Kant say about our lives being
dominated by chance and probability? Its seem that the only
philosopher who has even spotted this aspect is Nietzsche...

So, what are we to make of a reality that is chaotic and random?

and within that randomness and chaos, lies one the major problems
of philosophy, which is this: what is the role of morality/ethics given
the random nature of the universe?
How are we to understand ethics given that our lives is chance,
is chaos put into practice? to a great extent, we can now see that
the drive in human beings to exists within the '''ONE'' be it god
or some higher power in the universe, stems from the chaotic
nature of the universe..... Human beings want to be united with
something greater than they are... be it nature or nationalism
or religion, or some ism/ideology..... the racism we see in America
today is just another attempt to create meaning in some higher
force than exists within ourselves alone, individually.....
If I hate, be it blacks or Jews or women, as conservatives do,
then I am part of a class of people who also hate... that
commonality, in holding to hate, brings me closer to something
bigger than I am.... and thus we see its appeal..... it's wrong,
but I can see its appeal....

and where do liberals find their meaning? We find meaning in
more universal values.... Values of diversity, of tolerance,
the liberal holds to more collective values than conservatives do.....
conservatives hold to the values of the individual, whereas
liberals hold to the values of the many or of all......

And as nature, evolution has created human beings with a social
nature... we cannot exist alone, we are, for better or worse,
pack animals..... and we call this pack, tribes or perhaps even
citizens..... when we describe others, we use words that
identify others within a groups of people... for example, I might
identify another as an American, a group, or I might say, male,
another group, or white another group....

we might even get more specific in our identifications,
he is middle class, or she went to Stanford University,
but still our means of identifying others involved the use
of groups, be it social, economic, political, philosophical....
that is how we identify others.. by which group they belong to....
that is part of the social nature of human beings.... we belong
to groups and we are identified within those groups....
but this identification of others has nothing to do with the suffering
of human beings....

and we return to this question, how do we account for suffering
within our human lives? and then we can use this identification
of human beings as one means, one means of locating
the human condition which, at its heart, about suffering.....
to be human is to suffer..... and if suffering exists because
it is an essential aspect of the human condition, then we must
learn to accept suffering as an essential aspect of being human....

what have you done to accept suffering as an essential aspect
of being human?

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

one of the typical responses is that god will ''reward''
his followers with eternal life.... that has always seemed to
be rather poor recompense for one's suffering...

''The book of Job'' has god betting with Satan, that
the man Job, will remain on gods side given
a time of troubles..... Satan, then proceeds to
torture and abuse Job in wide variety of ways...
including the death of his family.....
and in return to remaining ''loyal'' to god,
Job gets ''rewarded'' with fairly meaningless
crap...... his reward for being tortured...
and what is eternal life, given you just been
tortured? poor, very poor recompense....

and in terms of guilt and innocence....
Job was tortured as if guilty, not innocent,
and what exactly was Job's crime, that deemed
him ''worthy'' of being tortured?
as far as I can tell, his crime was his belief in god......
that is why he is tortured.... to get him to forsake god....
even in, especially with his being tortured...

so, let remove god from this equation....
where would the blame lie in the case of Job being
forced to suffer... would the blame lie with Job?
Of course not.... the very suffering now becomes a random,
chaotic event, that could happen to anyone... if one were
be so unlucky.... but in doing it this way, we take away
both guilt and innocence... the draw of the cards as it were....
luck condemn Job, nothing more... and luck is not neither
guilty or innocent... it just is....

But Kropotkin, that is not very satisfying....
in every story there is a hero and a villain....
in your story there is no hero and there is no villain...
just luck.... yah, and?

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

and if one were to take a look at science, the basis
for science is probability....chance, luck...

for example, the theory of Evolution is basically a theory of the
probability of becoming life.... that species change and adapt due
to chance, and probability is one of the cardinal points of evolution...
that human beings became human beings due to chance
and luck.... that the universe itself, the big bang, as it were,
is a chance event.... there doesn't seem to be any type of rational,
reasoned theory behind the big bang theory.... suddenly, the universe
was created.... about a random event as one is ever going to get....

the lack of meaning or purpose in the universe due to its random nature,
is one of the primary reasons, that we human beings today, don't have
any sort of sense of their being a purpose or meaning behind existence....
why would any random event, such as the big bang, have any
sort of meaning or purpose behind it? its random...
where does one find meaning or purpose in random?
How can we find meaning or purpose in a chaotic and random universe?

So, given this chance nature of the universe, how do we construct
an ethics, a morality that speaks to the random nature of the universe?

Kropotkin

[Peter Kropotkin]

and in a random, chaotic universe, it really doesn't matter in
any, way, shape or form, how the universe began....
if the universe began from random factors, then the why
of existence is irrelevant.... it doesn't matter.....
whether the universe got its start from the big bang or
other theories, the question of the big bang, revolves
around this.... was it planned, was it just a random event?
the questions that arise from the universe being planned,
are questions that human beings may not want to know....
or as they say, be careful what you wish for, you might get it.....

Kropotkin