Part 1: Why suffering and evil in life

People have always wondered why there is suffering in life and as a corollary to that question they ask why evil exists. This question usually comes up in the context of discussion about God. Here are some answers that I hope you find straightforward and useful. There are books and articles that while well meaning and philosophical, do seriously miss the mark and as a result are not as comforting and helpful as they could be. I don’t want to write a lot here, so I’m going to organize it as points, starting with the largest issues and working to more specifics.

1. Why is there death?
Everything and everyone dies because nothing lives forever except God. God exists outside of time. Everything else lives within time. Therefore everything that exists, whether it is a star that lives for millions or billions of years, or a humble small animal, has a beginning, changes continually through life, and an ending. People wonder why humans die, why there is a death, but forget to notice that everything dies in time. Entire galaxies die, for example, in time. The definition of life is that a physical body is born, grows, changes, and eventually dies. Even non living things, such as the star and galaxy examples I give that sustain life but are not of themselves living have a limited “life span.” Eventually they burn up the fuel that sustains them, for example. So death is not “personal,” it is not a punishment or limitation that is given to humans to make them sad, but it is the state of all things, both living and inanimate. Only God is deathless because God is the entirely of existence that is outside of time, not within time. When people say God lives forever that implies that the clock never runs out, while to be more precise, there are no clocks or passage of time within God.

2. Why did some Biblical humans have enormous life spans?
As I explain above, within God there is no time. Adam and Eve were the first humans to walk with God in the garden. As such Adam and Eve were directly exposed to God in the form of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the breath of life from God and as such can confer long life span. Therefore even after the sin and fall of Adam and Eve certain people still walked with God’s Holy Spirit and as such gained long life span, not as a “reward” but because it is like having perfect bodily sustenance within one’s vicinity, giving the body ultimate benefit of life. You can see this effect with some martyrs and saints whose bodies are uncorrupted today. This does not mean that uncorrupted bodies indicate a holier person than everyone else and indeed, many of the holiest saints have only bones remaining or have had their bodies naturally degenerate. But some saints had the side benefit of their exposure to the Holy Spirit translate into sweet smelling oil, or bodily incorruption. Other people have other benefits of the Holy Spirit. But these saints with uncorrupted or slowly corrupting bodies are examples that people can see of how the Holy Spirit works within holy people (and ordinary people) in different ways, where sometimes there is a physical “benefit” of proximity to the Holy Spirit, either extraordinarily long lives for some of the early Biblical fathers and mothers, or uncorrupted bodies of certain saints.

3. Why then do some dead souls go to heaven while others go to hell?
As I explained God is the only condition of eternal life. Therefore for a soul to live forever in heaven the soul is “brought to God,” because by being “within” God’s “hands” in heaven, one is able to be sustained by God throughout eternity. In other words one lives within the Holy Spirit in heaven, achieving the sustenance the soul needs to continue. The opposite state of that is hell. Certain souls who are tainted with sin are not allowed to be within the presence of God, therefore the absence of God is by definition the horror of hell. I’ve explained in a previous blogging that heaven is the state of total purity, truthfulness and authenticity. Anything that is impure cannot exist in heaven, and the example I’ve used is that it is like a human who breaths only oxygen cannot live in an atmosphere that is only hydrogen. Or an ice cube cannot exist in boiling water. So it is not like God is stopping someone who could otherwise “live in heaven” but chooses to be mean or arbitrary, but rather, the person who goes to hell has made his or herself unable to live within the reality of heaven. Let me give some examples using analogies. A person who believes in the reality that Jesus existed but who lives in an anti-Jesus way is like a person who wears an “I breathe hydrogen” T-shirt yet has trained themselves on earth to only breathe oxygen. That person is in very likely risk of hell because his soul has been allowed to reject heavenly “conditioning” and cultivated instead sinful conditioning. So yes it is a punishment to go to hell, but it is the inevitable outcome of the person’s own choices. It is like a person who insists on staying on the conveyor belt that goes to hell. This is why legitimate death bed conversion is real and valid, where at the last moment even the worst sinner can jump off of the conveyor belt to hell. However, the person who deliberately rides the conveyor belt to hell, sinning and harming others, and who figure to jump off the conveyor belt to hell in a cynical way will not “fool God.” This is because like I’ve explained in previous blogs, God knows all and sees all, and people can not explain away a deliberately dirtied soul. So hell is not really an example of evil or suffering, but rather the reality of the physical location that is the absence of God. People who cannot exist within the pure place of grace, truth and purity that is heaven send themselves to hell. Final judgment for these people is not God deciding “yes” or “no” to heaven, but rather these people having the scales fall from their eyes as they see all that they have done while alive and are held to full reckoning. That is part of the horror of hell, the realization at that moment that it was not all a bluff.

4. Why does physical pain exist?
Pain is the condition where bodily circuitry called nerves work together with the brain to alert the person that something is wrong. If something is wrong with the body the nerves send a signal to the brain that is unavoidable and urgent, therefore is experienced as unpleasant pain. People sometimes imagine that feeling pain is a bad or mean design for the human body, but they forget two things. One is that many parts of the body do not have sensitive nerve endings at all, so there is not “over-wiring.” An example is the normal digestion of food. There are many fewer nerve endings inside the body than outside because otherwise there would be a pain reaction to normal events. You would not want to feel pain in your stomach as a result of the contractions that grind up the food and digest it, for example. This is one reason that people sometimes have enormous inner growths that they do not even know about until it gets to like grapefruit or bigger size and hence presses on a more externally located nerve. So the human body is not over-wired in order to feel continual false alarm pain and if anything is slightly under-wired to not feel pain until it is generated by an extraordinary medical or physical condition to the body. Examples are infection, cancer that is breaking down the body, burns that by definition are the destruction of the body exactly where nerves are most congregated. Oddly, because of this slight under-wiring of pain, some bodily assaults are not initially felt, such as some stabbings or bullet wounds, where a person may only feel a sting or pressure at first. The body has evolved to balance being sensitive to danger and harm via pain with there being no living advantage to feeling constant or excessive pain. So God does not make certain illnesses particularly painful (if anything some are under-wired, as I explained), it is a condition of how humans (and different species of animals) evolved to self monitor bodily threat or injury according to their body structure and environment. The second thing to remember is that this is necessary even in our “safe” world. There is a rare disorder that has been reported recently where some people do not experience pain at all. Rather than feel relief they are in mental anguish because they have no knowledge if their limbs are being harmed, they are being burned or even scratch themselves too hard, bang against furniture, and the many daily hazards that having pain protects people from experiencing harm unaware. Interviews with these disorder “sufferers” are very enlightening about the necessity of pain as a sheer survival trait. So of course cancer or burns are painful because they are assaults on the body that the body has to be in a continual state of alert via pain signals to the brain.

(To be continued in further blogging).