>>200721How I envy your faith. There's really just one thing stopping me from believing in God and that is how life is structured. It's fraught with suffering, disgrace and pain. In fact, those things are not only unfortunate accidents, they are essential parts of how life works and develops. Seeing a dog in shrieking agony over the side of the road with its bottom half turned to jelly is really something that makes you think. What could that dog possibly do to deserve that? His suffering can't possibly be related to Adam's disobedience, animals don't have free will to disobey its Creator and yet here we are, with all animals, including us, in a deep state of endemic suffering and destruction. And for nothing, really. Basically, an honest observation of how life and nature works really excludes the idea that this is the creation of a loving God. It's fundamentally incompatible, there's no other way around it.
Then, many years later, I read how Buddha also saw how this world is fucked and he doesn't beat around the bush or try to pretend it's actually pretty cute, like Christians would do. He just acknowledges the fact and say there's a way to end your own suffering, by a multitude of spiritual practices that basically makes you detached from all this horror. That lies more in line with my own, honest observation of reality. Of course, Buddha assumes individuals get fucked because of some shit they did in a previous life, basically blaming the victim, and that doesn't suit well with me because I can't observe people's past lives, I can only observe life here and from here all I can see is many people and animals getting fucked over completely random events, unrelated to their moral standing. So again, it takes a leap of faith I can't spare. Maybe I'm really just arrogant, thinking I'm smarter than all those guys. I wish I could lose that but so far I haven't made any progress.
So there I have it, on one side Abrahamic religions trying to tell the world is a product of a loving God, which is absurd, and on the other side I have Buddha saying yes the world is fucked but shit happens because of shit you did in the past, which also strikes me as absurd, so I'm pretty much stuck in between, I can't honestly embrace these doctrines, even though I would really like to become religious. I like the idea of having faith, but observation of the world aroun
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