free will and how compassion is pain

Main Points:

Compassion is painful - it is suffering for another suffers. You suffer with them and that is other-centred. It is because the other person needs understanding and accompaniment first and foremost. If help is not delivered in that spirit it is not real help. True compassion does not care if you suffer more than the other.

If compassion is not acted on or you don't want to act on it then it is not compassion but pity. People understandably admire compassion but find pity offensive.

If God gives us free will so that we can choose to be compassionate then it follows that suffering is not as bad as sin. Compassion involves suffering.

Compassion

Bringing God and sin into the compassion conversation causes total incoherence.

When we do harm, "God" says in some religions that he lets us do it so that compassion may be awakened for the victim. And acted upon. It is what we would expect God to say anyway. Compassion is suffering with sufferers and working to help them. It makes your wrongdoing worse for it makes it more harmful and unpleasant by demanding that people face the pain of compassion for the victim(s).

The evil person when he or she sees all that can get hardened and even stop seeing hurting people as a big deal for everybody is in a bad or dangerous position all the time anyway.

So the teaching is that sin hurts others by forcing them to think about compassion and compassion no matter how much it hurts you is good and the hurting makes it good. So suffering and pain are good when compassion causes them but bad for any other reason.

This denies that pain or suffering are bad in themselves!

Sin or vice or being bad inside is worse than any suffering no matter how great.

What if you say, "If sin is worse than suffering as religion says, then compassion is a sin for it makes the sin of the sinner far worse"? The answer to that is that it does not intend to. The sinner is the one who hurts others by forcing painful compassion on them.

If there were no compassion but just painlessly helping people, nobody would be able to sin by making us feel the pain of compassion. The circumstances then are the problem.

Is compassion a necessary evil for it is not a sin and it is not malicious and deserves celebration? You cannot celebrate a necessary evil for something you have to do which is bad is a tragedy. It highlights how religion cannot be pro-happiness. If compassion is a necessary evil you cannot rejoice in your compassion. God has to forgo his wish to reward you. Christianity is a false religion for it teaches definitely that God will reward your compassion.


If free will to do good is not about increasing suffering then why does God decree and make it necessary that we must suffer with those who suffer which adds to the evil? When his free will gift is granted for tormenting us he is evil and his morality is fake. His "gift" seeks to make his servants turn into sweetness and light clad terrorists.

The need for compassionate love is supposed by theists to explain why we can suffer even if God is watching over us. They say it accounts for why suffering in some way is a gift. But the need for compassion is supposed to explain why we should overcome suffering which is a complete contradiction. They say there is no love without suffering or risking suffering in order to do the right thing. Love and compassion cannot be the same thing for compassion desires to destroy harm/evil which is necessary for love so compassion works against love.

If compassion is right then pleasure is wrong. All free will is too much free will. The Humanist solution is to deny free will exists and to say that we need to feel compassion to spur ourselves on to making the world a better place. It says we must be selfish if compassion is too much for us. But belief in God infers that that solution is an abomination though it is clearly right.

Suppose you believe in God and free will and therefore that persons are responsible for the evil they do. They suffer. You will accept that it is possible that God is punishing them. If you don't believe in God you will believe that these people do not deserve what they get and are not being punished. So if you believe in God you are surer that they may be getting punished. It is a stronger possibility. Thus belief in God lessens your sympathy for them. Belief in God is bad news. And saying things like people should be allowed to take away the free will of others does not help. It worsens it.

Pointing to the compassion shown by religious people means nothing for perhaps they would be more compassionate without faith. If you really respect them you will hold they would be just as good without faith.

If a woman starts a serious relationship with a shallow man it would seem that if he abandons her when she gets cancer that she cannot condemn him for she consented to a relationship with him and had to accept that he might do that. This is absolutely correct if we have free will. You cannot argue that he has contravened her rights. You cannot argue that he did wrong.

You cannot argue that he did wrong in a way that makes him a damaged or harmful person.

If you deny free will you see it as wrong yes but not in a way that blames the person who acted. You can sympathise both with her and him for they are what nature programmed them to be. Not believing in free will does not alter our sense that some acts are wrong.

The free will defence says God gave us free will to love him and others and you abused it and that is what is solely to blame for evil and suffering for it corrupted nature and ourselves. There is no doubt that the free will defence agrees with lack of compassion because it says we consented to all the sin and suffering in the world. It is our responsibility. That is the whole point of the defence. You cannot expect your kindly self to be agonsing over what others have brought on themselves. People say that when they tell the woman she must take some responsibility they are trying to help her see so that she can watch out for herself better in future. No way! It is up to her to decide that and nothing is simple. They are judging her and that is not concern but sanctimony. There is no point in believing in free will then if you cannot judge so let us be nice to one another and forget the doctrine.

Encourages suffering

Everybody says these days that we should not will suffering or to suffer but only use suffering when it is the only way to achieve a good end and when we have done all we can about it. Suffering is approached as something that is just there and that is all there is to it and we have to turn it against itself. We see it as random and as misfortune and not as part of a plan. If it happens we deal with it. We do not say it should happen. We say it should not. People say we should see the evil as necessary in the sense that randomly terrible things happen but not as part of God's scheme.

People say that anybody who suffers for suffering's own sake is abnormal. They do not believe in a God who wants us to suffer. If we have free will then we have too much free will to suffer and cause suffering.

We see how the Church has conditioned people to accept a theory, the free will defence, that is unnatural to their way of thinking. Religion is deadly and toxic when it gets you to override your proper reaction to evil. Instead of seeing evil as vile and intolerable you see it as part of good plan.

If evil is intolerable and God won't deal with it and asks you to and leaves it up to you then it is not intolerable at all. That is the bottom line.

Compassion then cannot exist if that is your attitude.

So we see that the idea that if we have free will it is given so that we may suffer for others in compassion is rife with contradictions. Compassion should be strong but treated as something to be pragmatic about. Bringing in God and free will and metaphysics is only overdoing it.