If God doesn't care then God doesn't suffer but if God does care then I would think that God suffers. My concept of God is that of essentially a being of Heart or impulse to love everyone and all things and that we were created to resemble God. So too we strive to resemble God by trying to love as God would love. I think the highest expression of this would be the parent child relationship ideally. So I believe that God is a personal God of Heart and Love who is our parent in the truest sense of the word. I believe that there is a place for suffering in our experience, that it is a part of life. But I wonder if God being loving and presumably a very sensitive being isn't also a victim of abuse from the experience of evil in the world. A loving parent would be affected if their child were abused by another and also I believe that God must in my opinion be profoundly affected by the misbehaviour due to immaturity and also extreme selfishness as well as evil interaction in human experience. If God is suffering then it follows God needs to be liberated from it. What do you think?
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Does God suffer?
- Thread starter jreedmx
- Start date
Me Myself
Back to my username
I believe God is the victim and the victimizer, and the hero and the God.
Actually, I would say this is God´s song, and because of my selection, it is the Goddess song
:
[youtube]V8kiNMQIctg[/youtube]
I'm a *****, I'm a Lover - YouTube
Actually, I would say this is God´s song, and because of my selection, it is the Goddess song
:[youtube]V8kiNMQIctg[/youtube]
I'm a *****, I'm a Lover - YouTube
Rainbow Mage
Lib Democrat/Agnostic/Epicurean-ish/Buddhist-ish
If the crying Ganesh statue I saw once means something yes, the gods are pained by how we treat one another and the planet.
If you believe that history is a struggle between Good and evil or principalities then in this war there has been suffering. That means that in order for goodness to prevail against evil then a byproduct of that is suffering for those on Gods side so then God would be causing suffering for the greater good. But I can't say that I consider God a victimizer in a deliberate sense. Where people who are extremely selfish cause suffering to others I believe God is the opposite of that and won't sacrifice others for selfish interest but works in such a way to serve others at the expense of self. This is how I define Good and Evil. Evil is where someone sacrifices others for the sake of the individual without love and Good in my opinion is living for the sake of others with love.
Me Myself
Back to my username
Well, the problem with this for me, is that God could prevent any suffering happening to anyone if he wished to.
He doesn´t.
So, I am a panentheist. I beleieve we are all God. If something horrible happens, is because God wanted it to happen, but God suffered 100% by it. All the suffering that happened because God wanted it to happen is suffered by him, as all the pleasure from the cruel people that made it happen was also enjoyed by him. Everything and everyone is god´s dream.
So, I find it as a masochistic pleasure of sorts.
I like the idea of the golden rule where it really doesn't matter what someone believes but if there is a basic respect for each other and that our actions affect someone else just like their actions may affect us then we are less likely to do harm to our neighbor.
occupying_the_fence
New Member
Depends on what you mean by God because if they're omnipotent couldn't God Liberate God?
I think that given a viewpoint that god is all things, some aspects of the divine suffer and some do not. You have to be more specific. And also explicitly define what constitutes "suffering" if we're talking about things like Rock Spirits and Water Spirits that do not have neurobiological systems including pain receptors as we know them.