Life after death - Is Life ultimately absurd?

[Eugene I]

But this says nothing about whether we have free will. It just says that we have a purpose, and we will only really be the full embodiment of our true nature when we are aligned with that purpose.

We could restate it this way - if there is no goal you are acting towards, then your actions become meaningless. They are simply necessitated by some amorphous 'impulse' to act, which I would say is anathema to freedom.

Right, I agree, but the question is: did we choose the goal freely or are we just passive victims and guinea pigs of the telos/goal that we haven't chosen, have we participated in choosing this goal/telos or at least agreeing to it, or was it imposed on us without our consent and free choice/will? In the latter case this is where the limitation of freedom lies with such Absolute Telos, as well as the moral dilemma of theodicy. Specifically, does the Absolute/God has moral right to place us in his creation where we experience extreme suffering and force us to obey to the telos without asking for our consent? Does He has moral right to decide for us what is good and not good for us? And even if He does, would not it still be a limitation of our freedom? If God/MAL would be a entity of high moral intelligence, he would just not do that, he would not compromise our free will and impose his telos on us, with all the suffering as well as happiness associated with it, without our consent.

The workaround chosen by Bernardo is to claim that MAL does impose telos on his creation, but he is not metacognitive and therefore is not responsible for what he does, so such moral questions simply do not apply to him. I think Bernardo chose such solution exactly to avoid the theodicy problem. But IMO there could be another solution: the only thing God needs to do to resolve this moral problem is to ask for our free consent prior to placing us into his creation (or us entering it). If I would freely agree that the God-defined ultimate telos/goal is something worth pursuing for me and if I would agree to experience all necessary suffering to arrive to that goal, there would be no limitation of my freedom or a moral dilemma of unjustified suffering.

[Simon Adams]

Right, I agree, but the question is: did we choose the goal freely or are we just passive victims and guinea pigs of the telos/goal that we haven't chosen, have we participated in choosing this goal/telos or at least agreeing to it, or was it imposed on us without our consent and free choice/will? In the latter case this is where the limitation of freedom lies with such Absolute Telos, as well as the moral dilemma of theodicy. Specifically, does the Absolute/God has moral right to place us in his creation where we experience extreme suffering and force us to obey to the telos without asking for our consent? Does He has moral right to decide for us what is good and not good for us? And even if He does, would not it still be a limitation of our freedom? If God/MAL would be a entity of high moral intelligence, he would just not do that, he would not compromise our free will and impose his telos on us, with all the suffering as well as happiness associated with it, without our consent.

The workaround chosen by Bernardo is to claim that MAL does impose telos on his creation, but he is not metacognitive and therefore is not responsible for what he does, so such moral questions simply do not apply to him. I think Bernardo chose such solution exactly to avoid the theodicy problem. But IMO there could be another solution: the only thing God needs to do to resolve this moral problem is to ask for our free consent prior to placing us into his creation (or us entering it). If I would freely agree that the God-defined ultimate telos/goal is something worth pursuing for me and if I would agree to experience all necessary suffering to arrive to that goal, there would be no limitation of my freedom or a moral dilemma of unjustified suffering.

It all depends on your view of god. If god is the foundation of all things, not a thing, and yet the only thing that always was, then questions like these become a bit meaningless. Its a bit like asking what gave him the right to make a circle round without asking us first.

On the suffering question, this is one that first made me an atheist. Long before I knew it was an old trope, I’d decided that if god was all powerful then he couldn’t be good, and if he was good then he must be powerless to stop the suffering.

Now I see it very differently. I would of course never claim to be comfortable with suffering, only a sociopath can be freed from it in that way. But I do see that these lives are very short next to eternity. God says we are being “refined like silver in the furnace”, and when I look around, some of the nicest people I know have gone through terrible things, and somehow chose to respond to it in a way that made them come out as damaged but whole, and with more empathy for those still suffering. Others are like the typical spoilt child, never having to endure really hard things and just looking for their next source of personal satisfaction.

If you see this life as a short preparation for eternity, then the whole picture of suffering changes. Suffered becomes something where you want to do as much as you can to relieve it, for as many as you can (including animals and other creatures), but also something temporary. God shares deeply in the suffering as he is part of us, Jesus is called “the man of sorrows” and people who see visions of Mary often say she is ‘weeping for us’ (she is also called "our lady of sorrows").

One thing I became certain of very early on in my conversion was that when we die, we will see that it was all perfect, exactly as it was supposed to be. I have no idea where this certainly came from because usually I’m not a fan of certainty, and because it’s such a contrast to what we see going on all around us, from Yemen to the Congo, from Pakistan to Syria. Nonetheless I still fully believe it, even if I think it’s awful and inexcusable that we allow those things to happen whilst most of us live in such relative safety and luxury.

[AshvinP]

But this says nothing about whether we have free will. It just says that we have a purpose, and we will only really be the full embodiment of our true nature when we are aligned with that purpose.

We could restate it this way - if there is no goal you are acting towards, then your actions become meaningless. They are simply necessitated by some amorphous 'impulse' to act, which I would say is anathema to freedom.

Right, I agree, but the question is: did we choose the goal freely or are we just passive victims and guinea pigs of the telos/goal that we haven't chosen, have we participated in choosing this goal/telos or at least agreeing to it, or was it imposed on us without our consent and free choice/will? In the latter case this is where the limitation of freedom lies with such Absolute Telos, as well as the moral dilemma of theodicy. Specifically, does the Absolute/God has moral right to place us in his creation where we experience extreme suffering and force us to obey to the telos without asking for our consent? Does He has moral right to decide for us what is good and not good for us? And even if He does, would not it still be a limitation of our freedom? If God/MAL would be a entity of high moral intelligence, he would just not do that, he would not compromise our free will and impose his telos on us, with all the suffering as well as happiness associated with it, without our consent.

The workaround chosen by Bernardo is to claim that MAL does impose telos on his creation, but he is not metacognitive and therefore is not responsible for what he does, so such moral questions simply do not apply to him. I think Bernardo chose such solution exactly to avoid the theodicy problem. But IMO there could be another solution: the only thing God needs to do to resolve this moral problem is to ask for our free consent prior to placing us into his creation (or us entering it). If I would freely agree that the God-defined ultimate telos/goal is something worth pursuing for me and if I would agree to experience all necessary suffering to arrive to that goal, there would be no limitation of my freedom or a moral dilemma of unjustified suffering.

Heidegger talked about it as our "thrownness" into the world. We do not choose when, where, how, etc. we are born (or if we do, we generally have no memory of it). I would say our 'consent' is given every moment we choose to continue living. Not everyone makes that choice.

I also agree with BK that it may just be a bad question - perhaps because MAL is not metacognitive or perhaps because MAL is so beyond our limited meta-cognition that we cannot possibly grasp His ways.

But even if we assume everyone was thrown into an existence of suffering without any choice, that does not negate the freedom which is inherent in eternal purpose. The alternative would be no existence at all, in which case there is no possibility of freedom.

[Eugene I]

On the suffering question, this is one that first made me an atheist. Long before I knew it was an old trope, I’d decided that if god was all powerful then he couldn’t be good, and if he was good then he must be powerless to stop the suffering. Now I see it very differently. I would of course never claim to be comfortable with suffering, only a sociopath can be freed from it in that way. But I do see that these lives are very short next to eternity.

God says we are being “refined like silver in the furnace”, and when I look around, some of the nicest people I know have gone through terrible things, and somehow chose to respond to it in a way that made them come out as damaged but whole, and with more empathy for those still suffering. Others are like the typical spoilt child, never having to endure really hard things and just looking for their next source of personal satisfaction.

If you see this life as a short preparation for eternity, then the whole picture of suffering changes. Suffered becomes something where you want to do as much as you can to relieve it, for as many as you can (including animals and other creatures), but also something temporary. God shares deeply in the suffering as he is part of us, Jesus is called “the man of sorrows” and people who see visions of Mary often say she is ‘weeping for us’ (she is also called "our lady of sorrows").

I agree, and as I was a Christian a while ago, I went through this struggle myself, but that's still exactly the point of the dilemma: because it necessarily involves suffering I need to agree on it prior to getting involved in order to freely participate in this process, otherwise there is a moral dilemma with this scheme of things. It's like agreeing on a surgery: a doctor knows that a surgery will be beneficial for me and at the end will make me a healthier person, but because it involves pain/suffering and risks, the doctor cannot make that decision for me and cannot force me to undergo the surgery, he needs my free consent.

[Eugene I]

But even if we assume everyone was thrown into an existence of suffering without any choice, that does not negate the freedom which is inherent in eternal purpose. The alternative would be no existence at all, in which case there is no possibility of freedom.

Right, it does not negate freedom, but it still limits it. But it all depends on the metaphysical/ontic scenario. In case of materialism or idealism with non-metacognitive MAL the question of freedom of participation and complying to telos does not even arise, the telos and our existence is a given fact and we simply do not have such freedom of choice. Since material nature or instinctive MAL do not know what they are doing, any moral responsibility does not apply to them. But in other scenarios, such as theistic ones with metacognitive God/MAL that bear moral responsibility for his actions, such question does arise, and that's what I was talking about.

[AshvinP]

But even if we assume everyone was thrown into an existence of suffering without any choice, that does not negate the freedom which is inherent in eternal purpose. The alternative would be no existence at all, in which case there is no possibility of freedom.

Right, it does not negate freedom, but it still limits it. But it all depends on the metaphysical/ontic scenario. In case of materialism or idealism with non-metacognitive MAL the question of freedom of participation and complying to telos does not even arise, the telos and our existence is a given fact and we simply do not have such freedom of choice. Since material nature or instinctive MAL do not know what they are doing, any moral responsibility does not apply to them. But in other scenarios, such as theistic ones with metacognitive God/MAL that bear moral responsibility for his actions, such question does arise, and that's what I was talking about.

It does not limit freedom if the alternative is no existence hence no freedom. You can only expand freedom from there. I think it goes without saying the ontic scenario is idealism.

[Brad Walker]

Can a clown's life be not absurd?

[Brad Walker]

If you see this life as a short preparation for eternity, then the whole picture of suffering changes. Suffered becomes something where you want to do as much as you can to relieve it, for as many as you can (including animals and other creatures), but also something temporary. God shares deeply in the suffering as he is part of us, Jesus is called “the man of sorrows” and people who see visions of Mary often say she is ‘weeping for us’ (she is also called "our lady of sorrows").

Why would God want to falsely test people in a predetermined reality so they can enter eternal afterlife? Why not just give them eternal life? How can God create semi-eternal (origin, no finale) minds independent from itself?

[Simon Adams]

Why would God want to falsely test people in a predetermined reality so they can enter eternal afterlife? Why not just give them eternal life? How can God create semi-eternal (origin, no finale) minds independent from itself?

What’s false? Life is a full and rich, with light and dark, pain and happiness etc. I do n’t claim to understand it all, but there is something about the experience of a limited existence that gives us a chance to learn something necessary, something that we couldn’t learn if we were created directly as spiritual images of god. Angels were created directly as spirit, and yet there is something about us being created in the image of god that is different, even though god is spirit. Some argue that this is why Lucifer and the other angels rebelled, because of us being privileged in this way.

Also the way god has chosen to create us, through creating this vast universe with all it’s incredible beauty, that does not seem so shabby. Not bad as a womb! The fact that we are formed with the body necessitates evolution, and evolution would not be possible without suffering. I don’t think we can ever fully understand the whys and the hows, but Julian of Norwich was told something that completely matches what I had come to believe when I first read it: ‘It was necessary that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.'

[Eugene I]

I don’t think we can ever fully understand the whys and the hows, but Julian of Norwich was told something that completely matches what I had come to believe when I first read it: ‘It was necessary that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.'

Yes, I remember being very impressed with Julian's writings. I still tend to agree with Origen's pre-existence of souls, which includes pre-agreement of souls to incarnate and participate in the creation in human's roles and forms, because this resolves the theodicy problem that I was pointing to earlier. But Origen's teaching on pre-existence was declared as a heresy in the second Council and that is one of the reasons I'm not with Christianity. And note that the second Council also condemned the Origen's teaching on apocatastasis - the universal salvation, which is essentially the same as Julian's "all shall be well", even though she expressed it in a more ambiguous way.