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Friday, June 22, 2012

Hope and hopelessness

Dagmara Lizlovs said...


In a material universe, that is a universe without a perfectly good Creator, Who in turn wills our existence and our ultimate good, there would really be no purpose to suffering, and no purpose to an existence with suffering. A Godless universe is basically an indifferent universe, I have heard my humanities professors use the term "Absurd Universe". Two books I read back then - Albert Camus’s The Stranger and Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Night Flight. The Stranger as the professor I had back then explained it to us was about the pointlessness of existence in the indifferent "Absurd Universe". Another professor, with whom I had a good rapport, explained to me that Night Flight was about the human effort to impose oneself against the indifferent universe. The effort, while heroic, didn't seem to be going anywhere as far as I could see because that's a fight no one in the book was winning. It seemed like a constant struggle with a tie rather victory as the best possible outcome. A Godless material universe leaves us in such a state. Suffering is in and of itself pointless. The end result is either stoic soldiering on in spite of having no real hope or falling into despair. Drs Conrad Baars and Viktor Frankl have both made the observation while imprisoned in a concentration camp, that while everyone suffered terribly, those prisoners who died (not those who were killed) were those who had lost hope and who had no purpose. The survivors all had found some purpose within themselves. Purpose, hope are not the properties of materialism. I have read somewhere that the purpose of suffering is to conform us to a Creator who suffered for us. This is possible only if there is a Creator who wills our existence and who wills our ultimate good.

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