it is evident that God won’t do anything the suffering in this world, so if there is any meaning to suffering it that we need to do what we can to alleviate it.

I think God cares because, in order to be God, and also by nature of being God, he needs peers, other divine persons to share that life with.

You raise an interesting point about the trees issue. I think my initial response is that Trees do not get involved in petitionary prayer. But there might be damage to those life-forms if other disasters are avoided or controlled.

I think he is constantly like Christ is his capacity to experience suffering. His fully acted upon. I think Christ’s bleeding at every pore was a mortal response. Moreover, he experienced the suffering associated with our sins which once completed he did not need to do again, but I still think he suffers for our sins even now. Moreover, I have a hard time accepting that the enoch story is merely projection because of what else I accept about God’s person and about what I believe that narrative tries to show us about God. but i could be wrong.

I’m not disputing he loves us, but does he care ? A God who is the creator of all the universe, has seen the birth and death of stars, seen all the beauty of nature the magnificent designs of the animal world where do we compare in this temporal state we hold equal right for God to intercede on our behalf as do the trees in the rain forest, or the planet it’s self. Our existence starts to look more and more insignificant let alone our mediocre troubles.

Why does God intercede? because it serves a greater purpose either in lesson, or the future actions of an individual those who don’t hold any apparent value are left to themselves. *** I would add that suffering does not equal unhappiness, those in developing countries who by definition are suffering poverty, starvation and a barrage of life life-threatening illnesses has a similar ratio of happiness to un-happiness as the US. perhaps this is God at work enabling peoples burdens to feel lighter.

The story of Enoch is possibly just projection, or perhaps your right suffering is eternal and the only way to deal with it is to develop some sort of apathy toward suffering, otherwise he would constantly be like Christ who through godly empathy bled from every pore due to the pain and suffering of the world.

In the original post I talk about Ostler’s view that God always suffers. I think suffering will exist in the heavens. I think Enoch’s encounter with the weeping God shows us that this is so.

So do you think he did in the peace be still situation. I do believe God does intercede, but not as often as we believe. Moreover, I have seen miraculous things and also believe God has done some things for me. However, I feel guilty about believeing that because I do not consider my needs as great as many others. Nor do I think i have a special amount of faith.

“Further…I see suffering as eternal” I’m interested in this point do you mean that suffering will always exist because of worlds without ends or suffering will exist within the Heavens.

“For me a better and more perplexing question is why does God intervene sometimes (on accounts of some people) and in often trivial circumstances and not in others that are vital?”

I think this is a really good question, I would suggest that God hasn’t intervened in the majority of these occasions as reported including scriptural accounts.

Further because I see suffering as eternal I do not accept the ‘but a small moment’ argument.

For me a better and more perplexing question is why does God intervene sometimes (on accounts of some people) and in often trivial circumstances and not in others that are vital?

Rico mentioned “unless his maximally powerful position does not involve control of the randomness of nature as well”

I enjoyed Reco’s musing in this last comment #32, I think we have to admit God is all powerful and can pre-empt any natural disaster, pain or suffering. The question is then, “O GOD, awhere art thou? And where is the pavilion that covereth thy bhiding place?” I mentioned before the meaning behind suffering is not always for the individual but for the community, civilization, human race to wake up and do something about it.

To be honest although I want to say that God cares about our suffering, sometimes I really doubt weather he does or not. Doctor Manhattan is a character created by Alan Moore that begins to loose empathy with the human race after realising the futility of existence a simple rock becomes just as beautiful and viable to him. There is life after death which makes our temporal state useful only in it’s lessons to those around us and to our capacity to develop spiritually in essence suffering is meaningless because it falls into insignificance compared to eternity.

I’m not sure I find meaning in all suffering. I’m not sure God micromanages things like suffering and inflicts it lovingly on His people. (I agree)

I recognize that much of what we see as “suffering” is really just agency. And there is meaning in agency. Pol Pot, John Brown, and Jesus all had moral agency. This is the agency to inflict suffering on others, and the agency to exercise love on one another as well, and it wouldn’t really be agency if it truly had no consequences. (I agree)

In the case of natural suffering, illness, natural disasters, etc., I think there is room for discussion. (Room for what discussion. Are you saying that there is divine meaning in these types of suffering. Are you saying that these might be subject to human agency? Are you saying that there might be meaning in these sufferings but you are not sure.) I am not what the discussion room is here? Sorry for being unclear.

It’s standard Mormon theology. From the Encyclopedia of Mormonism:

OMNIPOTENCE. The Church affirms the biblical view of divine omnipotence (often rendered as “almighty”), that God is supreme, having power over all things. No one or no force or happening can frustrate or prevent him from accomplishing his designs (D&C 3:1-3). His power is sufficient to fulfill all his purposes and promises, including his promise of eternal life for all who obey him.

However, the Church does not understand this term in the traditional sense of absoluteness, and, on the authority of modern revelation, rejects the classical doctrine of creation out of nothing. It affirms, rather, that there are actualities that are coeternal with the persons of the Godhead, including elements, intelligence, and law (D&C 93:29, 33, 35: 88:34-40). Omnipotence, therefore, cannot coherently be understood as absolutely unlimited power. That view is internally self-contradictory and, given the fact that evil and suffering are real, not reconcilable with God’s omnibenevolence or loving kindness (see Theodicy).

But IME, theology per se doesn’t get discussed much in LDS church meetings. Sort of like what President Hinckley said, “I don’t know that we teach it. I don’t know that we emphasize it.” But it’s there.

I cannot see how God can be both All Powerful and All Loving. Any thoughts?

In Mormon theology, God is not necessarily all-powerful. Good and evil are eternal principles, not creations of God. God therefore may not be able to create a universe in which evil does not exist. If that is the case, then God need only mitigate as much evil as possible to be all-loving. Since we know that all possible evil does not occur, it is possible that God is mitigating as much evil as possible. It is therefore possible that God is all-loving.

I thought your reply was interesting. How come I have never heard this explained at church? Where do you get this theology from? Have I missed this or just heard it in different ways?

#7 – Thanks Douglas, I have been meaning to read Levinas for a while now but have only dipped my toe in the past.

#8 – Are you saying that natural disasters are the result of God’s loving action. I agreed with you up till that point and could not imagine you were saying what I thought you were.

#13 – I read parts but was not overly impressed, except that I could not critique him because he lived it.

#16 – Some would say he can’t be both. I would tend to agree. I would say God is maxiamlly powerful (i follow Ostler on this). But read Can God be all-powerful and all-loving by Eugene England in Dialogues with Myself, you might be able to find it online at Dialogue magazine.

#17 – Actually I believe the objective truths we can find are far far less than we suppose. I am not convinced that anything i believe is really really how it is, rather just an ok approximation.

1. Suffering

Suffering and frustration come from our difficulty in facing the basic fact of life that everything around us is impermanent and transitory. Rich or poor, average or gifted, all life is subjected to the following: the trauma of birth, the pathology of sickness, the fear of physical and mental degeneration, the phobia of death, karmically to be tied to what one distastes, or to be separated from what one loves. “All things must arise and pass away.”

2. Desire

The cause of suffering and frustration occurs because out of ignorance, we divide the perceived world into individual and separate things. The desire to pull apart from the rest of life and seek fulfillment for the separated self, at the expense of all other forms of life, causes suffering to the whole, as Life is One Being. Our duty to our brothers and sisters is to understand them as extensions, other aspects of ourselves, as fellow facets of the same reality.

3. Suffering and Frustration Can Be Ended

If the cause of life’s suffering is those inclinations which tend to continue or increase separativeness, in fact all forms of selfish craving, then its cure lies in the overcoming of such cravings. If we can be released from the narrow limits of self-interest into the vast expanse of universal life, we will be free of our torment.

I cannot see how God can be both All Powerful and All Loving. Any thoughts?

In Mormon theology, God is not necessarily all-powerful. Good and evil are eternal principles, not creations of God. God therefore may not be able to create a universe in which evil does not exist. If that is the case, then God need only mitigate as much evil as possible to be all-loving. Since we know that all possible evil does not occur, it is possible that God is mitigating as much evil as possible. It is therefore possible that God is all-loving.

I’d put in links to the various posts I’ve done on this subject, but the spam filter eats posts with more than one link.

http://mormonmatters.org/2008/05/11/affliction-final-post-in-the-series/ isn’t a bad spot for where my thoughts begin. I’ve experienced a little adversity in my life, which shapes my perspectives.

I think the real problem is that we have lost the approaches that they had, which, while part of the culture and the doctrine, do not mesh well with the strain of neo-calvanism that has crept into the Church.

Let me start by talking about evil in relationship to that supernatural interventionist model of God. A major problem that I and other theologians have had with the supernaturalist, interventionist model of God is that it makes it very difficult to explain how things like the Holocaust, or TWA 800 exploding in the sky, or the individual and random tragedies that people experience all the time, can happen. If we think that God can intervene when God chooses to, then it become incomprehensible how God could have let the Holocaust happen. If we think that God sometimes intervenes to heal people of catastrophic and life threatening illness, then it becomes incomprehensible why God doesn’t do that for everybody who’s got premature cancer, let’s say. All of those problems become utterly insoluble it seems to me with the interventionist model of God. Some 30 years ago, Bishop John Robinson, who wrote Honest to God listed three reason why atheism is the only attractive modern option–and he was thinking of atheism in relationship to the supernatural model of God. One of those [reasons was that] God is morally intolerable. His point is the one I’m just making. If God could intervene but chooses not to, then God is morally intolerable. For the panentheistic model of God, the notion of God as a being outside of the process, who sometimes intervenes, simply disappears. With a panentheistic model, God is present in everything and God is the source of everything–that doesn’t mean God is the source of everything that happens, but God is present in everything. I think most of the suffering that occurs in the world is not because of natural disasters or even because of illness or, let’s say, natural causes of death, most of the suffering in the world comes from structural or systemic evil, from social structure, political structures, that function to oppress millions of people, deprive them of adequate nourishment, deprive them of adequate medical care, and add to that all the wars in human history that are caused by evil social structure, or unjust social structures. So I think most of the evil–in the sense of suffering that occurs in the world–is because of humanly created social structures.

Also, I just finished reading Hesse’s Siddhartha, and the main character therein achieves enlightenment as he understands the interconnectedness of all things, living and dead, where deliverance, joy, and salvation cannot exist without corresponding oppression, suffering, and damnation. Siddhartha realizes that time is not real, and that all things are simultaneously being born, living, dying, suffering, and achieving nirvana. The suffering is something that all things endure.

Of course, neither one of these approaches jive with LDS theology (c.f. the first vision, and a disbelief in reincarnation). But considering that LDS doctrine allows for the vast majority of the world’s population to continue to have opportunities for spiritual progression after their physical deaths, and considering the relatively infrequent instances of god’s intercession in human history, perhaps God _is_ less hands-on than we make him out to be precisely because if he were more interactive, it would both make him terribly unjust for refusing to interact to prevent massive human tragedies and injustices, as well as limit the potential benefit of human suffering in an eternal spiritual progression context.

I see God as a supreme opportunist through the natural occurrence of misfortune and suffering. In this life or the next we have a story to tell that will help another. I too don’t believe that all suffering is meaningful, the belief system that God tries us to teach us a lesson is dangerous, further the belief system that by prayer God “WILL” intercede is spiritually crippling.

The real point I wanted to express is that, we are powerful; we each have the potential to do something extraordinary, at one point in our lifetime we will be faced with the opportunity to do something unique. help in the life of another, alleviate pain, help someone who is sick or in need, be they a widow an child a family an addict. This world is full of opportunity to help others. Science has progressed to the point in which by being a donor you can help. Donate blood, check bone marrow compatibility. Register as a Donor.