Peter's Perfect-People Palliative:Each of us is a mixture of good qualities and some (perhaps) not-so-goodqualities. In considering our fellow people, we should remember their goodqualities and realize that their faults only prove that they are, after all,human. We should refrain from making harsh judgments of people just because theyhappen to be dirty, rotten, no-good sons-a-bitches.
It often happens that people use evil in the world as an argument against the very existence of God. Bluntly, if God is good, how can it be that a child gets cancer? How can it be that a young mother dies, or that a friend becomes paralyzed? Why do bad things happen to good people?
When Bad Things Happen To Bad People Free Pdf
The Talmud (Brachot 7a) tells us that Moses was not asking to "see" God. Moses knew better. Moses knew that God has no body or any form for that matter and therefore cannot be seen with human eyes. Rather, Moses was asking to "see" God's "glory," so that he could understand God's plan. In effect, Moses is saying to God, "God, I love, honor and respect You in every way. But there are things about You that I do not understand. When I see a child with infantile paralysis, when I see a baby with leukemia, when I see a little boy suffering great pain and I know he is going to die soon, I don't know what You are doing. And I would love to have a total understanding of Your ways so that I can give you the full honor You deserve."
The next morning, when he goes back into town, he finds that a gang of marauders had massacred the entire population. Suddenly, he understands each and every difficulty he had faced: "Had I gotten lodging, I would have been killed. Had the lamp been on, they would have seen me. The rooster would have crowed, the donkey would have brayed. Everything that happened to me I now realize was all for the good."
When we ask the question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" we are often making erroneous assumptions. What we perceive as "bad things" might, in fact, be the best things that could happen to them.
Moses says to God, in effect, "God, I want to honor you totally, but my lack of understanding of Your ways interferes. How can I honor you completely when I see good people who have it bad and bad people who have it good?"
"Number one, don't be so quick when you call some people good and others bad, because you don't know for sure. Number two, when you say they have it bad or they have it good, are you sure of your definitions? Are you sure you know what you are talking about? You are not positive. And you can't be positive because you can't see My face. You will only be able to see it in retrospect. In retrospect a terrible thing could be the best thing. Sometimes it will take you years to see. Sometimes you will never see, not in your days on Earth anyway."
What troubles so many people, however, are the many times when even the gift of retrospect seems to give us no greater clarity. Looking backwards at one's life can be illuminating, but it can often still leave us with many unresolved questions. What can we do then? Does it mean that we will end our lives on Earth with problems never to be resolved, injuries never to be healed, cruelties never to be explained, injustices never to be set right?
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.Bad beliefs - beliefs that blatantly conflict with easily available evidence - are common. Large minorities of people hold that vaccines are dangerous or accept bizarre conspiracy theories, for instance. The prevalence of bad beliefs may be politically and socially important, for instance blocking effective action on climate change. Explaining why people accept bad beliefs and what can be done to make them more responsive to evidence is therefore an important project. A common view is that bad beliefs are largely explained by widespread irrationality. This book argues that ordinary people are rational agents, and their beliefs are the result of their rational response to the evidence they're presented with. We thought they were responding badly to evidence, because we focused on the first-order evidence alone: the evidence that directly bears on the truth of claims. We neglected the higher-order evidence, in particular evidence about who can be trusted and what sources are reliable. Once we recognize how ubiquitous higher-order evidence is, we can see that belief formation is by and large rational.The book argues that we should tackle bad belief by focusing as much on the higher-order evidence as the first-order evidence. The epistemic environment gives us higher-order evidence for beliefs, and we need to carefully manage that environment. The book argues that such management need not be paternalistic: once we recognize that managing the epistemic environment consists in management of evidence, we should recognize that such management is respectful of epistemic autonomy.
One theory of evil that provides a solution to the problem of evil isManichaean dualism. According to Manichaean dualism, the universe isthe product of an ongoing battle between two coequal and coeternalfirst principles: God and the Prince of Darkness. From these firstprinciples follow good and evil substances which are in a constantbattle for supremacy. The material world constitutes a stage of thiscosmic battle where the forces of evil have trapped the forces ofgoodness in matter. For example, the human body is evil while thehuman soul is good and must be freed from the body through strictadherence to Manichaean teaching. The Manichaean solution to theproblem of evil is that God is neither all-powerful nor the solecreator of the world. God is supremely good and creates only goodthings, but he or she is powerless to prevent the Prince of Darknessfrom creating evil. (For more about Manichaeanism see Coyel 2009 andLieu 1985; Greenless 2007).
"When a person is dying of cancer, I do not hold God responsible for the cancer or for the pain he feels. They have other causes. But I have seen God give such people the strength to take each day as it comes, to be grateful for a day full of sunshine or one in which they are relatively free of pain.
"When people who were never particularly strong become strong in the face of adversity, when people who tended to think only of themselves became unselfish and heroic in an emergency, I have to ask myself where they got these qualities which they freely admit they did not have before. My answer is that this is one of the ways in which God helps us when we suffer beyond the limits of our own strength.
"Life is not fair. The wrong people get sick and the wrong people get robbed and the wrong people get killed in wars and in accidents. Some people see life's unfairness and decide, 'There is no God; the world is noting but chaos.' Others see the same unfairness and ask themselves, 'Where do I get my sense of what is fair and what is unfair? Where do I get my sense of outrage and indignation, my instinctive response of sympathy when I read in the paper about a total stranger who has been hurt by life? Don't I get these things from God? Doesn't He plant in me a little bit of His own divine outrage at injustice and oppression, just as He did for the prophets of the Bible? Isn't my feeling of compassion for the afflicted just a reflection of the compassion He feels when He sees the suffering of His creatures?' Our responding to life's unfairness with sympathy and with righteous indignation, God's compassion and God's anger working through us, may be the surest proof of all of God's reality."
"There wasn't much of a thought process," he says. "I felt like, at that point, that was a small price to pay and almost like a cost of doing business. You know, things are going to happen, and I just needed to do whatever I needed to do to fix that. It wasn't like ... I didn't think that I was going to be losing money forever or anything like that."
If you accept what they're saying as true, then that raises a troubling scenario, because we expect people to protest when they're asked to do wrong. But Toby's employees didn't. What's even more troubling is that according to Toby, it wasn't just his employees: "I mean, we had to have assistance from other companies to pull this off," he says. 2ff7e9595c
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