(December 6, 2013 at 4:01 pm)Optimistic Mysanthrope Wrote:

(December 6, 2013 at 12:25 pm)DOS Wrote: I think it's a talentless writer who wrote this.

Well at least you now know how we feel

feeling grumpy

Somebody wake up Sleepy and tell him to stand by.

(December 7, 2013 at 1:58 am)Stimbo Wrote: Somebody wake up Sleepy and tell him to stand by.

Dammit. You beat me to another Seven Dwarfs joke!

Gotta be quick around here!

We can't just stand by idly while this DOS character feels up our dwarves!

(December 7, 2013 at 1:45 am)DOS Wrote:

(December 6, 2013 at 4:01 pm)Optimistic Mysanthrope Wrote: Well at least you now know how we feel

feeling grumpy

Everyone knows Grumpy used to be Dreamy, right?

(December 3, 2013 at 3:06 am)DOS Wrote: "There was, they say, here on earth a thinker and philosopher. He rejected everything, 'laws, conscience, faith,' and, above all, the future life. He died; he expected to go straight to darkness and death and he found a future life before him. He was astounded and indignant. 'This is against my principles!' he said. And he was punished for that... that is, you must excuse me, I am just repeating what I heard myself, it's only a legend... he was sentenced to walk a quadrillion kilometres in the dark (we've adopted the metric system, you know): and when he has finished that quadrillion, the gates of heaven would be opened to him and he'll be
forgiven-"
"And what tortures have you in the other world besides the quadrillion kilometres?" asked Ivan, with a strange eagerness.
"What tortures? Ah, don't ask. In old days we had all sorts, but now they have taken chiefly to moral punishments- 'the stings of conscience' and all that nonsense. We got that, too, from you, from the softening of your manners. And who's the better for it? Only those who have got no conscience, for how can they be tortured by conscience when they have none? But decent people who have conscience and a sense of honour suffer for it. Reforms, when the ground has not been prepared for them, especially if they are institutions copied from abroad, do nothing but mischief! The ancient fire was better. Well, this man, who was condemned to the quadrillion kilometres, stood still, looked round and lay down across the road. 'I won't go, I refuse on principle!' Take the soul of an enlightened Russian atheist and mix it with the soul of the prophet Jonah, who sulked for three days and nights in the belly of the whale, and you get the character of that thinker who lay across the road."
"What did he lie on there?"
"Well, I suppose there was something to lie on. You are not laughing?"
"Bravo!" cried Ivan, still with the same strange eagerness. Now he was listening with an unexpected curiosity. "Well, is he lying there now?"
"That's the point, that he isn't. He lay there almost a thousand years and then he got up and went on."
"What an ass!" cried Ivan, laughing nervously and still seeming to be pondering something intently. "Does it make any difference whether he lies there for ever or walks the quadrillion kilometres? It would take a billion years to walk it?"
"Much more than that. I haven't got a pencil and paper or I could work it out. But he got there long ago, and that's where the story begins."
"What, he got there? But how did he get the billion years to do it?"
"Why, you keep thinking of our present earth! But our present earth may have been repeated a billion times. Why, it's become extinct, been frozen; cracked, broken to bits, disintegrated into its elements, again 'the water above the firmament,' then again a comet, again a sun, again from the sun it becomes earth- and the same sequence may have been repeated endlessly and exactly the same to every detail, most unseemly and insufferably tedious-"
"Well, well, what happened when he arrived?"
"Why, the moment the gates of Paradise were open and he walked in;
before he had been there two seconds, by his watch (though to my
thinking his watch must have long dissolved into its elements on the way), he cried out that those two seconds were worth walking not a
quadrillion kilometres but a quadrillion of quadrillions, raised to
the quadrillionth power! In fact, he sang 'hosannah'."
The Brothers Karamazov by Fedor Dostoevsky

Edgar Allen Poe

"V. All things are either good or bad by comparison. A sufficient analysis will show that pleasure in all cases, is but the contrast of pain. Positive pleasure is a mere idea. To be happy at any one point we must have suffered at the same. Never to suffer would have been never to have been blessed. But it has been shown that, in the inorganic life, pain cannot be; thus the necessity for the organic. The pain of the primitive life of Earth, is the sole basis of the bliss of the ultimate life in Heaven."

Suffering is the point of life. Think on this. If you smoke, as a general rule, you will suffer health consequences. Taking reward leads to suffering debt. If you flip this, working out in a gym brings health. This is because suffering always brings reward. Work a job and your family also receives reward. On the flip side of this, stay home and you eventually lose your job. In this case, the family suffers. On one side of this, the person takes and suffers. On the other side, they suffer to give forward and reward follows.

R -----------> S ----------> R

Use any example you wish, but this law of returns will always cause a person to reap what they sow. Why is suffering the point? Buddha thought suffering can be removed. His actions to leave his family removed his suffering, but caused a debt on the other side of his actions.

Philosophy has always been after the one question to be answered: how can man experience unity from multiplicity and individuality? The answer is to suffer on purpose. Surplus can only be gained when we earn what we give. Taking leaves a debt to be paid. Objectivism has this problem.

If you return to the OP and contrast this to Poe's observation, the will of God to give over that of taking becomes evident by comparison to why we suffer here. At the end of this experience, we only receive. This life becomes the reflection point to value the gift.

This is the way I see the comments of the OP.

Good thread.

To be fair, I've never seem anyone try and use T account methodologies to justify suffering before.

Not that he probably knows what T accounts are (google, lol).

Dostoesvky has put it much simpler
In my freevolous translation it sounds about this - suffering is the only cause of conciousness.