is unearned suffering redemptive?

that's in MLK's "i have a dream" speech. it's a profoundly christian sentiment--perhaps _the_ quintessential christian sentiment. and i see how it works for the point he is trying to make.

but do any of you believe it?

no b/c I have read friedrich nietzsche

nah

jesus was asking for it, btw

No. Telling people that if they suffer they will end up with some intangible spiritual reward is a sentiment made to order for despots.

It is a powerful idea because it flips the observable oppressor-oppressed dynamic and gives an empowerment to those without power - but in practice I can't disentangle it from the idea of religion as social control and a device for convincing the people to put up with shit from above.

"an empowerment" should probably be "a sense of empowerment"

suffering is its own reward you buncha Protestants

http://www.gsarchives.net/neogeo/king_of_fighters_2001/sprites/animated/Whip_whip.gif

simon belmont looks... different

I suffer for my art.

what is art

I found a ca. 1998 notebook of mine where I'd written down a quotation from some book of apologetics I was reading that contained the awesome line "you are making good use of your time when you suffer"

That is pretty fucking sweet.

nope.

I suffer for my art.

<Flipper>
And now it's our turn.
</Flipper>

suffering is its own reward you buncha Protestants

― aerosmith: live at gunpoint (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Thursday, September 16, 2010 8:54 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark

i am still telling u man a pentecostal's ~my personal dadgod is even more disappointed in me than my regular dad~ guilt complex can give yr popemobile a run for its offering money

And my bipolar-induced guilt complex trumps all of yours.

the only redeeming quality to undeserved suffering is that everyone gets it to some extent.

lol zorn_bond noted that does sound pretty sweet

does suffering make sex more sexy?

& elmo you are kind of missing the point - if you are a certain kind of fucked up (i.e., if you are catholic), suffering feels good. "it feels good" = a redeeming quality for sure

my personal dadgod is cosmically disappointed in the conduct of my perpetually-redamning-itself soul!!

I have enough unearned suffering that I need to figure out how to make it a pleasurable pasttime.

/emo blog entry

It does sound transformatively awesome though.

does suffering make sex more sexy?

That's a second cousin to "Sex is better when it's forbidden,", which does tend to bring on suffering. So if you want more suffering, well....

eh i'm dodging the original question here because there is really no way to deal w/ this q outside of christian theology -- if you leave out original sin & the resurrection you are left with redemption, but to / from what exactly?

I was about to pose that sort of question - in the absence of an afterlife or karma, can unearned suffering ever be "redemptive"?

Well a lot of people after a personal trial will say they "learned a lot from it."

People will tell you it "makes you a stronger person."

which is gahbage but

nothing is redemptive

I don't feel like "redemptive" quite means the same as those things tho

no one to redeem

I am thinking that the non-religious equivalent to "redemptive" would be something like "not totally pointless/has some end positive benefit."

yea if you mean like, does getting dealt a shitty hand make you a better person? no. it can just as likely turn you into a fearful, bitter wretch.

next q: "does everything happen for a reason?"

in a roundabout way i think he might be saying undeserved suffering will disabuse you of the entitlement you might feel that suffering be distributed in a just fashion, where other people are living in a dream world?

that is certainly a possible, but by no means a given outcome

the thing from which you can be redeemed is your imperfect self. you at your worst. the ugly person you sometimes suspect you are. the petty vindictive selfish being that you struggle to be better than. redemption is about accepting that you are forgivable for being that person sometimes, because who you actually are - the you who lives down where you are genuinely yourself - is loving enough to forgive that other self, those other parts. when you suffer guilt for having treated someone poorly, the redemption comes from making use of that suffering: from learning from it; from acquainting yourself with that better self underneath who feels bad for having been petty, vindictive, etc.

^^All this right here is how I have always taken that kind of thing. It's in buddhism, too, when speaking about karma- "karmic retribution" "expiating negative karma" and so on.^^

this is a great, thoughtful, at times lol hilarious piece by john jeremiah sullivan in which he attends a christian rock festival and reminisces about a christian phase that he went through while in his teens

anyhow, here is a quote from it

He was the most beautiful dude. Forget the Epistles, forget all the bullying stuff that came later. Look at what He said. Read The Jefferson Bible. Or better yet, read The Logia of Yeshua, by Guy Davenport and Benjamin Urrutia, an unadorned translation of all the sayings ascribed to Jesus that modern scholars deem authentic. There's your man. His breakthrough was the aestheticization of weakness. Not in what conquers, not in glory, but in what's fragile and what suffers—there lies sanity. And salvation. "Let anyone who has power renounce it," he said. "Your father is compassionate to all, as you should be." That's how He talked, to those who knew Him.

Not a prioi redemptive but it can be if that's what you choose. Perhaps the very problem is in the very Christian notion of redemption and its Latin etymology, which implies that because of original sin you have to buy back your soul. Suffering makes some people even worse assholes as I'm sure we have all witnessed but it can improve some people inasmuch as it augments their compassion and empathy.

I guess my example above tho is "earned" suffering - amateurist's question is, like, catastrophic loss/calamity -- "acts of God" in legal talk -- is that redemptive? and I think the answer is, it depends on what you make of it, and the best policy, unless you're samuel beckett or something, is to try to find a way to make it meaningful in some positive way.

I'm looking at the excerpt where it appears in the speech and in a very weird and coded way, MLK seems to be asserting the powerlessness of God while couched in language saying the opposite.

"Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed."

I think he means for the audience themselves to be agents of this change, to be proactive, while an outsider listening in would hear placation, that God is the agent that will take care of things so there's no need to be agitated.

it isn't redemptive, but it (suppose to) help appreciate happiness and joy.

though humans tend to forget about suffering when they are happy, which is a mistake.

the nice part of the idea lying at the heart of catholic redemptive suffering is, i think, the concept of moving away from easy reward towards the pursuit of the immaterial. tie it in with not just the loss of riches, security and comfort, but also with pain, disgrace, disease, the lamentation of your women and what-have-you, and you start to end up with masochism as a religious act. that's mainly where i get off, though i can dig the earlier concept as a useful species-wide tool to work under uncertainty and hardship to gain long-term or obscure rewards.

listentoyoutube.com

right this is what i was gonna go in on earlier but then i realized that i was talking abt suffering i felt i'd ~earned~ and that's not really the question

hm

something happened there

was gonna say

i thought that was cryptic reference to youtube comments, associated suffering

It's no "utility data" but you take what little you can get in a thread about suffering.

I'm looking at the excerpt where it appears in the speech and in a very weird and coded way, MLK seems to be asserting the powerlessness of God while couched in language saying the opposite.

"Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed."

I think he means for the audience themselves to be agents of this change, to be proactive, while an outsider listening in would hear placation, that God is the agent that will take care of things so there's no need to be agitated.

I'm wary of this - I don't think MLK was secretly a nonbeliever, or that he conceived of God as anything less than the mighty God of scripture. how people should/must/ought to behave in light of what that God is like, yes for sure he had incredibly forward-looking ideas about that, but I don't think he's like winking to his fellow crypto-agnostics, which if that's an unfair reading of what you're saying pls excuse but yeah MLK believes in God v. heavily afaik

lol "utility data", abbott otm

is earned suffering redemptive? kinda what i worry about more

I am never gonna live that down am I

xp

it was funny!

is earned suffering redemptive? kinda what i worry about more

― are you interested in getting into a detailed car with me here? (goole), Thursday, September 16, 2010 11:24 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

i think, to the sufferer, it can be!

man that makes me sound all kinds of fascist but plz realize i intend the source of its meaning to come from the perspective of the sufferer

can i just

i say this with a deal of admiration, but Christianity is nuts

Michael White otm re. the Latin identification of redemption & repaying of debts (thanks again, Augustine!) but given that it emerges in later Church times you can fruitfully search for other meanings of redemption (obv. within a Christian context as re. the quote). aero points to another in an earlier post: unearned suffering is redemptive in the sense of being transformative: your suffering gives you a different insight into life, one which is valuable & generally not attainable o/w. Take for instance sickness. Nowadays we think of sickness as merely a negative thing, to be fixed by experts, but that's not the only way to understand sickness. In an older Christian context the sick were seen as having special insights into life, & in particular special access to Christ. You could secularize this a bit by maintaining that the sick can have a special kind of dignity not available to the well (that's to take a more "spiritual" view of health than the "therapeutic" view that predominates today).

"I don't think he's like winking to his fellow crypto-agnostics"
maybe not so much wink so much as delivering two different sermons for two different audiences, and not so much crypto-agnostics as folks who will interpret 'redemptive' as being paid back in this life, not the next.

curious as to why a distinction is implicitly being drawn between earned and unearned suffering

like, isn't the point of earned suffering that it redeems you (eg prison sentences etc.)

theoretically

i mean that's the whole question, isn't it

earned suffering is what you have coming to you, you pay it back in this life and it don't buy you jack in the next plane

in itself, absolutely not.

suffering is God's free gift, you don't have to earn it...just like redemption...we serve an awesome God imco

gift vs test, basic catholic stff here

lol imco

yeah i gotta answer no, but i would i guess

tch ask a bassist a complex question, get the answer of a man whose mind is already on the acquisition of his next illegal chemical meltdown

^ feels like he's earned some suffering next chance bassist mods gets tbh

Suffering is just suffering, whether earned, deserved or not, but in the same way that ecstatic joy can take you beyond yourself and teach profound lessons, so can suffering.

This is not automatic. Suffering doesn't confer sainthood all by itself. But it can sometimes act upon one like a purifying fire, scorching the accumulation of life's trivialities into a fine ash that blows away.

actually, aimless said it perfectly.

theology is batshit, imo.

...but oh so delicious when sufficiently diluted with compassion. I'd say a ratio of about 1:100 is right.

one's theological beliefs can either provide comfort from suffering (earned or otherwise), or even put it in perspective. but that doesn't make it redemptive by itself.

I still find more comfort in thinking about a totally random universe than in thinking that my suffering is a gift from above sent to make me a better person.

saying that suffering is a "gift from God" or a "blessing in disguise" is, at best, an after-the-fact rationalization. i mean, if the sufferer LEARNS something or does something to improve his lot after the suffering, then yeah maybe i could see that. but i don't even think that the point of the Book of Job is that suffering is a "gift" of any sort. and to doubt that doesn't make one less spiritual/religious.

"gift from God" or a "blessing in disguise"

People who say that sort of crap always mean well, but they have no fucking idea of what they are saying. If you are suffering and someone tries to sell you that snake oil, just consider it another trial you have to endure as cheerfully as humanly possible and try to repress the desire to bite them.

yeah as a guy who had to rise above some chronic physical stuff in the last few years I gotta say when I saw the way out, which was framing my affliction as a blessing to be decoded, it wasn't snake oil: it was a life preserver.

Suffering can only be alleviated by adherence to a "greater good".

the nice part of the idea lying at the heart of catholic redemptive suffering is, i think, the concept of moving away from easy reward towards the pursuit of the immaterial. tie it in with not just the loss of riches, security and comfort, but also with pain, disgrace, disease, the lamentation of your women and what-have-you, and you start to end up with masochism as a religious act. that's mainly where i get off, though i can dig the earlier concept as a useful species-wide tool to work under uncertainty and hardship to gain long-term or obscure rewards.

― illiterate mods are killing ilx (darraghmac), Thursday, September 16, 2010 9:47 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Primo Levi's holocaust memoirs are pretty adamant that the answer to this question is a resounding no.

The thread question, I mean.

yeah, but what about Viktor Frankl?

darraghmac have u ever read The Genealogy of Morals? I ask because this last sentence is very similar to the view that the book was written to counter: that we have certain ideas or behave a certain way because somehow they were 'useful' for 'humanity', as if that explained anything

No, bernard, i don't tend to read too depply into anything but histories of imaginary world where magic exists tbh.

But I don't cleave very tightly to that view i've expressed or anything, it's just one of the easier ways i could see for the justification of suffering as a positive

yeah, but what about Viktor Frankl?

I don't really know, I haven't read the guy, but I really like Levi's refusal to make anything into a parable, which I think Frankl and others tend to do a little.

No, bernard, i don't tend to read too depply into anything but histories of imaginary world where magic exists tbh.

But I don't cleave very tightly to that view i've expressed or anything, it's just one of the easier ways i could see for the justification of suffering as a positive

― illiterate mods are killing ilx (darraghmac), Friday, September 17, 2010 1:09 PM (34 minutes ago) Bookmark

you want to posit that people have some inherent tendency to distort pragmatic behaviors into transcendent moral principles

well without getting on the soapbox, it would seem to make sense that way, surely? 'people' being those with the authority to make these decrees, and therefore presumably interested (motivated either by personal gain or societal concern) in the long term replication of those baehaviours

I mean yeah, that's pretty much the position nietzsche arrives at: morality as (hegemonic? but I've been told not to use that word on ilx anymore XD ) cultural project, originally put in place by the powerful to celebrate and glorify themselves (this all rests on a fairly convincing philological argument tracing modern german terms for good/bad back to morally-neutral-seeming greek words for strong/weak, noble/common, etc., as well as the unimportance of a concept of 'free will' in the tragic greek worldview), then later inverted into the modern christian schema when the ressentiment of the 'slaves' (more a metaphorical than a literal condition) drives them to produce a new concept of morality based on the presupposition of free will: "yeah, we're miserable, but that's just because we choose not to better our condition on the earth through wickedness and violence directed at our fellow man! and we'll end up happier in the next world, so hah!"

(probably the most intriguing unanswered question in this account, which you can maybe see emerging even from my cursory overview, is: how is it that the 'masters' get more-or-less tricked into accepting the terms of 'slave morality'? you can see why it would appeal to the downtrodden and oppressed, but it's not clear how they sell their oppressors on the idea that they're doing something 'wrong'? the 2nd and 3rd parts of the book (and a substantial part of nietzsche's work in general) are devoted to this question, but I don't know if he ever finds a totally satisfactory answer -- nor do I know if such a thing would even be possible)

yeah, we're miserable, but that's just because we choose not to better our condition on the earth through wickedness and violence directed at our fellow man! and we'll end up happier in the next world, so hah!"

the sermon on the mount was the dirtiest trick the ruling classes ever pulled

how is it that the 'masters' get more-or-less tricked into accepting the terms of 'slave morality'? you can see why it would appeal to the downtrodden and oppressed, but it's not clear how they sell their oppressors on the idea that they're doing something 'wrong'?

I don't know, based on a quick think maybe it starts with members of the 'master' classes desiring to dis-associate with their own and become more like the noble savages? asceticism, disavowment of yr father's wealth in a strop, francis of assissi type of thing? and then gets picked up from there.

http://plif.courageunfettered.com/archive/wc195.gif