The Problem Of Pain

[Darth_Bill]

>perhaps instead of "finding it" on their own, they are instead shown? few find it in their mortal life on earth, but everyone will be shown everything beyond the veil.

Yes, I know all that. I used to be a temple worker until kids came into my life. If this statement is about baptism, and not about eternal life, the temple nullifies Christ's sayings. If it is about eternal life, then not many people will get there.

>no one would be happy in heaven if everyone wasn't happy - heaven would not exist - we're all in this together...

How does your view jive with separation of the kingdoms? do you feel there is any separation?

> The root of their suffering is our inadequacies or Satan’s influence.

Cancer is who's doing now? My ward just had a very young boy die of cancer. I can very easily see how this would affect someone. It isn't all rainbows and butterflies and much of humanity lead horrible lives compared to us. "Part of God's plan" isn't all that comforting to some and there are serious intellectual issues. Many put it on the shelf and use faith to shield the questions from their eyes. Some visit it and try to make sense out of it. Really, the book of Job is very instructive here.

Edited June 22, 2011 by Darth_Bill

[wenglund]

To me, pain isn't a problem, but rather a force for good. At the very least it helps minimize the harm we may do to ourselves and others, and it is a powerful motivator towards progression.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

[Loran Blood]

Let me again reiterate that any pain or suffering cause by the 3 instances I mentioned fit nicely within the plan of salvation and are often capable of creating beings who are fit to live Eternal lives with God.

1. Our own choices

2. The choices of others

3. Special circumstances, like in the case of Abraham, where God designs a special course of instruction for us through trial, tribulation, or some type of personalized instruction/test.

Outside of these three examples, the problem of pain becomes extremely difficult to reconcile within Mormon theological tenets. Especially when we get very very specific.

Example:

"news that two cherished little ones had perished alone in a field on a bitter Saskatchewan night, wearing nothing more than T-shirts and diapers. "I feel sad, I don't like to talk much," said Pearl Pauchay, the grief-stricken grandmother of little Kaydance Pauchay, 3, and her sister Santana, who was only a year old. "It's sad to have a loss."

...Both bodies had been covered by blowing snow. What little clothing they had offered the youngsters no chance of survival against a wind chill that had dipped around -50 C that night." Yellow Quill Reserve

This would appear to me to be nothing more than a case of what has been misnamed as "natural evil," but which is really nothing more than what should properly, and especially in a gospel context, be understood as tragedy. This understanding sets such events within that part of the plan of salvation that foresees and, indeed, foreordains what we understand as the human condition; those conditions attendant to the Fall and Telestialization of the world within which everything from dark, freezing nights, to tsetse flies and falling tree branches are a natural, common, and required (especially in their apparant randomness and, in many cases, high degree of improbability in being in the right place at just the right time) as part of the refining crucible of faith that is central to the plan.

Now in this instance, it would not have violated any natural laws that I can think of if God would have built these little ones a fire and sent an his angels round about to bear them up.

No, but is that the real question?

He made water come from a rock for Moses to provide life and sustenance and he allowed Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to survive a the natural element of fire without dying. Why couldn't he, in all of his mercy and Omni-benevolence, save these two innocent children?

Why is their innocence at issue? Need it be assumed that, when such things occur, the sufferers must have been guilty of some transgression?

Now multiply that tragedy by the millions of children who suffer from lack of food, clothing, shelter, sickness and then ask if you can honestly say like Nephi, God loves his children.

What you seem to be calling for here, at all events, is for God to essentially waive the conditions, requirements, and experiential possibilities of the plan of salvation and rescue everybody. It would appear to be a call for God to cancel the effects of evil in the mortal sphere, which would, according to core LDS theology, essentially negate the fundamental purpose of the mortal probationary state.

These are not issues of agency.

By disallowing any such experience, God may, indeed, by disallowing the choice of response to it, or the possibility of choice (and interpretation of the event or experience) in this life or the next, be curtailing agency (by preventing certain experiences from becoming a part of a certain person's background against which the gospel is lived and faith applied).

For God to allow these innocent ones to forgo a type of suffering that their intellect is incapable of understanding, would seem more congruent with the God and Savior that I have come to know. I am having difficulty reconciling the inaction of a God I believe has the ability to alleviate some of the needless suffering of the world.

But they perished in the cold. Their spirits came to this earth as adult beings, and return to the spirit world as adult spirits. The child bodies, with their child's brains, perished here. The experience of such an exit from mortality becomes then an object lesson about mortality itself that they carry with them as they continue their lives elsewhere. There is then, within the gospel, no such a concept as "needless" suffering that is not suffering brought upon ourselves by sin or upon others by the sins of others. No tragic death and attendent suffering, no matter how severe, can possible be thought of as "needless" so long as the gospel provides meaning through eternal perspective.

And how do you know that he's doesn't alleviate much suffering in the world that would otherwise go on unabated? Upon what basis do you make this assertion?

I have been cold before. I have never starved but I have been hungry enough to cry myself to sleep as a child. I prayed for God to help me be warm and find some food. I received no answer and I was left confused and hungry. I told God I would be good and do what he wanted. Please just help me and my little sister find food and warmth. You know what I got? My Dad died that month in a train wreck and things got worse. I think maybe God could have multiplied a loaf of bread or two and some milk so at least my little sister could have eaten.

I think the complaining and "murmuring" against God here under the pain and duress of difficult and deeply trying life circumstances may hold the key to precisely whey such things are so common in the mortal realm, and why you may yet, as I, have to go through the same door again before the purging and refining of the soul such experiences are intended to elicit settles and takes root.

Loran

[Loran Blood]

Does God get to bear some of the responsibility for putting these wheels into motion? If God knows beforehand all of the suffering, and knows beforehand how few will actually achieve some degree of success in this trial of fire (which is not many), yet he chooses to create both the spiritual and then the physical body which is needed in order to endure such atrocities in life.......is he not the responsible entity here?

Of course he is.

Given that all actual "evil" comes exclusively from the freely chosen actions of agency bearing, intelligent beings, "responsible" is perhaps not the correct term to use. That God is accountable for the state of the cosmos (in the sense that he can "give an account of himself" regarding the cosmos at any given time, and still be understood to be perfectly righteous and just) might be a better way to go. The problem here seems to be that God created anything at all, which provides the environment in which evil can occur, at least so long as their are intelligent beings around to weigh the alternatives, which brings us to the second possibility, that perhaps he should never have created human beings, either the spirit bodies or the mortal bodies for the use of this children. Or, perhaps he should have simply allowed all of them to cease their progression in the preexistant state, and plateau there, forgoing the possibility of becoming like him for the security of remaining beyond contact with sin or the choice, in a mortal context, between right and wrong.

All of these ideas have, or course, consequences. and the plan of salvation has the form and requirements it does for very specific reasons.

[LeSellers]

Loran

Welcome back.

Hope we will be able to enjoy your participation longer than before.

Lehi

[Loran Blood]

Welcome back.

Hope we will be able to enjoy your participation longer than before.

Lehi

Good to be back, LeSellers, and good to talk to you.

[Mola Ram Suda Ram]

Welcome back.

Hope we will be able to enjoy your participation longer than before.

Lehi

Word.

[shalamabobbi]

By disallowing any such experience, God may, indeed, by disallowing the choice of response to it, or the possibility of choice (and interpretation of the event or experience) in this life or the next, be curtailing agency (by preventing certain experiences from becoming a part of a certain person's background against which the gospel is lived and faith applied).

Thanks for your input.

Be filled with gratitude or be jaded and filled with the spirit of accusation.

Nothing from without can affect who you are. Only the way you choose to respond to it can affect that.

[Nathair/|\]

I venture to guess that it depends on what your definition of success is. Christ said "Few there be that find it." and if you view of success is the CK, then probably not many will succeed.

I would define total or perfect success as attaining exaltation to the highest degree of the Celestial kingdom, and I agree that few will find that, but the original statement was some degree of success. That, I would define as any improvement over a previous status. Everyone who receives a spirit body gets that.