I think what drives this is people who are unable to suffer with you. It’s a kind of defense mechanism driven by their own fear of suffering.
As I’ve found, only people who have been through it, know how to talk to another who is going through it. Even then I wouldn’t bet my life on it.
Like the mom who has a difficult child and the other mom with perfect kids looks sideways at her and the kid on the playground. My youngest child had colic, before this experience I would have thought colic was something easy, that it was no big deal. How wrong I was!
I’ll add people can also minimize your suffering with or without religious language because of emotional trauma in their past which has been covered over and hides behind a mask.
I think this is definitely part of it.
Alternating days and nights with my husband at the hospital with a very sick and altered kid for 12 weeks, while doing all the arranging to continue a good attachment with the adopted child, was a baptism none of us wanted, and reverberates a decade later. And it was far from the worst we saw. You enter a “club” you never wanted to join, and even years later, it shows.
Definitely, a lot of people try to keep it light. Upbeat. “Hullo! We’re down in the grave here.”
Unfortunately, some really bad advice has come from good pastors.
Our church had a grief pastor who was a real jewel. He said something, and it’s more than words, as there was also sadness in his eyes, “it’s ok that it’s not ok.”
Yeah. This is about as unamerican as it gets, isn’t it.
It’s horrific, when Shirley Temple was able to sum up so much of American theology and sentiment.
Temple Shirley
Little Miss Broadway (1938)
Be Optimistic
Lyrics/Music W.Bullock/H.Spina
Be optimistic!
Don’t you be a grumpy
When the road gets bumpy
Just smile
(Smile and be happy!)
Your troubles can’t be
As bad as all that
When you’re sad as all that
No one loves you
Be optimistic!
Don’t you be a mourner
Brighten up that corner
And smile
Don’t wear a long face
It’s never in style
Be optimistic
And smile!
I eventually threw the movie in the trash (had been a gift to the girls) with the girls’ blessing.
There’s something utterly perverse about that sentiment, when you’re looking at [ fill in the scene of real horror that comes to your mind ].
I know of someone indirectly who was recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and I expect is going have difficulty. She is (was?) said to have “incredible faith.” Before the biopsy and the diagnosis she told the doctor not to say “cancer” because she was going to be in the one to two percent where it isn’t.
In the retirement high-rise where my folks spent their last years, a neighboring apartment had an organ and all that the woman ever played was “Que sera sera”.
I’m so sorry. Awfull things. I know this might not be what you wanna hear but
Not all nihilists are like that. I’ve met some people who have described themselves as nihilists and one of them even has a family. That’s why I’ve said before I don’t wanna take extremes.
I’m gonna go to church on Easter for the first time after a year or so. But because the people who have hurted me are in my city of birth(which on holidays I return so to visit my parents)Im not gonna go to my old parish.
I hate the people there and I’ll never forgive them for what they did. Since my city it’s a small one there aren’t many churches to go.
However I found one a little bit far but I’m willing to go there and attend liturgy.
It was the people here in the forum that made me realize not all Christians are like that (although I do still have some biases for the majority ). I don’t know what people there are in the other orthodox church I’ll go but I hope they are accepting.
I went to a Roman Catholic one on Christmas and took communion(which the orthodox church forbids us to do so) but as I’ve said I don’t take extremes. Not even dogmas.
I hope you too Kendell don’t take the extreme side of negativity towards nihilists. Some are like the school shooter above. But others are normal and even some are hurt that’s why they adopted the ideology
Actually, I don’t take a negative view of nihilists as a whole. I see from your response how unclear (again) I was in what I wrote. I meant to say that the entier situation at MSU could enforce a nihilistic view of everything. I wasn’t focused on the murderer himself.
No, whenever I have attempted to maintain some extreme view of much of anything, someone comes along eventually and disabuses me of the view.
I hope your visit home goes well and that the church you go to is welcoming. Also that you don’t have to take grief about going to a different church that day. It can be so complicated.
I mentioned a video of an interview with a buddhist that Iain McGilchrist did a few months ago in the welcome back @jstump thread and alerted @Kendel to its relevance to this thread on Meaning. Then I just came across another interview by a second buddhist, apparently taped at the same event which is starting out like gangbusters. For anyone who can afford the time to listen to the first 8 minutes, I’d be interested to discuss both what they say and what that says about the meaning of life. Beyond that I’d also like to chip away at the idea that the only acceptable Christian goal is to convert the entire world to its cultural approach.
Imagine some day intelligent aliens arrived on earth who openly sought us out for the opportunity to meet another sentient, sapient creature and to explore what common features we might share in our sense of who we are, how we live and what we value. Further suppose we discover they too have a sense of the sacred to which they attach great, overarching importance. Should Christians seek to convert them too? Or might the galaxy be big enough for more than one approach to the sacred? If we can abide an alien race with a different road map to the divine, should we be able to do the same with buddhists, muslims and Hindus. If God had trademark interests in being the center of every being’s sense of the sacred, might He not have been more strident about converting them than in holding their neighbors in the same regard as they do themselves?
It’s mostly elders that go there,so I don’t mind them as much. Although elders in Greece are no joke. They can be very judgemental sometimes and rude. But I guess I’ll be fine.
If not I’ll go back to the Roman Catholic one I went on Christmas. In my city there are so few Catholics I only met like 20 people max in there.
The fewer the better for me.
I don’t want any distraction and I want to pass this Easter peacefully.
If I go to my old parish my feelings won’t be anything appropriate for the situation.
I might even lash at some of them since my mental state isn’t very good
Last time I visited my town of birth and saw some of them I was shaking and was in the verge of having a seizure. I don’t know what’s that called but when I see them something like anxiety or something kicks up and I feel very uncomfortable near them.
I think I would gently push on some of the worldview issues at play here if that’s ok. For most Christians their faith is not (principally) a philosophy by which they make sense of the world, it is what they believe to be true, at the most fundamental, basic level. It is something that runs to core of who they are in the world. In that sense their theology matters and impacts how they live… or should at least.
Their desire, therefore, to help others come into the fold of faith is because they believe Christianity to be the truth and that folks eternal destinies are in the balance. (This is true incidental of many Muslims too, Islam also being a monotheistic, proselytising religion.) Such actions, attitudes, and beliefs are not acts of intellectual and cultural supremacy in my view, but are (or should) be acts motivated by humble love. As someone famously said, evangelism is one beggar showing another beggar where to find bread.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I support freedom of religion and religious expression. I believe we all benefit from a society in which all are free and able to practice our beliefs without recourse or reprisal. I would never want to see State enforced religion… EVER. However, I would love nothing more than everyone to choose become a Christian. How could I not, it is the only logical conclusion of my theology and theology is important. To say otherwise would be inconsistent with my beliefs, dishonest, and hypocritical.
So where then do we draw then line? If I say I want everyone to be a Christian that would appear to some as ideologically imperialist, yet so might it to say that everyone should consider all religious viewpoints equally valid. And there in lies the rub. Is it OK for me to say that I love Hindus, Buddhist, and Muslims; that I would would fight for their right to freely and peacefully practice their beliefs; even though I consider those beliefs deeply mistaken and if given the opportunity would share (gently and respectfully) what I believe to be the truth? If it isn’t, then I would say that the religious pluralist is not much different from the religious exclusivist, since they too want everyone to share their views on religion.
Thanks for making me think, and for listening to me think out loud.
Hmmm… if I might politely add something, I have from time to time dreamed of asking an alien race if an infinite series can be formed through sequential addition… yes I am that big of an apologetics geek.
Of course, my pleasure. I also enjoy thinking about such matters, especially with someone as thoughtful and gracious as yourself. In the interest of gentle pushing I would return the favor by pointing out that no one knows God in the objective, detailed way they may know cars or mathematics or insects. Whatever God/gods may be, they aren’t the kind of thing we can study up close. We can confess what it is in our experience which persuades us of the truth of our belief, but the only thing we can study in detail is the history of what other people have thought and written down as theology. I anticipate you thinking but what about revelation, miracles and prophets? To that all I can say is we must all claim the truth that calls us and enriches our understanding of what we are here for. Those of us content with the truth we hold now, you and I for example, will have a hard time being persuaded by arguments in favor of what other people believe. That is as it should be since we don’t so much choose such truth for reasons as recognize it. Regardless the truth regarding what is sacred is not something we can be pushed toward by rational arguments; it is instead something that draws us or else it doesn’t.
We certainly cannot comprehend God, as in surround him in knowledge as we can more or less can with some things physical – it’s not for nothing he is called ‘inscrutable’ in a couple of places in the Bible. But we can certainly know, as in apprehend, much of him in what he has explicitly and implicitly and logically revealed to us. How many blind men were there ‘apprehending’ the elephant? We have way more data and true knowledge about God than all of them did about the elephant. I think that also says something about the meaning of life.
I would add God cannot be known in the way a flea can, and neither can there be an infinite number of those things. Yet he can be known better than that, as an infinite being who makes himself known to us in the most unexpected ways.
I don’t know. It’s a start at least. And I’m sure the regular non-Christians here have prayed and seen some contradictory things. I really don’t know their stories. I’m a 46 yo guy who has spent nearly 25 years as a Christian.
In one of those Asbury articles I shared, something was said about the surpassing worth of a single moment of the Divine. It’s pretty awesome how that can change anyone’s mind. I remember Edwards said one of the marks of the First Great Awakening, was that old people who were hardened in their unbelief, came to Christ. I’d like to think that God can do it again, I know he can because he did it for me. A single touch of his Spirit.
