Death

[athoughtfulman]

@thoughtful
I have never learned anything positive from suffering. Physical suffering is just suffering. It teaches you not to put your hand into the fire ,and to see a doctor. Emotional suffering has made me cynical

I do not fear being dead it's not an experience. However, like human beings generally I fear dying.It's not a choice,but forms part of my instinct for survival. I'm sure there are exceptions,there are for most general principles

I see what you mean. I suppose physical suffering is rather pointless. You put your hand on a hot stove, it stings, and the only thing you learn, is not to touch a hot stove. It's to say that's a happy lesson - it's just a lesson. But emotional suffering? I think that we can learn a lot from emotional suffering.

Such as when you were at school (hypothetical example), and you were real rude to someone, then they ignored you. And it hurt. So you learnt not to be rude.

I would agree that suffering itself is no good. I just see it as leading to somewhere. For example, if someone was bullied in school (not physically, just emotionally), they might learn that words can only hurt if you take them to heart. Sure, plenty of people end up bitter and twisted from suffering in their past. But I think that is them avoiding the obvious, that is, they don't want to learn a lesson. They want to keep believing as they have for however long, and it makes them uncomfortable to change.

Or take girls. I remember I couldn't talk to girls. They were rude, too pretty and downright out of my league. I was very shy for a while. Then at some point I let it go, I 'learnt' my lesson, and now I can talk to whoever I want. The lesson (as far as what I understood) was that girls aren't dangerous. Their words don't actually have to hurt me.

Now I can see that problems with those examples - they're a little light-hearted, ill-equipped to explain the great suffering throughout the world. That is because I could talk about suffering on a larger level, but that would generally involve talking personally.

I don't mean to offend, it's just that to look at suffering as an entirely negative thing, will just make it worse. And religious people say that Atheists can't have a moral standard. But our moral standard came through evolution, learning through what went wrong (suffering), how to make things right. We learnt how to be moral and just people by dealing with suffering and taking the lessons offered by it. If we didn't, we'd probably be either extinct, monkeys swinging through trees.