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From: saj@iuvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: Even If I DID Believe ... - (nf)
Message-ID: <148@iuvax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 15-Feb-84 15:29:22 EST
Article-I.D.: iuvax.148
Posted: Wed Feb 15 15:29:22 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 17-Feb-84 02:17:13 EST
Sender: saj@iuvax.UUCP
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#R:unc:-648300:iuvax:1700003:000:1816
iuvax!dsaker    Feb  2 17:55:00 1984

Alan,
      There are a few problems with your HOPED FOR truths:

If the experiences of this life are as nothing in the long run, then
how can the lessons learnt in this life themselves be other than as nothing.

Can you really embrace the idea  that all of your thoughts, hopes, dreams,
loves, longings and aspirations  should eventually come to be as nothing
- even to you?  Remember your mother fussing around you some time when
you were young and ill  (it was years later that you realised how tired she
must have been that night)?  Remember your first heavy infatuation and how 
your heart was broken?  Remember your child and the pang of love and pain you
 felt at its vulnerability?  Can you really embrace the idea that these things
 (and countless other tendernesses) will come to seem as nothing?
To my mind, the loss of these things into the blackness of time is one
of the (if not THE) hardest things to bear in life.  The failure of my memory
in regard to such things is an additional horror.
What I feel the need for is something to give "meaning" (oh vague word)
to human passions and values - not the promise of their "meaninglessness".

As for spiritual growth as the reward for suffering, does your spiritual
growth warrant the tears of even one small child?  (This is Dmitri
Karamazov's argument.)  And it is hard to see just what lesson a 3 months old
child screaming with meningitis is learning.

The problem is that we cannot imagine any adequate compensation for the
pain of this world, we cannot envisage a SOLUTION to the PROBLEM -
other than to be hit on the head until our sense of distress dissolves.
We are stuck longing for something which we cannot ever imagine having.

(By the way, Mahler's "Resurrection" is a magnificent evocation of
 that longing.)

Daryel Akerlind
iuvax!dsaker