A Prelude Concerning The Question Of Pain

Having totally botched the forty days of Lent, due to politics and pandemic, I had thought that I'd make up for that during the fifty day between Western Christian Easter and Pentecost with posting about the Resurrection of Jesus, the resurrection from death and associated topics, concentrating this year on what the eminent Christian, Catholic theologian Hans Kung said about those in his book On Being A Christian. 

But I will take some time to present some of what he had to say in the section of the book,  "God and suffering," an especially fraught subject anytime but especially as the world faces this pandemic we are in the middle of and which might kill any of us by the time it's over.  Those of us who live will certainly face losses and hardships. 

Before getting into this,  I should note two things, the first is that it is foreign to the culture I was raised in, what might be called Irish Catholicism, to ask "why me".  I don't know how other Catholics might have been brought up but that question is one that has always seemed strange and wrong to me.  Instead someone might ask "why not me".  If pain and suffering are not only possible but as common as dirt, why not me too?   The idea that comfort, prosperity and contentment are due to those who are good or, at least, like to think of them as good is, maybe, something that the Catholic habit of reading the lives of the saints prevents.  Lots of the best people have had some of the worst pain and bad luck and persecution in history. That's what the lives of the saints show.  Maybe that's what you get out of the cult of the saints.  I don't know. 

The second thing is that reading this section makes me think the common habit of modern Westerners to expect that things like moral or theological discernment "evolves" that there is some kind of progress from darkness into enlightenment is probably an illusion, a cultural habit drawn from the obsession of Westerners with evolution as it became a major feature of ideological warfare and opportunity for atheists desiring to convert people to atheism.  No matter what the claims are, whenever anyone uses the metaphor of "evolution" they really mean, or at least include the feeling of progress to something or, more typically, themselves as "better than" what came before. 

I think it's an especially arrogant and inapt metaphor when dealing with this question because intense suffering is not a solved or soluble issue, being a thing which people experience as an individual as a group, it is new every time it happens.  Maybe the traditional Catholic way of talking about it, which is certainly no explanation, that it is a mystery is the best that we're going to get by way of explanation.  Growing up an Irish Catholic accustoms you to accepting that there are things which are mysteries that are not going to be revealed in this life.  

And, just saying, I will be provocative enough to bring up the reported experience of those who have survived "clinical death" and report their experience of "death" that there is an end to suffering.  I have no idea if they are right or if that is what awaits all of us.  I add it to be provocative and to violate the rules against bringing such testimonial evidence into this discussion.  That rule is, itself, just a common habit enforced by ideological atheism.  I don't have any intention of being intimidated by it.