What Happened to Lee

Perhaps this is too philosophical, but for anyone who has dealt with someone with a long decline into dementia, it's very difficult for me to understand a belief in God after going through that (I certainly understand some people have the exact opposite reaction, so I'm in no way saying this belief is correct).

It's just difficult for me to envision a crueler God if that is indeed the case. A person who has died long before their body gives way, only to be a constant burden, with virtually no joy, and a constant reminder that your loved one is dead, yet still here.

In the worst cases I say unreservedly that it is a huge relief when the person's body finally joins their mind in death.

Not to be cruel, but the preexisting, running total of human suffering and tragedy in this world points to the fact that transcendent reality, the realm of God or a God, must have an alternative interpretation for human events, one which humans cannot fathom.

So for example, the tragedies which occur in your nightmares, after you wake, are given a different interpretation- the interpretation of "non-reality", i.e. it didn't really happen in some basic way that puts them into the category of "life non-tragedy".

From God's (or "a god's", for our dedicated atheists) POV, there is some enclosing context to the events of our lives that makes this mess we call reality "make sense". We don't have that perspective, so we think we suffer, pointlessly.

Along the chain from amoeba to goldfish to humans the understanding of events in our shared environment by each species changes. We think of that change as progressively achieving a "deeper understanding" of reality. The zinger in this recitation of prosaic facts is: your consciouness is not the last one in the chain.

This is what Christians experience (and think of) as "faith". Faith in the wisdom or sense-making of a transcendent God and His plans.

> the preexisting, running total of human suffering and tragedy in this world points to the fact that transcendent reality, the realm of God or a God, must have an alternative interpretation for human events

You're begging the question. It doesn't point to that at all.

Furthermore, I'd feel terrible accepting that "fact" if I were faithful. It would reduce my faith to that in a demiurge who can't (ergo impotent) or won't (ergo ignorant or malicious) build/maintain a reality that (1) makes sense in the enclosing context and (2) doesn't require the depth of horror and pain for its components/participants that this one does.

Exactly, unless one sees the suffering of others as suffering of NPCs or punishment for a former life, I cannot understand how one can believe in a benevolent omnipotent god. The cruelty that some have to endure is simply not explainable with a such a god. It cannot be benevolent AND omnipotent by definition. It becomes far far far more likely that there is simply no such a god. It's not like this dilemma is new so there should be a better explanation by now.

It's a deep problem with a long history of attempts at answering it, some more satisfying than others. One answer that appeals to many faithful is the idea that all this suffering will be "redeemed", or made to be worth it at the end. Augustine, for example, would take the "NPC" prong of your dilemma by saying that our earthly existence "in time" is not a full experience of reality at all. Indeed, you can find this view, that our conscious experience of reality-in-time is somehow illusory, in many non-Christian sources anywhere from Buddhism to Daniel Dennet. In Augustine's view it's only outside of time, with God, that human beings can fully exist - thus earthly suffering is nothing compared to the joy of being in Heaven. Obviously this is not a foolproof argument, but HN deserves to know the best answers Christian thinkers have come up with.