Philosophical musings...

[johnpalmer]

There's an idea that I have that I think might be a bit more unusual than most folks realize.

See, I believe that there's never anything inherently good about pain or suffering.

Now, that "inherently" is a really tricky idea. It's pretty easy to explain, though. I'm saying that, if something happens because of pain (or suffering - I'm using 'pain' for generic 'suffering' because it's short), and you could cause the exact same thing to happen, without pain, overall, the universe is a better place.

The easy application is that, when you have a cost free way to alleviate pain, you should use it. If you have food that will go bad, but could feed someone who's hungry and wants it, you should feed that person. If a person is feeling down, and you smile at them, and cheer them up, you've done something good.

But harder application is that vengeance is wrong. Now, that means that, if someone steals, won't steal again, and has returned what was stolen and paid reasonable damages, the odds are it would be wrong to punish that person for that person's own sake.

A lot of people think that doing something wrong merits punishment, even if the wrong has been undone. I disagree with that idea.


I think there *ARE* times when you could impose penalties morally, regardless of that. To some degree, applying punishment to provide deterrance is reasonable, especially in a human society,where we never know if someone has repented of wrongdoing. Plus, if the penalty for stealing is returning what you stole, and reasonable costs, why not steal? If you get caught, you just have to give it back, and pay a bit...

But,the really tough application of this theory is that I also feel that the common Christian idea of divine justice is completely wrong. ("Common" meaning "Frequent", not "something all Christians hold in common".)

There are multiple ideas of divine justice: most Christians seem to believe in hell (eternal punishment for wrongdoing); the Catholic church has purgatory, where one is punished for sins that don't totally damn a person. A HUGE number believe that Jesus had to die horribly and painfully in order to satisfy God's sense of justice. There was a sin committed, so someone had to suffer.

I reject all of those notions. All of them put some intrinsic goodness on suffering. All of them have wickedness being balanced by pain.

But it's not pain that erases wickednes... it's happiness that does.

This notion came to me while I was dealing with just how pervasive sexual assault was. I was dealing with another person's pain over being raped, and I was thinking about how I'd like to hurt the people who caused this pain, and then suddenly, I realized that I didn't want that at all.

I wanted the woman who'd been raped to be better. That was all that was really important.

That's not to say I didn't want the rapist to be punished... but that the real harm wasn't an unpunished rapist, but an unhealed victim.

It was later on that this idea developed into the idea that pain could never erase that crime, and that the whole concept of vengeance was screwy.

If someone stole $1,000 from you, you might want revenge. But if someone picked up $1,000 that belonged to you, handed you a different set of bills worth one thousand dollars, and you realized that somehow the money had doubled (economics aware people: let's pretend that this could happen miraculously without hurting anyone or anything. Yes, I know, it's impossible... that's why I said "miraculously"), you probably wouldn't be angry at the person, and probably wouldn't want revenge (even though the person did, technically, steal your money).

If you can prevent hurt, or erase hurt, *THAT* is what will fix things. Vengeance might be pragmatic at times (e.g., making sure that 'crime does not pay') but it's nothing, in and of itself.

That made me sure that, if the Christian view of the universe is correct (an all powerful, all wise, all good deity running things) that the Universalist heresy was, in fact, correct.

(I read, on a website about Unitarianism, that the reason for the name "Unitarian Universalists" was a pair of Christian heresies. If I'm remembering right, the Unitarian heresy was that Jesus wasn't God. "There's only one God... thus, Jesus couldn't have been Him." The Universalist heresy was that everyone, eventually, would make it to heaven, because God couldn't/wouldn't leave someone to suffer for eternity.)

I suppose, in the end, that is what might have predicted my break with Christianity... because I don't know of any specific Christian church that doesn't consider universalism a heresy.

Comments

[clauclauclaudia]

A HUGE number believe that Jesus had to die horribly and painfully in order to satisfy God's sense of justice. There was a sin committed, so someone had to suffer.

That's an interesting way of putting it, and I'm skeptical whether it's true. I think it's more that they believe that Jesus accepted a horrible death in order to spare us from justice.

The pain and suffering was to put the whole thing in big blink tags for those who might not notice. ;-)

(Even if you find the two ideas equivalent logically, which I'm not sure they are, that doesn't mean that people who believe B believe A: people can be totally irrational in their beliefs--predicate logic is not how most of us work, deep inside.)

I agree with you, though. It isn't pain that erases wickedness.

I had a whole thing about Buffy the Vampire Slayer here that works better as its own post. So I've posted it instead, here.

Thank you, John, for making me think.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

A HUGE number believe that Jesus had to die horribly and painfully in order to satisfy God's sense of justice. There was a sin committed, so someone had to suffer.

That's an interesting way of putting it, and I'm skeptical whether it's true. I think it's more that they believe that Jesus accepted a horrible death in order to spare us from justice.

The pain and suffering was to put the whole thing in big blink tags for those who might not notice. ;-)

Well, I probably overstated "huge", because the idea bugs me on many levels. I've heard it claimed (in all seriousness, with a This Is Truth tone) that "and at that moment, Jesus became guilty of every sin ever committed", and that "he suffered more than any person ever had, or ever will", and several other things.

Plus, if I found that 10% of Christians believed this as a matter of doctrine, I might consider it *HUGE* ("that's tens of millions of people believing that!") whereas you might feel that it's a tiny number ("One in ten people probably believe that toilets run on electricity, not water!")

I can accept the belief that Jesus died to to save us in some way... the only idea I have problems with is the concept that "there had to be suffering because sins were committed". It might be that the only way that would work involved suffering.

(as an analogy: If it's necessary to survival to grab a hot piece of metal, and you don't have anything to grab it with but your hands, the only way to survive is to risk burning yourself on the metal, but burning yourself wasn't intrinsically necessary to your survival... if you'd had a potholder, you wouldn't have needed to burn yourself. It might be that Jesus had to suffer and die, but I reject the notion that it was intrinsically necessary)

When I was still trying to "reinvent Christianity", though, I'd turned my faith to the idea that he wanted to show that it's never time to despair, and that his message and teachings were, in fact, stronger than death. And, the only way to prove that one must never despair, and to prove that one's message is stronger than death, is to go through something that would make nearly anyone despair, and then die.

I still have beliefs rooted in that idea. I think that, if morality means something, it *IS* stronger than death. I think you should be willing to die to do what's right, if that's the only way to accomplish it.

(Mind you, I'm a relativist insofar as I think it'd be wrong to let yourself die if someone threatened to kill you if you didn't steal a $.25 pack of gum, so "being willing to die for what's right" more or less means "over something that's worth a person's life".)

[mamishka.livejournal.com]

As a friend of Claudia's, I was lead to your page and was interested in your musings, as I have given much thought on this matter too. I posted this in response to her posting, but thought I would post it here too. Just looked at the whole vengence thing without getting into the Christian aspects. As a Christian/pagan, I have my own opinions on that matter which seems like an entirely seperate posting's worth. ;-)

I think the reason that vengence exists is because we cannot turn back time. We cannot stop the wrong, the harm, from being done. But as victims, or loved ones of victims, there is a need for -something- to balance the scale. Something to bring balance into our lives. The perfect balance is of course to eliminate the hurt. But in many cases that is impossible. I know from my own experiences that what I suffer from when I or someone I love is "wronged" is a need to have power and control over the situation in order to make it better. When that is impossible, it is even harder, leading to anger and vengence which are often easier emotions to follow. Anger is can be an emotion of disguise. Often anger is in actually sorrow, shame, guilt. But anger is more acceptable in our society than tears and grief, which are often perceived as weaknesses. Anger gives the illusion of strength. Power. And in situations where we have no control, we often crave having some sort of power to create change.

So we have the urge to make it better. The urge to set things right. The urge to have the power to make a difference. And since the harm usually cannot be undone, if there is a perpetrator, then vengence is something that -can- be done. It is a poor scale, the balance in the end meaningless, save for the fact that it gives us the illusion that we are not completely powerless. That we managed to do -something-.

We are imperfect creatures living in an imperfect world. Often we will take whatever it is that we can get, even if it is only an imperfect balance. I'm not saying that this is right or wrong, simply that it is, and more importantly that it is understandable. Not perhaps the best thing, or the most helpful thing, but an understandable thing.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

I think the reason that vengence exists is because we cannot turn back time. We cannot stop the wrong, the harm, from being done. But as victims, or loved ones of victims, there is a need for -something- to balance the scale. Something to bring balance into our lives. The perfect balance is of course to eliminate the hurt. But in many cases that is impossible. I know from my own experiences that what I suffer from when I or someone I love is "wronged" is a need to have power and control over the situation in order to make it better. When that is impossible, it is even harder, leading to anger and vengence which are often easier emotions to follow. Anger is can be an emotion of disguise. Often anger is in actually sorrow, shame, guilt. But anger is more acceptable in our society than tears and grief, which are often perceived as weaknesses. Anger gives the illusion of strength. Power. And in situations where we have no control, we often crave having some sort of power to create change.

So we have the urge to make it better. The urge to set things right. The urge to have the power to make a difference. And since the harm usually cannot be undone, if there is a perpetrator, then vengence is something that -can- be done. It is a poor scale, the balance in the end meaningless, save for the fact that it gives us the illusion that we are not completely powerless. That we managed to do -something-.


Nod. I definitely understand the urge for vengeance. I even think it can be a "best of bad options". Really, my only concern about it is the idea of vengeance for vengeance's sake... Claudia's post was a good example of it. "No, we wanted his soul to make him suffer, and if it stopped doing that, then we'd end it, regardless of the incredibly high cost of that."

[andreas_schaefer]

A HUGE number believe that Jesus had to die horribly and painfully in order to satisfy God's sense of justice. There was a sin committed, so someone had to suffer.

IIRC from the day my Catholic upbringing meant more to me I learned that Jesus died in a way to satify mans sense of justice. To show once and for all that here was god who walked a mile in mans shoes, Was hungry, cold, horny, had problems getting up in time, doubted God, and went through the whole of human pain including death. To show that there is a god that cares, that god is not demanding good behaviour unfairly (' just because god can't be tempted he demands we should not be, what does he know of living') but limited himself to human size and doubts and experienced that human-ness.

I will not go unto why I left church ( which in Germany, where the state collects church tax for the big ones see: http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=tigerbright&itemid=39316&thread=81044#t81044
involves going to a state office so that the apropriate entry can be made on your tax-file - they tell the church)
exept that yes the idea of a god that condemns some to eternal damnation is not to my liking. Neither can I resolve the sorry stae of the world with a caring and allpowerfull being. And last not least I disagree with the Pope and his local representative, the Archbishop of Cologne, on policy.
As far as I am concerned the unitarian heresy ( as described by you) is an attempt to measure god by human logic and human scale - which is about as aplicable as pre Newtonian physics are to reality, not very much.


As far as revenge and punishment are concerned - you are right.
IMO what societies are justified in doing is protecting the innocent. No more no less. And whilst punishment may work sometimes for that ( but not terribly efficient if one looks at repeat criminals ) revenge does not serve tht pupose.


Also added you to my friend list so I will not miss a post, you write well and interesting.