By: Seth Garrett
Abstract
Job highlights a toxic Judeo-Christian principle - you don't deserve family, health, or happiness. If you lose family, health, or happiness, you are supposed to be content because you didn't deserve that stuff in the first place. Maybe if you grovel before the God who is abusing you, he will be nice to you again. Red flags of an abusive relationship all over the place. Aristotelian virtue ethics realized 300+ years before Christ that any virtue can become a vice when it is deficient or when it taken to the extreme. A lack of gratitude is the deficiency of ingratitude. An excess of gratitude is the vice of obsequiousness - slavish servile debasement of self-worth.
Preface
The Biblical story of Job is often viewed through the lens of the philosophic problem of evil - the problem of how we can reconcile the existence of God to the existence of bad things happening. This analysis of the book of Job will address the problem of evil, but more importantly, it will address the problem of suffering (the problem of enduring evil) - which I define as the problem of how to deal with the existence of suffering. Different religions and philosophies have different approaches in how they view suffering. The way we view suffering can have a big impact on how we manage it. The existence of suffering demands a response, if not a solution. In this exegesis we will explore Job's response to the problem of suffering and try to discern whether or not Job's response contains the intimations of a meta-solution to the problem of suffering or if we need to look elsewhere for a more fulfilling solution.
Introduction | Meta-Mythology (freeforums.net)
Chapter 1 - Reframe the Suffering
Chapter 1.5 - Personal Backstory
Chapter 2 - Infinite suffering
Chapter 3 - Regrets being born
Chapter 5 - God is a disciplinary father
Chapter 7 - Pathetic existence
Chapter 8 - Innocence is blasphemy
Chapter 9 - Power, Resentment, and Justice
Chapter 10 - Divine Epicaricacy
Chapter 11 - Repent and be forgiven
Chapter 12 - With great power comes great responsibility
Chapter 13 - Stockholm syndrome
Chapter 14 - Destroyer of Hope
Chapter 19 - Hope despite betrayal
Chapter 22 - An Unjust God is Illogical
Chapter 24 - Justice eventually comes
Chapter 27 - Maintains innocence
Chapter 28 - The Godless Wicked are Cursed
Chapter 32 & 33 - Challenge & Refute
Chapter 34 - Existence is evidence of God's goodness
Chapter 36 - God is in the weather
Chapter 37 - Impressive equals good
Chapter 38 - God's reply - Who the hell are you?
Chapter 39 & 40 - Who is greater? Who is more powerful?
Chapter 41 - Do you dare to challenge God?
Chapter 1 - Reframe the Suffering
Satan challenges God to curse Job in order to test his loyalty to God. God agrees to allow Satan to test Job. Job's family, servants, and cattle are all destroyed by a series of God/Satan-ordained phenomena. Job's response (Job 1:20-22) - "At this, Job got up and tore his robe and shaved his head. Then he fell to the ground in worship and said: 'Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised.' In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing."
Kriah Ritual
Their ritual of sorrow, termed the kriah, involves the tearing of clothes. Kriah itself is the Hebrew word for "tear". For Job, this ritual seemed to have symbolic significance in metaphorically returning to an infantile state. Job seems to think that everything you have in excess of what you are born with is a blessing. Job's natural state at birth was nakedness. Clothing was obtained after birth (the Lord giveth). Job destroys his clothing, seeming to show that he accepts that the Lord can also justly take away that which he hath given. Job's natural state at birth was hairlessness. Hair was obtained after birth (the Lord giveth). Job shaves his head, seeming to show that he accepts that the Lord can also justly take away that which he hath given. The root of this ideology is the debasement of oneself to a type of baseline-zero gratitude.
Gratitude
I like to define gratitude as acknowledging you deserve nothing more than a certain baseline, and therefore being thankful for everything in excess of that baseline. Depending on where you set your baseline, your gratitude can shift in intensity. The lower your baseline, the more positive emotion you get for feeling lucky for all the things you have in excess of that baseline.
Desert
Our feelings about desert, or that which we deserve, are the deepest type of metaphysical expectation. When we claim that we deserve something, we seem to be making a judgement about the nature of reality and declaring that reality owes us something. So while we might be pleasantly surprised and pleased by turns of events that exceed our expectations in the moment, the joy of gratitude comes from a deeper felt sense of expectation in relation to what we deserve. The opposite of this feeling of gratitude might be a sense of entitlement, where you feel you metaphysically deserve a higher standard of living from reality, and are therefore disappointed when reality doesn't live up to that expectation.
Reframing Expectations
It would seem to be human nature to often take for granted what we have. We seem to have a propensity to view our current material wellbeing as the expected status quo, any improvements to our status quo would provide a positive emotional affect, and any regressions from our status quo would provide a negative emotional affect. Therefore, our emotions are connected to our expectation of maintaining a certain status quo. During a process of self-introspection, we can analyze our status quo and change it. The status quo is the default for what we expect from reality, and our frustrations are merely deviations from that arbitrary expectation. When we reframe our experience, we recalculate what our expectations should be. We convince ourselves that perhaps we shouldn't have expected the status quo. By shifting our expectations, we have the ability to shift our emotional valence from negative to positive.
Baseline Zero
By setting the infantile state as the baseline expectation, he acknowledges that he doesn't deserve his hair, nor his clothing, which he removes as a part of his kriah ritual. Anything obtained after birth, like family, servants, and cattle, are likewise things that he obtained in excess of what he deserves - and therefore he can assuage his agony by converting the feeling of loss to a feeling of gain, merely by lowering his baseline expectation for what he deserves out of life.
The Golden Mean
The Aristotelian perspective on virtues would be to look for the balance between the two vices of obsequiousness and ingratitude. A moral problem and perhaps a hidden evolutionary strength of the Judaeo-Christian tradition is that they smuggle in obsequiousness into their definition of gratitude. By reducing our baseline to zero, we become slavishly thankful to God, as if we don't even deserve basic decency, dignity, and human rights. This obsequiousness is morally problematic because it promotes living in a way that embraces a low standard of wellbeing for human flourishing and therefore makes the world a worse place by encouraging apathy towards the concept of wellbeing. Yet, this attitude may be evolutionarily advantageous if it inspires contented endurance during periods of misfortune.
Chapter 1.5 - Personal Backstory
High Expectations
Growing up, I always had a high degree of self-motivation. I skipped two grades when I was twelve, started college part-time when I was fourteen, composed and produced music along the way, tried to start my own business at 22, and even authored a trivial book in my early twenties. I had a big vision for my role to play in the world. I had great aspirations for the future - a view of myself that I perhaps had the potential to continually level up in all areas of my life, continually pursuing greater and greater goals in trying to make the world a better place. I also held significantly strong expectations on my desire to have a wonderful romance with the love of my life, raise a beautiful family and inspire my children to have the aspirations to become as great as they can be to make the world a better place.
Bad Luck
In my early twenties I started experiencing a bitter chain of bad luck. My attempt at starting a business was floundering since I didn't have enough time or resources to devote to it in-between a full-time job, dating, marriage, and even part-time college classes. My marriage turned out to be the complete opposite experience from what I expected - only after marriage realizing that my wife was violent and abusive. I also had a consistently growing amount of pain and disability in my spine.
Faith Destroyed
I was completely convinced that my marriage was a disaster. She was the most horrible person I had ever met. I hadn't just fallen out of love with her, I was disgusted by her. I had zero desire to continue my life with her, in fact, suicide seemed preferable. While pondering the divorce decision, I heard the voice of God in my mind commanded me to not get divorced. After 6 months of pondering why God would command that, I was forced to conclude that there was zero benefit for my wellbeing, my wife's wellbeing, and our potential children's wellbeing to force this marriage to continue. If God wasn't motivated by our wellbeing, what was he motivated by? Perhaps he wanted to manipulate us into staying in the church, and forcing the marriage to continue would help maintain his worshippers? I found the idea that God would want to maintain his followers even at the cost to their own wellbeing a morally repulsive idea. My innate sense of morally was screaming to me about the primacy of wellbeing. I found myself unable to accept the moral status of a God who didn't care about wellbeing - if God didn't care about our wellbeing then he wasn't a God worth worshipping. I left the metaphorical door open for God, asking him for explanations for what he was intending. But I told God that if I don't get a satisfactory answer in six months, then would promptly leaving the church. I figured that if he truly cared about me then he would explain what he meant and what he intended for me, in relation to my wellbeing. The answer never came. Either he was a malicious God, or spiritual experiences were completely unreliable. My faith in God was destroyed.
Suffering in Taiwan
In addition to the string of bad luck in my early twenties, scoliosis began to dominate my later twenties. Living in Taiwan for a time, my girlfriend broke up with me because I had a bad spine. Knowing that my spine would only get worse over time, I started to lose hope in the possibility for me to have a successful relationship and family. If women would not tolerate it now, how would they tolerate it when I'm in a wheelchair? Taiwan was not a friendly country for backpain. Most restaurants only supplied uncomfortable chairs. Living space was restricted so it would be expensive to have a couch to rest my spine on. Most travel was done by walking or standing via busses and trains. I found my life in Taiwan increasingly exhausting for my spine. Every night on the town required me 24 hours of rest to physically recover. I wouldn't be able to make enough money in Taiwan to provide myself with enough treatment and luxury to manage it. I was forced to return to America.
Suffering in America
Working as a software engineer in Phoenix Arizona, I found my spine to be an exponentially worsening problem for my career. The combination of backpain-induced insomnia with muscular and mental fatigue during the day, I found the constant pain of sitting in my chair to be so unbearable that I would frequently sneak out to my car and laydown in the back for as long as I could get away with to reduce the inflammation before returning to work to endure it again. It became so unbearable that I had to frequently buy new chairs. My company didn't want to buy me a new chair so I had to buy them myself. I needed to crank back the incline on my chair so that I was basically laying down while working. This exacerbated a different problem - I could no longer work efficiently since I could barely see the fine print of the code on my screen from lying down so far back. Coding with speed requires being able to have very good vision of any misplaced periods or other small details. If I could barely read the code, it would be very hard for me to notice small problems with it. But my inability to sleep due to constant pain from laying in my bed was breeding within me an infinitely deep sense of rage towards the structure of reality. How dare reality torture me so? The fatigue induced by this combination of lack of sleep, inflammation, fatigue, and pain resulted in my beginning to completely lose all the functioning of my body. Not only was I losing the ability to walk, I was also losing the ability to use my hands. For at least an hour a day, my body was so dysfunctional that my hands would lay lifeless to the sides of my body while I stared blankly at my computer screen - completely unable to bring my hands to my keyboard. I begged my bosses to help me with my ergonomic situation - I needed a better chair that would support my back and my arms - since my chair had no armrests. My company had no desire to help me and promptly fired me. I realized that I was too disabled to work. Not only was my physical situation not compatible with work - but my emotional situation wasn't compatible either. By forcing myself to work, I was maximizing my suffering and was torturing my soul into developing a dark level of resentment towards reality. It wasn't emotionally healthy for me to maintain that level of resentment.
Medical Disappointments
For years I had been experimenting with a variety of treatments for my spine but nothing was satisfactory. I purchased a variety of medical devices yet nothing produced sufficient results. I visited an endless array of doctors and tried a whole host of therapies but absolutely nothing was helpful. As I perused the scientific literature surrounding scoliosis I was distraught to find that in a hundred years there has basically been no progress in dealing with spinal curves like mine. To add disappointment to injury, not only were some doctors being absolutely rude to me, but some doctors were not even believing me when I told them how severe my problem was. My final straw was when one doctor built up my hopes by giving me a new diagnoses that might have potential solutions. Yet, when I went to visit him a second time, he completely forgot the diagnoses he had given me the last time and even got frustrated with me when I kept mentioning the prior diagnosis - "You need to get that diagnosis out of your head! You don't have that diagnoses!" I told him in frustration that he was the one who gave me that diagnosis and left for good, realizing that it was very likely that no one could help me.
Destroyed Expectations
As I realized that I might be too disabled to ever work again, my expectations for my future began to fall like dominoes in a cascade of disappointments. If I couldn't work, I couldn't afford to raise my own family. If my back was disabled, then I couldn't date or travel. If I couldn't travel, then I can't even see my family or friends. If my disease was only to get worse then I would not only have to expect my current levels of pain and disability, but also look forwards to a future with increasing levels of pain and disability. I began to delight in the idea of death.
Personal Reframing
Personally, when attempting to cope with my existential frustration at the state of the universe, I have found it useful to engage in thought experiments involving possible worlds.
1. universe where I live 28 good years and then suffer through the rest (with suicide as an option at the end if it becomes unbearable)
2. universe where I was never born
In comparing these two, I usually end up choosing the former. At a certain point, suffering overwhelms the good and non-existence seems preferable. But in general, as long as the good outweighs the bad, existence seems preferable to non-existence. In this way, I could reduce my resentment for the structure of reality by adjusting me expectations - instead of expecting 70 good years, I could instead just be grateful for my 28 basically-good years.
Job Reframing
Job seems to be reframing his suffering by putting it into a similar type of a context.
1. universe where Job has X number of years of prosperity and joy with his family, yet they all disappear in the end
2. universe where Job was never born
By reframing tragedy, it can become more psychologically bearable. So, while is seems dehumanizing for religion to push for the obsequiousness of baseline-zero gratitude, it seems to have utility in assisting the psyche with enduring suffering - which might also have evolutionary value.
Reframing in Pop Culture
In Garth Brooks – The Dance, he sings - "I could have missed the pain, but I'd of had to miss the dance." The greater the love, the harder the loss. But if you want to avoid the pain of loss, then you might have to sacrifice the opportunity for the love in the first place.
The lyrics hint at the idea that a universe with the beauty of love paired with the pain of loss is preferable to a universe with neither. It seems that even in modern music, we try to reframe our experience so that we can endure it better.
Reframing Therapy
Psychologist James J. Messina recommends five steps to facing and resolving resentful feelings: (1) Identify the source of the resentful feelings and what it is the person did to evoke these feelings; (2) develop a new way of looking at past, present and future life, including how resentment has affected life and how letting go of resentment can improve the future; (3) write a letter to the source of the resentment, listing offenses and explaining the circumstances, then forgive and let go of the offenses (but do not send the letter); (4) visualize a future without the negative impact of resentment; and (5) if resentful feelings still linger, return to Step 1 and begin again (Resentment - Wikipedia)[1].
God is Always Right
The manipulative nature of religion is exposed in the last line of chapter one - "In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing." The story already admits that God is complicit in Job's suffering, yet it subtly asserts that God is necessarily morally unassailable. It hints that you have a duty to be obsequious and slavish towards God, even at the sacrifice of your dignity - that your baseline should be zero, even to the point of accepting continuous abuse, and any thought to the contrary is a sin. Its one thing to say - "Perhaps there is a benefit in reframing our experience of suffering" to saying "You are an evil person if you expect anything like dignity, common decency, or human rights. In fact, you are evil if you expect to not be physically, emotionally, and spiritually abused by God and/or the structure of reality". One perspective is balanced with an orientation for improving human wellbeing and flourishing. The other perspective promotes a worsening of wellbeing and flourishing.
Chapter 2 - Infinite suffering
Satan tempts God again, and God agrees to curse Job's body with intense pain coming from sores all over his body - so great that his friends didn't dare speak to him for seven days for fear of aggravating Job further.
Sores
I have a friend who recently went through a pregnancy. A few months after the birth she went through the pain of enduring something worse - a disease of inflammation causing sores and puss within her skin. She claimed that the pain from her sores was twenty times greater than the pain of childbirth. Given that childbirth is already an incomprehensibly intense type of pain, I was shocked to find a type of pain that was almost infinitely greater than that which I already assumed was an infinitely horrific pain.
Rage
What this communicates to me is the almost limitless possibility for suffering in the human experience. Great suffering can make you want to lash out in rage at anyone or anything that provokes you - hence Job's friends were fearful of even talking to him. With greater possibility for suffering, there is perhaps a greater test of character - the ability to not take out your suffering on others who are innocent. There seems to be a scientific consensus on the connection between chronic pain and anger [2]. There also seems to be evidence that chronic pain leads to violent ideations [3].
Chapter 3 - Regrets being born
After seven days of intense suffering, refusing to curse God and die, he finally curses his birth. The suffering has finally surpassed all the good things in his life and made him wish the whole thing never happened. Job is faced with the awkward juxtaposition of believing in a good God, and living an existence of suffering that is so evil he judges it to be better off to have never existed. He can't bring himself to curse God for allowing such suffering. But he can muster up the courage to curse the day of his birth. I have experienced the same anguish. Never being born is a simple yet impossible solution to the problem of suffering.
Blinded by Suffering
Intense suffering inevitably inspires one to question the very purpose of life. What good is existence if it involves suffering that is greater than any possible good to be had? This pattern of thought, when taken to its logical conclusion arrives in anti-natalism - the idea that it is immoral to bear children into a world that will inevitably inflict them with suffering; the idea that no one should be born. During periods of intense suffering, it is easy to become overwhelmed by a single-minded focus on suffering. If all you can see is suffering, then it is easy to conclude that existence is evil.
Anti-Natalism Stigma
There is a temptation among theists to view anti-natalists as evil. Theist logic is often along the lines of - God is good, therefore God's creation is good; God even says that his creation is good at the beginning of the Bible. Therefore, anyone that curses creation necessarily curses the creator. The theist is often obsequiously praising God for all the good things he has done with existence. The theist's gratitude blinds him from the problem of evil by obsessing over the goodness of God. This blindness can cause theists to fail to empathize with anti-natalists and instead view them as being possessed by a Satanic ideology of destruction. Rather than being ostracized, the people with anti-natalist ideologies deserve the utmost sympathy and love - because they are obviously suffering at much higher levels than the average person.
Anti-Natalism has a Point
I think that anti-natalism is only correct when the suffering over a whole lifetime surpasses the good. The problem with anti-natalists is that they are blinded by their suffering and cannot see the fact that many good things exist within the universe besides suffering. While anti-natalism might have been the right choice for Job's life, Job has no right to assume that anti-natalism should apply to others as well. As long has the probability of a net-good life is probable, utilitarian ethics would be in favor of bringing more children into the world. If someone has a serious disease that would increase the probability of a life of net-suffering for their child, then they might need to take the anti-natalist argument more seriously before deciding to have children.
Chapter 4 - Karma
Job's friends finally have the courage to speak and they end up hinting that Job must have done something wicked to deserve this - because their understanding of justice doesn't permit God to do something like this to the righteous. They assume that the idea that God curses the righteous would create a reality where mortals are superior to God. "Can a mortal be more righteous than God? Can even a strong man be more pure than his Maker?" According to their religious axiom that God is perfect, Job must be the imperfect one. If Job is to maintain his innocence, it calls into question the perfection of God - a sin of blasphemy.
Karma
Karma, generally speaking, is the idea that good deeds bring blessings (good fortune) and bad deeds bring curses (bad luck). Often karma is spread over multiple lifetimes in reincarnation-based religions - where good deeds in the first life are rewarded in the second life, and punishments likewise transcend lifetimes. But as shown in the ideology of Job's friends, in primitive Jewish thought, karma was supposed to happen in the same lifetime. This idea of same-lifetime karma is shown by Job's friends to be a toxic idea because it implies that the unfortunate deserve their circumstances. Not only do the unfortunate suffer from their circumstances, but they also suffer socially due to people imputing blame unto them.
Karma Scripture
Same-lifetime karma is both supported and rejected by Biblical scripture. Jesus addressed it in saying "he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." When people asked Jesus why someone was born with a disability, he proclaimed that blindness and deafness are not punishments for sins, but rather opportunities for God. But despite Jesus trying to undo the toxic narrative of same-lifetime karma, this noxious logic is still littered throughout scripture. The world is wicked, therefore God issues a genocidal flood. Sodom and Gomorrah are wicked, therefore destroyed by fire. Israel is righteous, therefore their efforts in war are successful. The idea that you reap what you sow is woven through the fabric of so many stories in scripture, that it is very hard for a believer to not fall into that pattern of thinking, despite Jesus's admonition to the contrary.
Karma Morality
In general, the idea of karma is quite useful - which is perhaps why many cultures evolved this ethos. Karma is almost like the metaphysical abstraction of a "tit for tat" morality. It not only implies, "you do bad, you receive bad", but also "you do good, you receive good". Rather than abstracting karma to just the social sphere, karma gets abstracted out to the structure of the cosmos. God or divine nature functions as the ultimate arbiter of karmic justice.
Tit for Tat Morality
Tit for tat morality is based on a pattern of behavior that mimics the individuals of the same species (conspecifics) that you interact with. It starts with a default behavior pattern of generous reciprocity, expecting others to return the favor. If a conspecific benefits from your behavior and returns the favor by sending benefits your way, the cycle of reciprocity continues. If the conspecific does not return the favor, then the cycle of cooperative behavior stops. If the conspecific does not harm you, then you don't harm them. If they do harm you, then you harm them in a similar way to ensure that they incur evolutionary costs for their abusive strategy.
Tit for Tat in Game Theory
In a variety of computer program simulated experiments, tit for tat morality has consistently performed well as a reliable strategy in simulated social environments [5]. While tit for tat might not be perfect, it can sometimes be improved by adding a programmatic element of "forgiveness" to the strategy to remedy lost cooperation due to miscommunications that turn into negative feedback loops under normal tit for tat. Chris Bateman summarized the most robust version of tit for tat morality containing 1) niceness - never be the first to betray others, 2) vengeance - punish those who betray you, 3) forgiveness - don't continue negative feedback loops indefinitely, and 4) non-envious - don't try to compete with others [6].
Tit for Tat in Symbiotic Relationships
Morality resembling tit for tat strategies seems to be found in the animal kingdom. Symbiotic relationships between species can be evidence of an existential tit for tat agreement of - "you do something good for me, I do something good for you". Certain species of fish will develop symbiotic relationships with each other, where the smaller fish will clean the larger fish by consuming the parasites on its body, and the larger fish will provide the cleaner fish with protection from predators. Crocodiles have a tit for tat relationship with birds who clean their teeth (getting the benefit of nutrients) and the crocodile doesn't harm them because he is getting the benefit of healthy teeth. Even bacteria have been found to engage in relationships reminiscent of a tit for tat morality when one bacteria provides nutrients to the host and the other creature provides shelter.
Tit for Tat in Social Animals
Certain types of birds will protect the nests of their neighbors. Other birds will give off loud warning signals to protect others at the cost of allowing the predator to hear them. Vampire bats will share blood with other bats. Chimpanzees benefit each other with grooming activities. More robustly, experiments on chimpanzees have tested the extent to which their tit for tat morality is conscious and adaptable or unconscious and purely instinctual. In Engelmann's experiments, he equipped two chimpanzees with a contraption that has two options - low quality food for yourself (selfish), high quality food for the other chimp (benevolent). There was a possibility for the receiving chimp to share some of the high quality food with the chimp who sent it his way. Over iterations of tests, they found that chimps would often trust each other to share the high quality food. If a receiving chimpanzee did not share the food, the betrayal of trust would be remembered and on the next round, the chimp less likely to be generous towards the conspecific who had done him dirty in the prior round. Trust was measured by probability of sending high quality food to the chimp partner. Over all, trust increased over time between chimps who shared with each other, and trust decreased over time between chimps who had a history of betrayal [7].
Religion Supports the Nice Element of Tit for Tat
The nice element of a tit for tat ethic is to always initiate with altruistic behavior towards others. The golden rule is the religious expression of this nice element - how we should treat others the way we want to be treated, which would mean we should assume that others are like us and deserve altruistic treatment by default. This golden rule is expressed in many religions, almost to the point of becoming a human universal.
The Golden Rule
Hinduism: "Everything you should do you will find in this: Do nothing unto others that would hurt you if it were done unto you" (Mahabharata 5:1517). Buddhism: "Do not offend others as you would not want to be offended" (Udana-Varga 5:18). Taoism: "The successes of your neighbor and their losses will be to you as if they were your own" (T'ai-shang Kan-ying P'ien). Confucianism: "Is there any rule that one should follow all of one's life? Yes! The rule of the gentle goodness: That which we do not wish to be done unto us, we do not do unto others" (Analects 15:23). Judaism: "That which you do not wish for yourself, you shall not wish for your neighbor. This is the whole law: the rest is only commentary" (Talmud Shabbat 31a). Christianity: "In everything, do unto others what you would have them do unto you. For this sums up the law and the prophets" (Matthew 7:12). Islam: "None of you shall be true believers unless you wish for your brother the same that you wish for yourself" (Hadith 13).
Religion Undoes the Revenge Element of Tit for Tat
The tit for tat ethic assumes a personal responsibility to ensure justice in your local relationships. If you are betrayed, you will punish the betrayer. If you are rewarded, you will reward your benefactor. Religion turns this logic upside-down by convincing the believer that "tit for tat" justice is woven into the metaphysical fabric of the universe - either by karmic forces or by God's omnipotence. By shifting the tit for tat ethic to the universe, it removes personal responsibility for ensuring justice. This could have both beneficial and detrimental effects.
Detriments of Abstracted Tit for Tat
But it can be socially detrimental in that it can make believers apathetic about the principle of justice and their social responsibility to maintain it since justice during this life might not be important since a superior cosmic justice is waiting for us. It can be personally detrimental when you choose to endure abuses in hopes of an eternal reward. It can be detrimental to the course of evolution if no one punishes sub-groups that evolve an abusive ethic.
Benefits of Abstracted Tit for Tat
It could be psychologically beneficial, in that it comforts the distressed mind about the unfairness of crime and abuse - the universe will satisfy the psychological need for tit for tat justice. It can be survivalistically beneficial, in that your survival is more likely when you abstain from attempting to get revenge personally. It could be socially beneficial, in that it demotivates personal attempts at revenge which can create dangerous negative feedback loops (blood feuds between clans). It could be beneficial towards classes of people who lack social power, in that it allows your group to survive in a hostile environment by enduring abuses rather than offending those in power with feeble attempts at retribution (Nietzschean slave morality).
Nietzschean Slave Morality
Nietzsche posited that morality was essentially a class-based phenomenon where the powerful and the powerless adopted different virtues to match the needs of their different roles. The "masters" were the rich, powerful elites who embraces their successes as virtuous. The "slaves" were the poor, powerless servants who resented the upper class as evil. Based on these two perspectives, different moral codes would result. The rich would embrace gluttony, sensuality, dominion, and competence as signs of virtue. The poor would vilify the virtues of the rich, and converting their own status quo into virtues. If the poor lacked food, then fasting was virtuous. If the poor lacked women, then chastity and celibacy were virtuous. If the poor lacked status, then humility was virtuous. If the poor lacked power, then meekness was virtuous. By embracing virtues like humility and meekness, the slaves were more likely to survive in the face of their oppressors. The villainization of the attributes of the masters would eventually unite the minds of the population against the abusers - making it a powerful long-term revolutionary tactic. Instead of taking tit for tat physical revenge against the oppressors, they take revenge on their ideas.
Game Theory of Abstracted Tit for Tat
There might be a game theoretical advantage to this submissive ethic in that - abusive people might be able to get away with abusing a series of people, but one day they will abuse the wrong person and become eliminated by retribution. If individuals take revenge into their own hands, they suffer a risk of getting damaged in the process. By following a submissive ethic, as long as there are others in the population without a submissive ethic, someone else can absorb the risk of taking revenge on your behalf. This would increase the survival rate of the submissive ethic while not necessarily allowing an abusive ethic to pervade.
Judgmental Karma
The toxic aspect of karma is when it is used by people to infer conclusions about an individual's character by backing into their character from what they observe an individual receiving from the universe. If Job receives bad things, then Job must have been bad in order to trigger this karma. Unfortunately this is still a temptation for Christians despite their access to Jesus's doctrine. Conversely, theists can be tempted to assume that non-theists or ex-theists are deserving of bad luck or curses because of karmic logic. With confirmation bias at hand, theists can ignore years of good luck, and the moment the perceived "sinner" has a year of bad luck, the theist now have evidence that their metaphysical superstitions were correct. This toxic perspective that "sinners" deserve their suffering leads to apathy about improving wellbeing for all. There is an argument that creating social structures that maximizing wellbeing subtract from God's ability to enact karmic justice in the world. By maintaining the possibility for suffering in the lower classes of society, a pocket of reality is maintained for allocation to the "sinners".
Chapter 5 - God is a disciplinary father
Job's friends warn of resentment. They encourage Job to plead with God for a miracle.
“Blessed is the one whom God corrects; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty.
For he wounds, but he also binds up; he injures, but his hands also heal."
Circular Reasoning
They seem to be subtly insisting that Job has done wrong, but to not be discouraged as God probably acts like a disciplinary father in both punishing and comforting. This dualistic nature of God makes it easy to attribute most observable phenomenon to him. If you receive blessings, God is rewarding you! If you receive cursings, God is punishing you! If you are enjoying a good life despite sin, your time hasn't come yet - God is giving you time to repent! If you are suffering despite your righteousness, God is testing you! By having an explanation for every possible observed phenomenon, the theist has an unlimited supply of supposed evidence for God's intervention in their life - without realizing how circular their interpretation of reality is.
Chapter 6 - Suicide
Job begins to beg God for a swift death. He feels his trials are too great. He is not strong enough to take them on. He has completely lost hope in his ability to ever have a future again.
Lack of Hope
I think that losing hope is a huge factor in people's desire for suicide. When weighing the value of continued existence, you need to calculate your future happiness and subtract your future misery. If you lose hope in the possibility for future happiness, life loses its value quickly. When reaching this type of a low, personally, I found that pondering what constitutes happiness is a useful exercise. If a new source of happiness can be discovered, then you can have hope in a better future that you originally calculated.
Suicide Stigma
By begging God for a swift death, Job is subtly implying that he believes he doesn't have the moral right to take his own life, because this would violate God's commandments. Only God has authority to end his life. This is a very toxic idea - that the right to personal autonomy doesn't exist. This leads to many modern-day Christians believing that those who commit suicide are destined for hell, or some equivalent, for breaking God's commandment "thou shalt not kill". This idea leads to both the extended suffering of those who are fearful of the afterlife, and the moral ugliness of someone being judged for suffering so intensely.
Euthanasia Should be Legal
The fact that it is possible to suffer so much that the bad outweighs the good is one reason that active voluntarily euthanasia should be a human right. We don't have evidence that anyone ever consented to be born into this world. We don't have evidence that anyone consented to the suffering that this world would bring to them either. If we are subjected to a life of suffering without our consent, we should at least have the authority to consent to end our own lives. The idea that you can come to earth without consent and then be forced to stay here against your will makes you a slave to your experience. Currently, the USA does not support active voluntary euthanasia. No doubt the Christian obsession with the over-simplified edict "thou shalt not kill" has corrupted our laws regarding euthanasia.
Chapter 7 - Pathetic existence
Job continues to lament over the meaninglessness and pointlessness of his pathetic existence. Job asks why his life is so important to God that God must oversee every moment of his life to test him. He wonders why he has become the target of God. He wonders how he could have sinned in a way that God would choose to do this to him. He pleads for forgiveness instead of torture.
Targeted by God
There have been many times in my life that my soul has echoed this sentiment as I writhe in pain from scoliosis. There is a certain amount of helplessness that comes when you realize that your fate is out of your control. When you believe that God exists, it imbibes a certain teleology to all of your experiences - bad things that happen to you are not the result of mere misfortune, but rather the purposeful dictates of the almighty above. This can be a very sad psychological state to be in. Not only are you suffering, but your father in heaven, who is supposed to be on your side, has decided to betray you.
Chapter 8 - Innocence is blasphemy
Jobs friends continue to scold him for his blasphemy in maintaining his innocence. For Job to claim innocence is to claim that God punishes unjustly - blasphemy.
Chapter 9 - Power, Resentment, and Justice
Job complains that trying to defend himself against God is not fair since there is such a power imbalance. Job concludes that God destroys both the righteous and the wicked. Job starts to hint at resentment for all the examples of suffering that God allows in the world. Job wishes someone could bring him face to face with God so he could discuss justice.
Enlightened Suffering
When you are sheltered from suffering, you exist in a state of ignorant apathy. By never experiencing it, you have a hard time understanding other's experiences. One of the effects of unjust suffering is the realization of how evil suffering is as a concept. A process of enlightenment unfolds when you learn how deep the metaphysical well of suffering goes. You start to gain insight into how others might be experiencing their own suffering. You can extrapolate from your own experience to imagine how other types of suffering function in other's lives. This process increases empathy for all types of suffering.
Character
To me, character is being willing to suffer for doing what is right. A lack of character might be to do what is wrong for an advantage. The way I often define psychological goodness is wanting to make the world a better place; conversely, psychological evil is wanting to make the world a worse place.
Slippery Slope of Resentment
Suffering can provide the temptation to resent existence. It can make you desire the destruction of existence itself. The greater the suffering, the greater the temptation to view larger and larger systems as worthy of destruction. Perhaps it is not only the individual's life that should be destroyed but also the bullies at school? What about the entire school for allowing the suffering? What about the entire culture? What about the entire political structure? What about the entire economic superstructure? What about the entire race? What about the entire nation? What about the entire world? What about proclaiming the entire universe as an evil system worthy of ultimate destruction?
Resist Resentment
Character, then, seems to be the ability to resist that temptation and say that despite the suffering, what good can be achieved? How can the world be made better in the face of this suffering, rather than desiring to make it worse?
Resentment is Good
Now to play devils advocate - it would seem that revenge impulses have their evolutionary utility. Game theory simulations show how "tit for tat" morality is one of the most successful systems. If your neighbor steals your food, you need to steal their food to balance out the game. If they kill your family member, you kill them. Those who don't get revenge will lose the evolutionary game over time because they keep incurring costs and their DNA dies off quicker relatively. A revenge ethos would then be useful for increasing the cost of unethical behavior. When humans evolve social systems, revenge becomes more complicated because you can be harmed by a system rather than an individual. So, getting revenge on a system might make sense as a way to punish bad systems and motivate the evolution of systems that don't manufacture unfair suffering.
Resentment Must be Accurate
But, despite the evolutionary benefits of revenge - the moral calculation necessarily demands accuracy in getting revenge. If you get revenge on the innocent members of a system, your actions betray a principle of justice - in that people should only be punished for their own sins. Justice has been found to be a naturally important principle to some animals. Even monkeys understand the principle of fairness - that which is unfair is an abstraction of something that can hurt your relative development and therefore hurt your evolutionary chances. Relatively less food (unfairness) means less energy and less ability to compete in the game of natural selection. We naturally want to reward those that treat us fairly and punish those that treat us unfairly so we motivate collective evolution down a more cooperative path. If we randomly punish the innocent in our flaming rage - we punish the wrong people, and hence harm the evolutionary chances of those that we should actually want to succeed.
Forgiveness Is Superior To Revenge
Yet, most types of harm don't fully require revenge. Human error causes resentments to build, but it is often less than intentional, or a product of miscommunication, bad timing, circumstantial stressors, etc. Evolutionary game theorists have also noted this phenomenon. When a certain amount of "noise" (inaccurate signaling) is injected into the interactions between simulated creatures, they start to misinterpret each other. Perhaps one creature thought his food was stolen, but it wasn't really the case. So when the frustrated creature steals food in revenge, the victim of revenge doesn't understand why they were punished, so it turns into a cycle of unnecessary revenge that makes them both less evolutionarily successful. The trick is to evolve forgiveness. Once one of the creatures chooses to forgive, the cycle of revenge stops.
Natural Evil is Untouchable
But the phenomenon of revenge and forgiveness are mainly functional within the scope of human-caused evil, or moral evil. The philosophic problem of evil covers both man-made evil and natural evil. We can solve our resentment towards man-made evil with revenge or forgiveness. When it comes to natural evil - like disease, death, chronic pain, hunger, disability, discomfort, and emotional agony - revenge and forgiveness are no longer tools to deal with evil. There is no way for man to get revenge on God, nor to punish the elements. Forgiveness becomes empty when there is no way to get nature to repent of its evil ways in the face of your forgiveness.
Obsequiousness Solves Resentment Towards Natural Evil
Perhaps the religious impulse towards obsequiousness is to stave off the potential danger of resentment that lies in the path of thinking you deserve something better than what you have. In this way, perhaps the Bible is on to something in proclaiming anything that other than obsequiousness a sin. By setting your expectations to zero, you stave off resentment. Perhaps expecting something from reality can be a route to evil - an initial sin that leads to resentment and the desire to make the world a worse place.
Chapter 10 - Divine Epicaricacy
Job wishes for God to explain his legal grounds for punishing him so severely. He questions whether or not God enjoys watching the suffering of his righteous children, while he allows the wicked to run free.
Resentment Aims Upward
Professor of philosophy Robert C. Solomon has theorized that the negative emotions of resentment, anger, and contempt function in relation to your position on a social hierarchy. Resentment is the emotion that is triggered by injustices delivered to you by someone of a higher rank than yourself. Anger is triggered by offenders of an equal status to your own. Contempt is triggered by offenders of a lower rank than your own [8].
Behavior Implications
The ability to identify the power imbalance between the offended and the offender would seem to have useful implications for optimizing behavior. When faced with injustices by a higher power, a certain amount of inhibition is to be maintained. Resentment builds in silence, because the victim doesn't have the power to defend themselves. When pushed to the extreme, this could lead to revenge ideation - secretly looking for weaknesses in the oppressor in order to exploit them and get revenge.
Epicaricacy
Epicaricacy is the English word for schadenfreude - the taking pleasure in the misfortune of others. Epicaricacy seems worse than the popular version of sadism - instead of merely delighting in the pain of others (often only superficially - enjoying the idea of stimulation rather than the actual suffering), you delight in their downfall - a more comprehensive desire for them to suffer in any and all ways possible. When facing repeated injustices by a higher power that has the capacity to stop the pattern of injustices, it can be natural to impute epicaricacy to the offender - or else how do you explain their lack of action? Obviously, there are many factors to take into account. Hanlon's razor advises us to not assume malice when stupidity is a possible explanation. Yet in the case of God - when defined as omniscient, stupidity or ignorance no longer become acceptable answers. If ignorance and impotence are not viable answers, theists often move to assume that God uses suffering as a tool to teach us. But in the depths of suffering, it doesn't feel like any lessons are being taught - the only lesson they are learning is how evil the structure of reality actually is. If the nature of the suffering becomes so extreme that "learning" becomes an unacceptable answer, epicaricacy becomes a logical deduction as to why God allows evil to exist - because he likes it.
Revenge Against the Divine
Job is suffering injustices dealt to him by either God or nature - both with a higher status of power and influence than his own. He cannot battle with them as equals with the emotion of anger. He cannot swat them away with the emotion of contempt. He can only deal with them using resentment. But resentment, unmanaged, can be a self-harming state of being.
Self-harming Resentment
As Alice May stated, "Hanging on to a resentment, someone once said, is like drinking poison and hoping it will kill someone else. [9]" There is a lot of pain in the soul of the person racked with feelings of resentment. There is an element of psychological self-harm in this mode of being. Because of the extreme power imbalance between God and man, there is no real way to satisfy it's base desires for revenge. The person harboring resentment might suffer more than the offender does thereby. According to Dr. Nina Radcliff, resentment can 1) weaken your immune system, 2) increase stress and anxiety, and increase the risk of 3) heart disease, 4) hypertension, 5) stroke, 6) cancer, 7) alcoholism, 8) drug addiction, 10) compulsive behavior, 11) weight gain, 12) mood swings, 13) depression, 14) burnout, and 15) shortened lifespan [10].
Resentment as a Defense Mechanism
Despite the power imbalance, resentment can function as a tool to ensure that you never trust a source of your pain ever again. This change of trust can protect you from future incidence of harm. I think a major factor in many post-religious individuals is a type of resentment that comes from experiencing the harm that the higher power of religion caused them. A religion is often represented by the power structure of an organization. Often the emotions of anger (same power level) or contempt (superior power position) are unable to manage the imbalance of power between the individual and the organization - leading to resentment (inferior power position). The resentment can provide these individuals a defense mechanism to ensure that they maintain their distance and never get harmed by trusting that religious organization ever again.
Religious Defense Mechanisms
In response to the post-religious resentments, the currently religious often adopt a mentality that anyone who leaves a religion is possessed by evil energies. This can provide them with a psychological defense mechanism to write off the harm experienced by those who depart from the faith and maintain their trust in their religious structures. Yet, this is incredibly unfair to the post-religious individuals - not only do they have to suffer the trauma caused by realizing you were betrayed by religion, but they also have to suffer from being villainized by those who formerly were your only support group. Job experiences this acutely by realizing that his theist friends are now his enemies that demonize him everyday, adding insult to injury.
With Job's appeal to divine epicaricacy, you can see Job's resentment growing in each chapter.
Chapter 11 - Repent and be forgiven
Job's friends continue to berate him, and claim that if he repents and turns his heart to God, everything will be better and he will forget his suffering like the water flowing down a river. Job's friends make appeals to God's infinite and unfathomable wisdom that cannot be questioned.
Divine command theory
Job's friends continue to fall into the divine command theory religious trap that forces religious conclusions to go in accordance with the principle that God is always good, no matter what happens. By making "God = good" the axiom of divine command theory, everything he does is good. Therefore, God is always worthy of worship. The problem with this line of thinking is that it makes goodness arbitrary. God can torture, rape, steal, lie, murder, and all of it is justified by "God's ways are mysterious" and "God's ways are higher than our ways." By making unending appeals to mystery, you could even allow a being as unscrupulous as Satan the possibility to become God in your own eyes - for no divine sin is beyond being able to be brushed off as a mystery.
Chapter 12 - With great power comes great responsibility
Job makes appeals to God's omnipotent nature, seeming to build a case that God is responsible for all of the suffering in the world since he oversees it.
Atonement as God Paying For the Creation of Evil
Natural human moral intuitions guide us to understand that power is connected to responsibility. There is an argument for saying that God was obligated to pay for the suffering of humanity because in the final analysis, God is responsible for it. When looked at through the lens of divine responsibility, Christ's suffering almost makes sense as a type of obligatory compensation to humanity for providing humanity with such a harm-ridden universe. Under this framework, one could theologically argue that the creation of evil was of such benefit to man that God was willing to pay the price of justice in order to deliver it to us - allowing himself to be tortured for every torturous lesson he delivered to humanity. But this solution to the problem of evil necessitates the conception of a God who is not fully omnipotent - a God who is unable to teach his children except by the creation of evil.
Chapter 13 - Stockholm syndrome
Job pleads with God to take him to court so he can plead his case. He still trusts in God's justice. He laments on how God is treating him like an enemy.
The Abuser is Never at Fault
Stockholm syndrome seems rampant in theist logic. When I studied psychology 101 in college, it became apparent to me that there was a weakness in the human psyche that allowed battered wives to stay with their abusive husbands. They would blame themselves for the abuse, expiating their husbands of guilt. It became self-apparent to me that this was morally wrong in that it allowed for the continuation of suffering by turning justice upside-down. It indicated a twisted view of reality that converted the perception of yourself as a victim into a perpetrator, and the perpetrator into a victim. Noticing this apparent pathology of reasoning in battered women caused me to identify a parallel in theist psychology. No matter what God does, God is the good guy. If a theist suffers, it must be the theist's fault. The pathological psychology seems to function in an identical way to put the blame on oneself, never on God.
There Ought to be Justice
I have gone through all of Job's emotions in suffering with scoliosis. In enduring my chronic pain, I concluded that ultimately, one of the most important principles for my continued existence was the principle of justice. If I endure suffering, but I am never rewarded for it, of what use is my endurance of character? The principle of justice seemed self-apparent to me as a fundamental axiom of how the universe ought to operate. In drawing this conclusion, I unwittingly arrived at a theory that is the alternative to divine command theory - namely natural law theory.
Natural Law
Natural law theory is basically the idea that there are certain fundamental rules to existence that we can be aware of naturally. In the Euthyphro dilemma, it was questioned if the good things are good because God commands them (goodness as arbitrary as God's opinion), or if God commands things because they are have the essence of goodness - hinting at the idea that goodness is a transcendent quality that pre-exists God's opinions, of which he is subjugated to.
Consent and Compensation
Everyday in 2020 I would lie on my couch in spinal agony and stare at a picture of Zeus on my wall. He cast a sanctimonious gaze of self-righteous judgement over the room - as if he was skeptical of whether or not I was worthy of his help. I mentally, emotionally, and spiritually wrestled with the concept of justice under his gaze. It seemed to me that the universe should give us a baseline quality of life as a minimum standard of what we deserve, then any undeserved suffering in excess of that should be balanced out with joy to compensate us for those damages. It seemed like even undeserved suffering could not be limitless without violating some aspect of justice. The idea of consent seemed relevant to justice. How can God give us suffering without our consent and still be termed "good"? I concluded that if there was a God who was allowing my continued suffering, he was already guilty of violating justice by allowing harm to me without my consent. Not only was God obligated by the principle of justice to compensate me for my suffering, but also compensate me for violating my consent.
Judge God
I figured that if God existed, he must be subject to the principle of justice or he doesn't deserve the status of God. I figured that perhaps my suffering was proof that he had violated the principles of justice and therefore I might be able to sue him for reparations in a heavenly court. By embracing natural law theory, I now had a legal standing to judge God. By accepting the idea that the principles of goodness (justice) were more powerful than God himself, I was able to comfort myself in the idea that I might be able to leverage that to my benefit just as Job does.
Theological Algebra
Carl Jung, in his book "Answer to Job" talks about the imperfection of God - God being a pseudo-perfect entity, the only think he lacked was imperfection. Carl ponders the idea that God created man to help him discover his own inconsistencies, as if man was a tool for God to learn from. Carl talks about God in terms of the psyche, or the unconscious. From a psychological standpoint, the book of Job is showing how man is struggling with the definition of perfection. Is the definition of perfection consistent with the harshness of life? Is the harshness of life consistent with justice? God almost functions like a algebraic answer to every question. If life is unfair, God's justice is the answer. The Old Testament often focuses more on justice during this lifetime. The New Testament makes an effort to push justice into the next life - were we no longer need to be frustrated with the problem of evil because all will be taken care of in the mansions above. Job struggles with this principle as it seems that God is not fulfilling justice during this lifetime and he is more or less ignorant of Christian ideas of rewards after death. He has not been enlightened by New Testament thinking, so he has to invent the concept of courts in heaven to comfort him in his pursuit of justice.
Consent in the Pre-existence
In considering the concept of consent, it occurred to me that the Mormon doctrine of the pre-existence gives God an "out". If we existed as spirits before this earth life, it is possible that we preemptively consented to our trials that would come to us in this mortal life. So the pre-existence is necessary for satisfying the consent component of justice. An afterlife is necessary for satisfying the compensation component of justice. To be ontologically pessimistic about the veracity of religious claims, it seems like humanity has invented metaphysical solutions to comfort us in our emotional needs for justice.
This Universe is the Forbidden Fruit
When thinking on the story of Adam and Eve, an alternative interpretation came to me. Perhaps God understands the evil of this world. Perhaps he understands that a universe based on entropy is so horrible that he forbade his children from going there. Perhaps the forbidden fruit was a symbolic representation of a universe based on the principle of entropy. Perhaps the other fruit of the garden of Eden represented other universes founded upon other benign yet interesting principles. Perhaps the fruit of the tree of life was the ideal universe with no entropy, no suffering, and no sorrow. Perhaps the garden of Eden functioned as a conjunction point between the universes within the multiverse. God, giving his children access to all universes, only forbade them from visiting one universe - the universe of entropy and death. He called it the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.
Godhood Requires Suffering
There is an argument to be made that if you desire to become a God, you must necessarily become omniscient. Then there is a further argument that the only way to know all things is to experience all things - which includes experiencing all suffering. Therefore the path to Godhood necessarily involves a journey through hell. This theological argument necessitates reincarnation - in that the only way to experience all types of suffering is to be born into every possible experience of suffering. When I ask myself - "Is it possible that in a preexistent state I desired something like Godhood and therefore consented to enter a universe of entropy?" I am forced to the conclusion that it is possible that I consented.
Create Justice
My conclusion was that there are ways to construe the metaphysical landscape that allow for justice to be satisfied over time. But just because we have the cognitive ability to play metaphysical algebra to calculate how eternal justice might work doesn't mean it is true. It might be possible that in the cold harsh reality of things, justice isn't always satisfied. The idea that the universe might be a system that perpetuates injustices filled me with an intense rage for a time. But in the end, I think the idea that this universe might not guarantee justice should motivate us to cherish this principle even more. If we want to live in a just universe, we may have to create that justice ourselves. We should try our best to engage with others in an honest way that respects their consent and doesn't harm them unnecessarily.
Chapter 14 - Destroyer of Hope
Job hints that it would be better if God just left men alone rather than pestering them with trials. Job hints to God that after he dies and disappears, God will miss his existence and want to renew him. He accuses God of being a destroyer of hope.
Divine Coercion
I have personally felt all of these emotions in my suffering due to scoliosis. I concluded that it would be better to have a universe without a God than a universe with an evil God. For a time, I felt like the metaphysical reality I existed within was between a battle between a Satan who wanted to maximize suffering, and a less than virtuous God who wanted to maximize his own pleasure rather than truly care about the wellbeing of humanity. I felt like God didn't really care about my suffering, he only wanted to use it as a tool to force me into obsequious humility and return to slavishly obeying his every edict in order to take from the crumbs of his blessings. God's curses were a tool of coercion - an abuse of power. God merely wanted to destroy my hope so that I would return to him.
Between Heaven and Hell
To feel stuck between a selfish God and an evil Satan is a frustrating predicament. It paints a dark vision for what reality is like - a place where goodness doesn't rule. There were times in my post-Mormon life that I felt like Satan and God where trying to guide me in different paths, but neither were trustworthy. I finally concluded that the only person I could trust was myself - because I alone truly cared about my own wellbeing.
The Eternal Self
Using metaphysical algebra, I invented a concept to mollify my anxieties. Based on my understanding of physics, it seemed to me that within Einstein's relativity was the possibility that eternal entities existed within black holes, since the experience of time at black hole level gravity is zero. If an object in a black hole never experiences time, it would never age - hence the possibility for godlike lifeforms. If there was a possibility of my consciousness existing after death, there was a possibility that my consciousness would be absorbed into a black hole and therefore guarantee my eternal life in the non-theological sense. I figured, if there was any possibility of my own consciousness leveling up into a demi-god in the future, there was the possibility that my future state as a God transcended time itself by dwelling within a black hole. My understanding of the eternity within a black hole was that time would be zero. This would mean that past, present, and future were all simultaneous realities to my God-state. Once my God-form entered a black hole, he would simultaneously exist in the current time of my mortal experience. Despite the paradoxical nature of it, I concluded that there was a possibility that I could pray to the future God-form of myself who transcended time and was therefore currently accessible in the "now". I figured that if I couldn't trust the Mormon God, I could trust my own God-form. Since his existence was dependent upon mine, I could confidently trust that he would be invested in my true wellbeing.
Chapter 15 - Audacity
Job's friends continue to condemn him for daring to speak against God.
The Audacity of Natural Law Theory
By defying divine command theory (not assuming everything God does is good), proponents of the natural law theory of natural goodness now have a standard to judge God with. This rubs theists the wrong way because of their innate sense of respect for authority. Evolutionarily, it makes sense to obey authorities even if they are wrong, because the audacity to speak against authority can lead to tyrannical order via a public executions and punishments, or nihilistic chaos in the discoordination or revolution of the masses. It seems like our evolutionary tendency to respect authority got abstracted to the metaphysical realm where the religious don't dare to judge the ultimate authority, God himself. But by failing to judge God when he departs from the definition of goodness, one fails to be truly committed to goodness.
Chapter 16 - Apathy
Job criticizes his friends for a failure to show empathy and comfort a person in need.
Religious Apathy
I believe that there is a tendency for the religious (Judeo-Christian ethic) to fail to show true empathy for those who are embittered by suffering. I believe that the root of this is the religious insistence that the existence of suffering is justified. Either the sufferer deserved it, or the sufferer needs the suffering in order to level up. No matter what, the suffering must be sanctioned by God, therefore an acceptable component of reality. When viewed through this lens, it is impossible to have true empathy for the embittered sufferer, since the sufferer knows that their suffering is NOT an acceptable component of reality.
Personal Regret
There was a man on my mission in Taiwan who had resentment towards God. He had suffered from a car accident that completely disabled him in all four limbs. As a missionary, I tried to tell him that he was wrong to blame God. I told him that what he was going through was just a trial and that it would all get fixed in the next life. Thinking back, I don't think my angle of marginalizing his pain helped him at all. What he probably needed was a big hug and lots of empathy instead. I wish I could go back in time and tell him, "I know how you feel. Sometimes things happen in life that don't make sense. Some things just plain suck. It doesn't make sense how a loving God could ordain any of this. If you want to blame him, you have every right too. I just hope you can find peace despite your pain."
Chapter 17 - Complain
Job continues to complain and desires death.
Anti-Prayer
In my suffering with scoliosis, my resentment towards the universe lead to a rumination on the negative aspects of my life. It lead to a never-ending series of complaints and the desire for death. My psychological state was a constant state of something resembling the opposite of prayer - instead of meditating on the good, I was meditating on the bad. I felt the universe had dealt me a bad hand, an unfair hand. This was a type of injustice. I tried to process this injustice over and over in a cycle of rumination, trying to figure out how to respond to it. If there was a source of the injustice, it would be either God or the natural nature of a universe based on entropy. Instead of expressing gratitude in my mental state of ponderment, I was expressing resentment. My resentment for the universe lead to darker and darker thought patterns of cosmic revenge. It didn't make sense - revenge on God, revenge on the universe. But it felt like something needed to pay for my suffering - and there was nothing adequate for blame except cosmic forces that were completely out of my league.
The Power of Rumination
Rumination is essentially the psychological state of being obsessed with a certain idea. Its almost a form of self-brainwashing - by thinking over and over about an idea, you find more ways to justify it and further reify it within your thought structure. It is a spiral of ever deeper conviction in a certain principle. Rumination has been found to be a mediating factor between childhood trauma and emotional disorders by helping facilitate depression and anxiety [11]. Ruminating on your anger for another person in conjunction with punching a punching back has been shown to actually increase aggressive tendencies rather than reduce aggression by venting and blowing off steam [12]. Although other studies have found a less than convincing correlation between anger rumination and the actual act of revenge [13].
Types of Harmful Rumination
Depression is linked to a rumination on things that make you sad, like your failings and lack of self-worth. Anxiety is linked to a rumination on the things that make you anxious, like deadlines, high-stake decisions, performing in front of others, or potential threats or disasters. Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is linked to ruminating on details that have been assigned an importance by your subconscious, like the need to be clean by constantly washing your hands, the need to not waste resources like water by constantly checking the faucets, the need to be safe by locking doors, or the need to be accurate by counting certain phenomena. Phobias are linked to ruminating on your fears. Schizophrenia is linked to ruminating on unusual thoughts, feelings, fears, or sensations [14]. Resentment is linked to ruminating on things that make you resentful like injustices like harm incurred.
Resentment Rumination
As I listened to Jordan Peterson's lectures, he made an interesting point about resentment. The columbine shooters had written in their journals their constant rumination over their resentment for the people that they felt had mistreated them at school. By obsessing over these resentments, their commitment to their principles became deeper. Eventually the commitment to resentment was so deep that they were able to justify acting on it. They had convinced themselves that the school was so corrupt in allowing their suffering that the entire school was complicit in their suffering and therefore worthy of revenge. The shot up the place with glee [15].
Harmful Pessimism
Jordan Peterson eventually made the point that there is an argument for resenting the structure of the universe - but if you act on that principle it doesn't make the world a better place. Since the suffering we experience screams out to us its awful nature, we should be inspired to reduce suffering, not increase it. If we know that suffering is evil, then we have to reject an ideology of resentment - since that will lead to more suffering, even if that ideology is true. So paradoxically, Jordan Peterson suggests choosing to believe the illogical idea that the universe is not evil for pragmatic purposes, rather than for truth purposes - sacrificing truth for goodness.
Beneficial Optimism
Jordan Peterson suggests taking a pragmatic approach to your theology - believe in what works; believe in that which will make the world a better place. In his analysis of the Bible, he shows that in the very beginning, the creation of the world, theology smuggles in some axiomatic ontological assumptions - the idea that existence is good. Each time God creates something he says "it was good". Jorden Peterson offers up the suggestion that perhaps it is better to have faith that the structure of the universe is good rather than evil, since the faith that existence is good leads to better results.
Chapter 18 - Cursed
Job's friends continue to insist that those who are cursed must be evil.
Affirming the Consequent Fallacy
An affirming the consequent fallacy occurs when one takes a principle, for example - A causes B, and then flipping the logic, and assuming that - if B, then A. This fallacy fails to understand that B could have a multiplicity of causes, and is not only caused by A. For example, it is possible that A causes B, and Z also causes B. If B, then A or Z. It would be a fallacy to assume that only A is the possible explanation.
Affirming the Consequent of Wickedness
In the Judaeo-Christian logic put forward by Job's friends, righteousness brings blessings (R -> B) nd conversely, wickedness brings cursings (W -> C). Job's friends observe his cursings and therefore affirm the consequent by concluding that Job is wicked (C -> W).
Eastern Karma Vs Monotheistic Justice
Both eastern religious concepts of karma and the primitive Judeo-Christian concepts of justice infer the idea of affirming the consequent of desert - the idea that we deserve our current situations. Yet, the eastern concept of karma is harder to refute than the western one. Job can refute the idea that he deserves his cursings since he has a knowledge of his innocence during his current lifetime. The eastern concept of karma allows you to be punished for sins in a former life in the cycle of reincarnation. So even an innocent Job might be cursed for sins he can't remember from former lives.
Karmic Theodicy
Theodicy is the attempt to provide a solution to the problem of evil - the conflict between the existence of God and the existence of evil. The Ramanuja school of Hinduism separates God from the nature of the universe - creation is a natural and eternal cycle that happens independently of God's existence. God is therefore not a fully omnipotent being in the face of this flow of nature. Karmic justice is just a natural law of the universe - the evils that exist are necessary in the face of these natural laws that not even God can override.
Karmic Anti-Theodicy
An anti-theodicy is a counterargument to theodicy. Under a karmic framework for viewing the world, every evil must have a prior justification. Every stubbed toe must be in relation to some former sin. Every miscarried child, every sickness, every accident, every offense, every abuse, every crime - all must be natural responses to certain bad deeds. But when we look more closely at reality, suffering is built into the very fabric of existence. Suffering could fall under a spectrum of micro-sufferings to macro-sufferings. Every cold puff of air, every itch, every bruise, every discomfort - all of these are micro-sufferings that must be build into the metaphysics of the universe. In order for all of these micro-sufferings to be justified, individuals must have committed a myriad of micro-sins, equal in magnitude to the sufferings. But I think that in the average persons life, upon reflection they would find that they aren't performing micro-sins at the same rate as their micro-sufferings. Most micro-sins would be in the social sphere and usually people get micro-revenge on social offenses by returning insult for insult, so the karmic justice is mostly satisfied. So if micro-sins at the social level can't be used to justify micro-sufferings, what can? The next most common type of harm committed by people is eating meat. Would it be logical to say that micro-sufferings are a response to the eating of meat? This line of thinking presents two problems - 1) the people who don't eat meat still have micro-sufferings, 2) are micro-sufferings an appropriate response to the harm caused by eating meat? We know that certain groups of people have practiced the ethic of not eating meat over the ages. If micro-sufferings were a response to eating meat, we would expect to find certain groups of people who don't experience micro-sufferings because they didn't eat meat in a prior life. Yet, we know that these types of people don't exist. Everyone experiences micro-sufferings, so their attribution to eating meat must be in error. The same argument can be applied to refuting the idea that micro-sufferings can be attributed to sexual sins as well, since over time there have also been subgroups committed to celibacy. To the second point - is experiencing a cold breeze or itchiness a proper punishment for ripping apart the flesh of an animal and eating them? Wouldn't the more appropriate punishment be reincarnating into an animal and experiencing being eaten? In the macro scheme of this, it doesn't seem like the universe cares whether or not flesh is being ripped apart in a painful manner because entire classes of animals have developed singularly for this purpose. The teleology of suffering seems much less logically connected to prior sins and much more logically connected to that which is naturally harmful for a species' evolution.
Evolution of Karmic Justice
The idea of karma is probably an evolutionary useful idea that helps perpetuate cooperative reciprocal behaviors in society. When you believe that good deeds bring good results and vice versa, you will have more motivation for prosocial behavior, and conversely less motivation for anti-social behavior. Variants of this principle seem common across religions. "A man reaps what he sows" (Galatians 6:7). "Whatever deed he does, that he will reap" (Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad: Fourth Adhyya, Fourth Brahmana 5). "Whoever acts righteously — whether male or female — and is a true believer, We will surely give them a good life" (Quran 16:97).
Karma can be Toxic
In my opinion, any system of belief that is quick to jump to the conclusion that people are evil is toxic. The label of "evil" is one of the most harmful and damaging labels there is. That which is evil is a class of objects that deserve punishment, if not destruction. It is harmful to conclude that people who suffer are evil because it infers that they deserve their suffering and isolates them from assistance. Job's friends are observing his suffering and then concluding that he must be evil so as to reap such a reward in this lifetime. One of the harmful aspects of many religions is this toxic propensity to inaccurately attribute the label of evil to certain people. Yet, this propensity doesn't seem to be limited to the religious, but seems more like a tribal phenomenon of human nature, in that out-groups or heterodox groups are often demonized as evil.
Chapter 19 - Hope despite betrayal
Job laments that all people have turned against him in his time of need.
His only remaining hope is in a redeemer who will redeem him at the last day.
Betrayal
Job suffers from supposed friends emotionally betraying him in his time of suffering - instead of empathizing with him, they condemn him. For me, in complaining about my physical condition of spinal pain and disability to those most close to me, some have been quite obtuse in completely failing to understand the severity of my situation. Some have thought I was imagining things and was merely suffering from hypochondria. Even my doctors have been completely useless, also failing to understand the severity and unable to help me find solutions. There is a certain element of adding insult to injury when those that are supposed to be on your side fail to support you.
Hope
In trying to survive my suffering, I posted a variety of metaphysical principles around my apartment. One of the principles was "I will be healed". This was a vague principle that gave me hope, similar to Job, that I would be redeemed at the last day. There are many ways to interpret this principle. Perhaps death will be my healing - in that my suffering won't be forever. Perhaps a resurrection will be my healing. Perhaps a miracle will occur to heal me during my lifetime. Perhaps new technology will be invented to heal me. By keeping this principle on my wall and meditating on it often, I have been able to maintain hope. Sometimes faith or hope is the psychological solution to existential crisis. In abandoning religion, it can be tempting to throw the baby out with the bath water and give up on ideas like faith and hope. But the Nietzschean call to create your own values requires us to rationally reevaluate the benefits of ideas like faith and hope. For me, hope provides an incentive to endure - hope is the cheese at the end of the maze that keeps you going. If the goal is to keep going, then perhaps inventing some imaginary cheese can be helpful.
Chapter 20 - Pride
Job's friends continue to insist that God despises prideful hypocrites and curses them, hence hinting that Job's secret sin must be pride.
Theological Pride
Divine command theory proponents will necessarily view natural law theory proponents as prideful for their audacity to use their definition of goodness to judge God. Yet that which they assume to be pride is actually a transcendent commitment to the most pure definition of goodness that they can imagine. Divine command theory proponent's suppression of natural law theory is actually an obstacle to goodness. It is actually prideful for them to assume that their God is always right.
Chapter 21 - Life isn't just
Job complains about the wicked who still live and prosper as being evidence that God's ways are not consistent.
Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People
A classic element of the problem of evil is man's confusion over why justice is not always delivered in this lifetime. The juxtaposition of the successful wicked to the suffering righteous is so powerful that it can elicit the most deep frustration possible to man. Metaphysical algebra pushes the justice into the next life, but this is not a satisfying answer to those who see the hand of God in every action. If God is never involved, then it makes sense for inconsistencies to arise. But if every event is dictated by an omnipotent God, then the abundance of inconsistencies can be immeasurably frustrating.
Chapter 22 - An Unjust God is Illogical
Job's friends counter that it doesn't make sense that God would punish the righteous - what benefit does he get from that?
Axiomatic Reasoning vs Backwards Induction
This is an interesting argument in favor of a good God, but it seems to lack creativity. If a God exists, that fact alone doesn't give us information about his attributes. Job's friends start with an axiomatic assumption that they can anthropomorphize God and assume he is like us. With this axiom, at first glance we could assume that he would enact the type of justice typical to human sentimentality, where the righteous prosper rather than suffer. While it doesn't make immediate sense why an anthropomorphized God would punish the righteous, it is a fact that some of the righteous are being punished by the vicissitudes of life. The problem with Job's friend's argument is that reality refutes this axiom. Using the facts of reality to work backwards, we can deduce that God does like the punishment of the righteous, since he obviously allows it.
Begging the Question Fallacy
This type of reasoning begs the question by indirectly assuming God is good, and then indirectly concluding that God is good. He concludes that it wouldn't make sense that God would punish the righteous, because theoretically a good God wouldn't get a benefit from that. If you assume that 1) God is good, and 2) a good God wouldn't get a benefit from watching the righteous suffer, then you can conclude that 3) God isn't motivated to cause the righteous to suffer. This approach lacks creativity because it fails to imagine the possibility that a good God would want the righteous to suffer, nor the possibility that God is actually wicked -a God of epicaricacy would definitely benefit from watching the righteous suffer. But an obvious theist apologetic answer might be that God wants his children to learn and grow, therefore he likes suffering for its beneficial byproducts.
Job Must be Evil
Job's friends accuse him of taking money from relatives, robbing the poor of clothing, refusing to give food and water to those in need, turning away the widows and the fatherless.
Chapter 23 - Refiner's Fire
Job is not afraid to defend himself against God in court.
He trusts that he will become refined into gold by these trials (Job 23:10).
He fears God has many more plans to try him.
True Love
I view the measure of true love as the degree to which you are willing to sacrifice for the object of your love. Small measurements of love could be the sacrifice of time and money. Larger sacrifices would be your health or opportunities. The greatest sacrifices are when you are willing to die or even suffer on behalf of the thing that you love.
Refined into Gold
Suffering can test the limits of our moral capacities - the limits of what we are willing to endure for that which we love. This seems to be a mentally purifying process - a process that helps us zero in on what exactly is most important, that which is of transcendent importance to us. Ideas like justice, unity, peace, and love can be ideas of transcendent importance that we are willing to orient our lives towards promoting. The ideas that we are willing to suffer for, therefore are ideas that contain transcendent value to us. They are transcendent because they occupy the space of value that transcends our selfish interests - that which we are willing to sacrifice our selfish interests for. They are the ideas that we love.
Love Provides Meaning
If you can orient your life to be in service of that which you love, you will derive deep meaning and satisfaction in that pursuit. Jordan Peterson often echos a common philosophic trope that affirms the importance of our human need to find a meaning in our lives that can justify our suffering.
Need Meaning to Overcome Suffering
This philosophic principle is subtly implying that the greater your suffering, the greater the meaning you need to find in your life. Perhaps meaning in a relationship with one person is not enough meaning to stave off certain types of suffering. Perhaps having a family provides a greater amount of meaning. But as suffering approaches infinity, the meaning must grow larger, even to exceed the meaning associated with just one family. Eventually you need to have a goal of serving all of mankind. Only a goal that large can justify suffering that approaches the human limit. Coincidentally or not, that is the story of Jesus - the one who suffered the most was able to endure it by dedicating that suffering to all of mankind. Friedrich Nietzsche was the one who succinctly stated it as - 'He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.'
Evolutionary Meaning
Our brains are wired to have at least two meaning cortexes revolving around selfless meaning (eudemonic self-transcending meaning) and selfish meaning (hedonistic self-enhancing meaning). The reward centers of the brain are constantly trying to evaluate which is more important, taking care of yourself or taking care of others. Because evolution designed us to be pro-social, we can derive deep feelings of satisfaction when we try to make the world a better place for others. By orienting ourselves properly, we can maximize the rewards produced by our brains, and therefore have a type of satisfaction that offsets the suffering in our lives. By developing pro-social reward systems, human societies can be more cooperative and therefore more evolutionarily powerful.
Evolutionary Lessons
A common theme in religious mythology seems to be the idea that trials in life are a mere test or lesson from the heavens. This meme seems especially useful in evolutionary terms. Not only does it reframe our suffering to make it more psychologically endurable, it also motivates us to look for the lesson that we can learn in order to avoid future suffering. If suffering motivates us to be nihilistic, we might lose attentiveness towards what can be learned from the experience. A theistic mindset might orient our brains towards finding the lessons hidden in our circumstance and arrive at solutions to our problems. The downside of the theistic mindset is that they might falsely attribute the cause of their circumstance to unrelated things - like subtle behaviors that offended God prior to the trial, but in reality had no causal connection to the misfortune.
Chapter 24 - Justice eventually comes
Job laments on the awful state of mankind, a state of continual suffering resulting from all types of deprivations, and crime abounding which only adds to the collective suffering. Job believes that the wicked might succeed for awhile but eventually God's judgements will catch up to them (Job 24:23-24).
Faith that the Universe is Good
Job seems to begin to realize that in order to not descend into the complete bitterness of resentment, he must trust in the principle of justice. There seems to be a subtle internal conflict within Job as to whether or not the universe is good. To him, it seems like the only way that the universe can be good is if justice is fulfilled. Initially Job was wishing that justice would be more swift, so that the righteous would prosper in this life, and the wicked would be punished in this life. But now he is exercising patience and is willing to give God a bit more flexibility in performing justice over the course of longer periods of time, perhaps even after death.
Chapter 25 - Man is nothing
Job's friends say that man is nothing compared to God.
Obsequiousness vs Justice
Job's friends insist on the obsequiousness of divine command theory, yet Job refuses to accept the idea that he is so meaningless that his suffering doesn't deserve justice. Job's friends think that whatever God does is justified, because he is so great he can do no wrong. Yet, Job doesn't start with the divine command theory axiom that God is good. He starts with an axiom from natural law - that suffering is bad. Thus, it becomes a theological battle between whether or not God is obligated to give Job justice. If God's decisions are good, then allowing Job to suffer is good and no justice is required. But if suffering is bad, then a reward of some kind is necessary to balance out God's metaphysical debt to Job.
Chapter 26 - Does God help?
Job asks - Does God help the weak? Does God teach the unwise?
The Nature of God
A lot of theological logic falls under black and white thinking. Either the successful are righteous and the poor lack virtue, or the successful are corrupt and the poor are righteous victims. Job seems to be trying to transcend the dichotomous thinking and get straight to the heart of the matter. What is the nature of God? What does he care about? Does he care about those who struggle? Does he care about those who are confused?
Faith Requires Knowledge of God's Nature
In Joseph Smith's Lectures on Faith, he elucidates his perspective on the fundamental elements of true faith. Lectures on Faith - Section 3: "Let us here observe, that three things are necessary, in order that any rational and intelligent being may exercise faith in God unto life and salvation. First, The idea that he actually exists. Secondly, A correct idea of his character, perfections and attributes. Thirdly, An actual knowledge that the course of life which he is pursuing, is according to his will." I thought this was an unusually profound notion for Joseph Smith to communicate. The idea of faith requires an understanding of what exactly you are to believe in.
Psychological Nature of God
I like how Akira the Don synthesizes Jordan Peterson's naturalistic definition of God into a music video [16]. The transcript is as follows - "So there's a line in the New Testament where Christ says that no one comes to the Father except through him. Which is a hell of a thing for anyone to say. I am the way and the truth and the life. That's another one. Here's the idea. Its as if there's a spirit at the bottom of things that is involved in bringing to being of everything. People talk about evolution as a random process, but that's not true. The mutations are random, but the selection mechanisms are not random. What are the selection mechanisms? Human females are very sexually selective. That's why you have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. So the male failure rate for reproduction is twice that of the female. How is it that males succeed differentially? Females reject. They reject on the basis of what? Well its something like competence. How is competence defined? Well men put themselves in hierarchies and they vote on each other's competence. Let's say you follow the best leader into battle. Then you don't die. Like, he might get all the women, but you don't die. So at least your still in the game. And it might be the same if you're following the greatest hunter. And the greatest hunter wouldn't be the person who was the best at bringing down game, it would be the person who was best at bringing down game, and sharing it, and organizing the next hunt, and all of that. What that means to some degree is that there's a spirit of masculinity shaping the entire structure of human evolutionary history. That's what that means. Its the spirit of positive masculinity that manifests itself across epochal ages - millions of years perhaps. And it actually has shaped our consciousness - actually! Its like the essential spirit of all the great men who defined what greatness constituted - that's a spirit. Well that's a purely biological explanation. That's God. God is the highest value in the hierarchy of values. That's God. God is how we imaginatively and collectively represent the existence and action of consciousness across time. That's God. God is that which selects among men in the eternal hierarchy of men. That's God. God is that which eternally dies and is reborn in the pursuit of higher being and truth. But there's another possibility too which is that that's actually reflective of a deeper metaphysical reality that has to do with the nature of consciousness itself. I think that's true. I believe the biological case and I believe the biologically reductive case. But I don't think that exhausts it. There's a metaphysical layer underneath that that the biology is a genuine reflection of. And that's the macrocosm above and the microcosm below. We are really reflective, including in our consciousness, of something about the structure of reality itself. And that might involve whatever it is that God is. Well that's God. God is the future to which we make sacrifices. That's God. God is the voice of conscience. That's God. God is the source of judgement and mercy and guilt. That's God. God is what calls and what responds in the eternal call to adventure. That's God."
God of Evolution
Jordan Peterson seems to posit a God of evolution, where the forces of evolution are equated to God. Certain virtues promote successful evolution, so the process of evolution is guiding us towards these higher principles. The forces of evolution require us to care about our survival and our relationship to others in order to survive together. This means God is a force of nature that motivates us to help the course of evolution. This force of nature inspires our psychology and morality. Jordan seems to take this natural force a step further and thinks it operates at a supernatural layer as well.
Is Evolution Good?
G. E. Moore coined the naturalistic fallacy as the fallacy for when you assume that that which is natural is also good. Jordan Peterson seems to be walking on a shaky foundation when he makes this assumption - which is probably inspired from the assumption found in the Biblical creation story when God claims that that which has been created is good. Of course, pertinent to this question is the definition of goodness itself.
Game Theoretical Goodness
The benefit of linking morality to evolution means you can use game theory to determine what is "good". That which is evolutionarily successful is good. If goodness is limited to mere survival and propagation of the species, then any game theoretical strategy that maximizes the propagation of the genes would be "good". But if you look at it from this angle, it seems absurd to say that any strategy that lets you win the "game" is good - for example, perhaps within evolutionary game theory is a "nuke everyone but your family" Noah's ark style strategy. High risk; high reward. Just because mass murder might win the game (maximize your genetic representation in the future) doesn't mean it is a "good" strategy. "Good" seems inextricably linked to flourishing and the maximization of the greatest wellbeing for the greatest number of creatures, and therefore mass destruction would be immoral.
Game Theory Punishes Immorality
But the morally optimistic approach to evolution would be to believe that immoral game strategies have a higher cost than their benefit, or a higher risk than their reward. Nuking everyone can destroy supply chains and create a nuclear winter. It might not be a winning strategy after all. Committing genocide might be a good strategy for reducing genetic competition, but since genocide offends our moral intuitions, neighboring nations are likely to join up and punish you in war for your atrocities.
Low Reward For Punishing Immorality
So, a more pessimistic perspective might be - evolution doesn't guide us to the purest morality, it guides us to a morality of "cheat the game as much as you can get away with". So, in a China-like situation, it is purported that China is using genocidal policies to subjugate the Uighurs (yet, in my opinion, it doesn't seem like the evidence for this is very strong though at the moment). As long as China performs genocide in a less noticeable way, performs it indirectly (through forced sterilizations, rape, or arranged marriages), only commits it within their borders, and doesn't aggress other nations at the same time, China gets the benefit of reducing competitive genes within their borders, and the other nations have little evolutionary incentive to punish them since these atrocities don't hurt foreigner genes outside of China.
Technology Will Punish Immorality
But then you can say - well a "cheat the game as much as you can get away with" strategy is dependent on "what you can get away with" which is based on our moral intuitions encoded into law, and then our ability to prosecute offenders. The more pure our moral intuitions, the more pure our law, and the more efficient our justice system, the less things people can get away with. And so there is a higher tier claim that our moral intuitions paired with our technological innovations will get better and better at punishing cheaters, and therefore the "cheat as much as you can get away with" evolutionary morality will eventually be constrained by less and less things that you can get away with. And therefore we are destined to evolve a more pure morality.
Does Evolution Require Predation?
But then there is the veganism dilemma of evolutionary morality - is it immoral to harm the wellbeing of the creatures you eat? If evolution is guiding us to a more pure morality, and pure morality is based on the wellbeing of creatures, eventually animals come into the equation. If evolution has a teleology for cooperation, why do predators exist? Within one species, you can make the argument that evolution pushes for cooperation since preying on your own species isn't a very efficient game theory strategy. But outside of a species, morality and cooperation seems to play less of an evolutionary role. Interestingly, there seem to be many examples of interspecies cooperation in the animal kingdom. Perhaps interspecies cooperation can be evolutionarily beneficial when symbiotic synergies are able to be had, but predator-prey relations seem destined to stay antagonistic.
Evolution of Predator-Prey Cooperation
Is it possible that - if you push evolution to the end of time, predators will eventually evolve to cooperate with other species instead of preying on them? Perhaps a tiger hunting a goat is an inefficient long run evolutionary strategy because the goat doesn't want it's wellbeing to be harmed and will fight back, therefore incurring a percent risk of damage to the tiger. If the tiger can evolve to eat grass or absorb sunlight, then it can avoid the risk and get the same reward. But if every animal evolves plant or herbivore diets and moralities, then they eventually will become competitors for the same food. The planet might become unstable since the ecosystem can't balance itself anymore, all the plants get eaten and the remaining life must rely on photosynthesis or go extinct. If predators are a necessary component to a balanced ecosystem, does that make it moral to ripe apart the bodies of your prey? I am biased to feeling like systemic violence is immoral since it causes suffering, even at the animal level. Is the evolutionary question a choice between existence and morality, and evolution chooses existence? Are we doomed to preying on other creatures for eternal sustenance? Of course humans have the omnivore option, but this is hardly a solution to the entire problem of animal suffering, it only reduces our involvement in it.
Better For Animals to Not Have Been Born
But then the veganism argument provides another moral dilemma - what amount of suffering denotes a life of net-negative value to the creature? What amount of suffering meets the criteria of "better to not have been born"? The vegan argument seems to be, we should not participate in factory farms because they cause animal suffering. But factory farms are not the only source of suffering. Animals suffer plenty in the wild. Safety is a large part of animal joy (freedom from anxiety). Perhaps an animal in the wild has more joy (freedom of movement) but also more suffering (anxiety). I'm ignorant about factory farms, but in a humane farm, a human putting an animal to death in a humane way seems preferable to being ripped apart by a wolf, or starving to death in the bitter cold of winter. There might be an argument to say that at the level of the individual creature, factory farms cause more suffering than life in the wild, but I am biased to thinking that suffering on a humane farm would be preferable to suffering in the wild. Yet, the vegan argument seems to be against both types of human-caused suffering.
Veganism to Anti-Natalism
Absent human involvement, these animals would not be born. Humans largely subsidize and protect the existence of farm animals. So the way I see it, there seems to be a slippery slope between the veganism argument and the anti-natalist argument - the idea that humans should not be born, because average human suffering is greater than average human joy. The vegan deontological ethic seems to be that we have a duty to not cause animals harm, no matter what the consequence. If bringing an animal into the world means we cause any harm to that animal, then we can never justify bringing any animal into the world, even human children.
Utilitarian Solution to Veganism
Converting the vegan ethic from a deontological one to a utilitarian one seems to be the moral pathway that doesn't negate the meaning of life itself. Instead of saying no suffering at all, and therefore no life at all, the utilitarian ethic measures the joy against the suffering. If humans can provide a better life for animals that the wild provides, then perhaps it is justifiable, even if at the end we still eat them.
Technological Solution to Veganism
But at the end of the day, giving an animal a life of minimal suffering and not eating them seems morality superior to minimal suffering and eating them. Will evolution ever guide us to that end? Can we ever escape the laws of entropy that cause these cycles of carnage? Perhaps with advanced technology we can grow meat in labs and mitigate our impact on animal suffering? Perhaps with advanced technology we can eventually evolve was to absorb non-biological energy types? Or are we destined to pillage planet after planet for resources, always destroying as we grow like a virus in the universe?
Can we trust evolution? Or is it secretly guiding us to hell? I think this is a question I will continue to ponder for decades to come.
Chapter 27 - Maintains innocence
Job concludes that God has deprived him of justice and he will forever maintain his innocence.
Shame culture vs Self-love
Religious culture often requires the cultivation of shame culture to create an emotional problem that only religion can solve - hence manipulating people into deeper and deeper cycles of religiosity. Job refuses to give in to his theistic friend's pressure to blame himself. He insists on loving himself.
Chapter 28 - The Godless Wicked are Cursed
The godless wicked are supposedly destined for the following fates:
1. no hope after death
2. ignored by God in time of need
3. children will die by the sword, hunger, and the plague
4. will lose all his possessions - no legacy
5. terrorized by floods and tornados
Moral Desert
Moral desert, the idea that you should be held morally accountable for your actions and deserve reward or punishment for them, is an idea foundational to Judeo-Christian theology. Growing up Mormon, moral desert was a no brainer, since the religious doctrine made very clear the inherent free will (free agency) given to us by God to choose good from evil. Yet, after leaving the church I came across a whole ideology of "no free will". It blew my mind that something I had considered a no brainer my whole life was actually something worthy of skepticism. There is a profound argument to be made that moral desert is only justifiable if free will exists. If free will doesn't exist, then we can't be held morally responsible before God.
Job Moral Desert
The entire book of Job is a discussion on moral desert. Did Job do something that was worthy of punishment? He claims he didn't. But he never doubts that free will exists. He seems plenty willing to hold those who actually perform wicked deeds accountable for punishment.
Free Will Thought Experiment
The typical religious idea of free will is the idea that we are a spirit inside a body, merely pulling the levers of our brain to perform actions with our body. The material of our body isn't the cause of our decisions, but rather our spirit is the cause of our decisions. If this is truly the case, then perhaps we would 1) be able to find levers in the brain that are being pulled by a supernatural force, 2) be able to measure this supernatural force by its impact on our brains, 3) be able to detect the energy of this spirit leave when we die, 4) be able to see a top-down decision making function that starts with our spirit and ends with our biology. Even if all of this was proven to be true, there would be a second order level of analysis that would need to be resolved before we could accept the idea of free will. That is - what type of mechanism is the spirit using to make decisions? Is our spirit absorbing information and running a cost-benefit calculation in order to make decisions? If our spirit makes decisions based on algorithms that process information against value-systems, did our spirit have the freedom to choose 1) the algorithm, 2) the information absorbed, and 3) the value-system? If your spirit did choose those things, did your spirit have the freedom to not have chosen those things? If the spirit is choosing based on which option gives them a good feeling, did they choose which feeling to have? If the spirit is a receiver (rather than creator) of their feelings, then they become a slave that is forced to make choices that are in alignment with feelings that are out of their control. If you keep asking the question "why" in relation to why decisions are made, you eventually run out of answers for where the freedom actually is.
Deterministic Argument for No Free Will
If free will is the ability to have chosen differently, a deterministic view of the chemistry of our brains would say that the cascade of cause and effect chemical interactions destines your brain to have certain states which lead to certain decisions. If you went back in time to change your decision, you would be unable to because your brain contains all the chemical potentials for the same brain state to produce the same decision. You would need to inject a free will variable into the past to change the trajectory of the decision, yet there is no evidence of such a free will variable.
Philosophic Argument for No Free Will
If there is a choice to be made, there must be variables at play for one thing to be chosen over another. If option A contains X units of favorability, and option B contains Y units of favorability, a choice is able to be made as to favor A over B. Without comparable units of favorability, no choice is able to be made. It doesn't matter if you are a brain or a spirit, both choice producing systems require favorability variables in order to make the choice possible. But then, one must ask, where did the favorability measurements come from? If you didn't choose the favorability measurements then you don't have free will. If you did choose the favourability measurements, then the same question gets pushed back in an infinite regress which becomes absurd quickly. Upon what favorability variable did you choose your favorability variable? Eventually it inevitably gets pushed back to the environment which bestowed upon you the variables that controlled your decision, hence "no free will".
Science of No Free Will
Neuroscience seems to have found the opposite of religious free will to be the case in reality. There are no levers in the brain for the spirit to tug on. Damage to the brain has a severe impact on behavior, personality, and consciousness, indicating that the brain is the source of our decisions, not a spirit. A supernatural source has not been measured puppeteering brains, rather our environments have been found to be puppeteering our brains. Environmental stimuli triggers physiological reactions in the body that send chemicals to the brain that activate different cortexes for decision making. Visual stimuli of threats can start as photons in the environment. These photons enter the brain, get interpreted, and then produce adrenaline which activates the fight or flight response. Consequently, it has become obvious within neuroscience that we don't have a top-down decision making structure, but rather a bottom-up decision making structure. The environment affects our chemistry which affects our biology which affects our physiology which affects our psychology. The information gets processed in our brain, and then flows back down the chain back to the environment. Free will experiments have been performed to show that when we think we have consciously made a decision, our signals in the unconscious portions of our brain had already made the decision before our mind had. By reading the electric signature of our body, scientists can predict our "free will" decisions before we make them. This shows that the true source of the decision is not our conscious mind but rather our biology. Benjamin Libet's experiment was able to predict people flicking their wrist a half a second before they consciously chose to [17]. Itzhak Fried found correlated brain activity 2 seconds before people consciously chose to perform actions [18]. Chun Siong Soon was able to predict mathematical decisions before people were consciously aware of making the choice [19]. Matsuhashi found that people become aware of their decisions after the decisions are already taking place in their body, meaning their conscious minds are too slow to be the originators of movements. While there is a fair amount of criticism of these scientific studies, the trend seems to be towards a bottom-up model of behavioral causation [20].
Quantum No Free Will
Sometimes quantum randomness is appealed to for the sake of providing wiggle room for free will to exist within that spooky randomness. The main problem with this approach is the fact that randomness is not the same as freedom. When a dice is rolled, no one has the power to control what number it will land on. It seems incorrect to assume that quantum randomness implies freedom. That said, lets look deeper at how randomness could play a role. If electrons have free will, they would only have free will within the scope of the uncertainty principle, as measured by physics. My current understanding is that the uncertainty principle gives wiggle room at about the size of the electron wavelength, which for atoms is about the width of the atom. The problem with the panpsychist free will argument (that all matter is conscious with free will) is that brains don't operate at the level of the atom (.1 nm), they operate at the level of the neuron nucleus (3,000 - 18,000 nm), if averaged at 10,500 nm it would be a 105,000 times larger than an atom [21]. If you wanted to claim free will at the level of the synapse, then you have 20 nm of wiggle room which is still 200 times larger than an atom [22]. If you want free will at the level of the neurotransmitter, that is 5 nm, still 50 times larger than an atom [23]. I would guess that an equation for freedom would look something like the wiggle room of the election divided by the size of the functional scope. If the electron wavelength distance of wiggle room is divided over different functional scopes you get 1/50 is freedom at the level of the neurotransmitter, 1/200 is freedom at the level of the synapse, and 1/105,000 is freedom at the level of the neuron. An accurate measure of freedom would probably have to calculate the level of interactions between multiple free electrons, but the more electrons needed to cooperate, the harder it would be as only so many electrons are within an atomic distance from each other. So perhaps at a local point you could get closer to 2/50, 2/200, 2/105,000 if you allowed next-door electrons to participate. For surface-level freedom, you might be able to get all of the electrons on a surface to act in unison, so you might have a greater amount of freedom, perhaps calculated by the number of atoms on the surface, divided by the total number of atoms within the functional scope. These types of freedoms would be limited to the power of the electron. If the functional scope requires a larger structure (such as an atom, molecule, or protein) for activation as opposed to an electron for activation, the measure of electron freedom loses relevance rapidly. So, all in all, it doesn't seem like quantum randomness has a large enough amount of wiggle room to provide meaningful freedom at the level of neuron function.
Tumor Induced Criminality
Charles Whitman was a normal guy until a tumor developed near his amygdala (which controls fight or flight response). He transformed into someone who was struggling with obsessive compulsions and eventually when on a killing spree until he was killed by the police. In a letter, he begged people to perform an autopsy on him because he knew something was wrong with his brain [24]. Another case of brain tumor induced criminality was in a case of a 40 year old married man. He was a normal husband and father until he started developing greater sexual urges towards taboos, including children. He was guilty of child pornography and child sexual abuse, in addition to a myriad of other sexually deviant behavior. After reporting headaches, a brain scan was done that found an orbitofrontal tumor. When the tumor was removed, his paedophilic urges disappeared. A year later, the tumor came back, and so did the urges [25].
Punishment Under No Free Will
If there is no free will then there is no moral desert. For how can one be held responsible if they are just a victim of their biological programming? Perhaps, even if there is no moral desert, punishment can still be ethically applied. A utilitarian perspective might look at the idea of preventing future harm - punishments can be justified if they are helpful to the collective. Punishments could be seen as a psychological tool for negatively reinforcing bad behavior - creating a deterrent against future crimes. An evolutionary perspective might see punishments as a type of evolutionary tit for tat justice. An indirect effect of punishments like jail time and other state punishments is the damage to a criminal's reproductive ability. These punishments could possibly reduce the likelihood that genes with these behaviors propagate into the future. Caruso has proposed a type of "public health-quarantine" perspective on punishment, viewing criminals as victims of their environment and biology. Under the "public health-quarantine" perspective, criminals are treated like those infected with a disease. They may be separated from the rest of the population as to protect others, but no punishments in excess of separation are warranted [24].
Locus of Control
Locus of control is a valence of believe about an individual's control over their life. Those with an internal locus of control believe that they have the power to control their destiny. Those with an external locus of control believe that the environment controls their destiny. These attitudes seem connected to attitudes about free will, yet the scientific literature seems to show that they are not linked very tightly psychologically [26]. Between attitudes on free will and locus of control, some studies show a positive correlation, others a negative correlation, and others no correlation [27]. Practically speaking, it makes sense that someone can believe they control their destiny, yet also not believe in free will. The distinction here is perhaps the idea that an individual's will exists, even if it is not totally free. You can use your will to control your destiny.
Growth vs Fixed Mindset
There is another set of related concepts - the idea of a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset. With the growth mindset, you believe that you can continually improve, level up, and make things better. With a fixed mindset, you believe that you will always be the same way and that you will never be better than you are currently.
Psychological Impacts of Free will
There seems to be growing evidence of how different beliefs affect you. People naturally have a high level of belief in free will. Tests have shown that trying to increase people's free will has no effect (since they already believe in it), yet trying to decrease their belief in free will will have an effect on their behaviors. Vohs and Schooler found that children exposed to material that tells them there is "no free will" have increased levels at which they cheat on specific tasks. Baumeister, Masicampo, and DeWall found that hurting people's belief in free will can lead to an increase in aggressive or harmful behaviors (measured by making others consume unpleasant hot sauce). They also found that harming the belief in free will causes people to become less helpful (measured by not letting someone borrow their phone). In another study belief in free will was correlated with willingness to volunteer to help others in need. Stillman and Baumeister found that harming belief in free will caused people to be less likely to volunteer to help in recycling. This effect was even larger in those with psychopathic tendencies (those who lack empathy). Alquist and Baumeister found that disbelief in free will was correlated to conformity, and belief in free will correlated to more novel behavior (measured by whether or not their judgement of a score for participants followed the judgment of the prior judges or not). Stillman found that belief in free will was correlated to job performance, positive impact on the workforce, and job attendance. Another study of Stillman's found that a belief in free will caused greater confidence in a successful future. Even after controlling for intelligence, Big Five personality traits, and locus of control, free will still remained a significant factor. Rigoni, Ku¨hn, Sartori, and Brass found that belief in free will was correlated with a participant's willingness to take initiative on tasks. [27]. Crescioni found that a belief in free will was correlated with a more meaningful life, higher life satisfaction, higher self-confidence in one's abilities, greater religiosity, and gratitude. Alquist found that reducing the belief in free will caused people to be less creative in generating fewer possible choice paths for themselves. Stillman and Baumeister found that belief in free will correlated to being able to generate higher quality learnings from past mistakes. Crescioni further found that belief in free will led to the creation of more goals, goals that were further into the future, and goals of a higher quality. Free will belief has been correlated to extroversion, agreeableness, and right-wing authoritarianism. Stillman also found a belief in free will to be correlated to three Big Five traits, namely conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience. There was no correlation with intelligence. Brewer & Baumeister found that belief in free will was connected to greater self-control and a greater desire for self-control. Shariff, Karremans, Greene, Schooler, and Vohs found that belief in free will led to less forgiveness for offenders, and harsher prison sentences. Crescioni, Baumeister, Ent, Ainsworth, and Lambert found that beliefs in free will were correlated with people's ability to transcend conflict and forgive their partners in relationships. Brewer & Baumeister found that belief in free will increased perspectives on 3rd person accountability, whereas disbelief in free will led to more forgiveness for 3rd persons. Belief in free will was negatively correlated with opinion about one's sense of humor, attractiveness, and empathy [27].
Psychological Impacts of Locus of Control
People with an internal locus of control have been found to make more money [28]. People with an external locus of control [28].
Psychological Impacts of Mindset
Researchers performed an experiment to test the affect of growth mindset messaging vs fixed mindset messaging on children. Some children were praised on test performance using fixed mindset words like "You must be smart", others were praised with growth mindset words like "You must have worked very hard". Children who were given growth mindset messaging were more likely to be optimistic about taking a harder test and more honest about the results. Children who were given fixed mindset messaging were more displeased with having to take a more difficult test and were more likely to lie about the results of the more difficult test [29]. This study seems to show an increase in anxiety about results when the results are connected to a child's fixed attributes (like intelligence), and how connecting the results to a growable attribute (like effort) gave children less anxiety and more motivation.
Synthesis
I think with these concepts, the Hegelian idea of a dialectical synthesis is very helpful. Leftists have a bias for an external locus of control, thinking that the environment place the largest role in our individual destinies, and therefore gives them motivation to use the government to make the environment more fair. Right-wingers have a bias for an internal locus of control, believing that they are personally responsible for their behaviors which guide their destinies [29]. I think that in this instance it is easy to make the case that for most people, reality is a good mixture of both internal and external factors. It could vary on a case by case basis. If we want to have the best policy, we need to have an accurate understanding of reality. Either extreme can take us away from reality. Too much bias on internal locus of control can lead us to a strict meritocracy that rewards the lucky, and punishes the unlucky. Too much bias for external locus of control can lead us to a communistic state that punishes merit. I think the optimal synthesis is a mixture of safety nets for leveling the playing field when luck plays a role, and capitalistic rewards for when merit is a desirable thing to promote.
Divine Punishment
One thing is certain, if there is no free will, then the entire theology of moral desert is false. There can be no post-death judgement if we are fundamentally not truly free and therefore unable to be held accountable for our choices. Hell or other types of divine punishments would be inherently unjust.
Chapter 28.5 - Love of wisdom
Wisdom is the most priceless of gifts. The source is God. Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. To shun evil is understanding.
Wisdom Provides Meaning
Job realizes that the pursuit of wisdom (philosophy) is something that can provide him with meaning to offset his suffering.
Chapter 29 - Reminisce
Job reminisces on the good old days when he was rich and esteemed by all.
He was a father to the fatherless and helpful to the widows. He saved the victims from criminals. He helped the poor and the homeless.
Good Deeds Provide Meaning
Living your life in an honorable way can provide you with pleasant memories and the satisfaction of self-love that offset your suffering.
Chapter 30 - Mocked
Job laments that now even the children of the homeless mock him.
Job's skin grows black and peels. He is constantly burning from fever.
He has become the brother of dogs and the companion of owls.
Expectation Suffering
When we expect something, a result less favorable than our expectations can cause a type of psychological suffering. The more righteous Job was in his past, the more he will psychologically suffer as the gap between what he expects that he deserves and what he gets grows. The juxtaposition between his righteous life and his horrific suffering is so great that the recognition of it can be quite painful.
Chapter 31 - Purity
Job maintains that he has always followed the rules of sexual propriety. He claims that if he had committed adultery than perhaps God would have a sin to claim against him. But not only had Job stayed true to his covenants, he had always helped those in need and stayed honest.
Toxic Worthiness
An aspect of religious shame culture is set an impossible moral standard (like perfection in thoughts, words, and deeds), and then every time bad things happen, you constantly blame yourself for not being perfect enough, not being worthy enough. This creates a never-ending loop of psychological torture that motivates ever increasing devotion. But Job flat out rejects shame culture. He has confidence in who he is. He knows that he lived a sufficiently moral life. He refuses to enter the shame cycle.
Chapter 32 - Challenge
A younger friend dares to speak his mind against Job.
Chapter 33 - Refute
The young man says that Job is wrong to complain that God has treated him as an enemy.
Job is also wrong to say that God has refused to communicate with him.
The man insists that God's ways of communicating with us are many despite us not discerning them, perhaps by dreams or by the voice of warnings in their ears.
He claims that the accursed can repent and be healed.
Divine Hiddenness
On argument against the existence of a loving God is the question of divine hiddenness. If God is truly loving, why wouldn't he appear more often in our times of need? Job's friends suggest that God is not hidden and that he is waiting for a connection. But Job has been constantly petitioning for an audience with God. Does God only appear to those who are willing to obsequiously enter the shame cycle and debase themselves before God? Can God be considered good if his requirements for appearing harm human wellbeing?
Chapter 34 - Existence is evidence of God's goodness
The young man claims Job is wrong in saying God has deprived him of justice. He claims that it is unthinkable that God would commit an evil act. His evidence for this claim is the fact that if God wanted to do evil, everything would already be destroyed by his power. He claims Job needs to take a repentant heart to God to humble himself and learn where he needs to improve. Why should God heal Job if he refuses to repent? He thinks Job deserves the utmost trial for daring to speak ill of God - a sin of rebellion.
Thought Experiments
Job's friend begins an interesting argument from the perspective of a thought experiment. Assuming a universe governed by an evil God, he concludes that an evil God would destroy everything. When he looks at reality, he finds that creation is not completely destroyed, and therefore concludes that God cannot be evil.
Evil God Thought Experiment
If I were to run the same thought experiment, I would first want to begin by defining evil. If we run with the assumption that evil means the desire for destruction, then Job's analysis of an evil God might be correct. But if we interpret evil as the desire for maximal suffering, then we might produce a different type of universe. When I try to imagine a universe with the maximum amount of suffering, it ends up looking something like the Christian idea of hell - a place with an infinite number of conscious beings all experiencing an infinite amount of pain and suffering.
Good God Thought Experiment
If I were to run the good God thought experiment, I would define goodness as the maximization of the wellbeing of conscious entities. This would produce a universe similar to heaven - an infinite number of conscious beings experiencing infinite joy.
God and Devil Equal in Power Thought Experiment
If I were to imagine a good God who was omnipotent, but in contrast, an omnipotent evil also existed, then the forces of evil might be able to challenge God's ability to create a good universe. In the Animorphs book series, K.A. Applegate reifies this thought experiment in her creation of god-level characters, namely the Ellimist and the Crayak. The Ellimist is the last remnant of an alien race that evolved so much that they evolved into the godly status of omnipotence. The Crayak, conversely, was the last remnant of an opposing alien species that also evolved into omnipotence. The Ellimist travelled the universe in the hopes of sparking life and goodness throughout the cosmos. The Crayak travelled throughout the universe and left a wake of war and destruction as he enjoyed watching things burn. The two Gods were constantly fighting over the implementation of their ideals on the universe. For every planet that the Ellimist would create, the Crayak would destroy a planet. It became such a fierce battle that for each action the other would take, the opponent would reverse time to undo their progress. The Ellimist and the Crayak soon realized that their powers had the ability to undo each other and were faced with a stalemate. Since neither of their ideals could be accomplished under a stalemate, this result was not satisfying to either of them. They eventually decided to mutually consent to playing a competitive game of wits, with the rules being that the winner takes all. Whoever wins the game gets to determine the fate of the universe without interference by the other. Under the framework of the game, each god was able to select different planets as their chess pieces. They were allowed to use their power in minimalistic ways to inspire the citizens of their planets to evolve, progress, and eventually defeat the other chess-piece planets. For each unit of power the Ellimist used to help inspire his aliens, the Crayak was able to use an equivalent amount of power to inspire his. The question then was, who's aliens would be more successful, with the minimal amount of help from above. This type of cosmic game explains how we can suffer the effects of evil, but still have hope in a good future. It makes the concept of evil more acceptable, because the existence of evil is not something God wants - it is something God is currently powerless to avoid. It makes it easier to trust God and want to fight on God's behalf, because the goodness of God is easier to believe now that evil can be explained by the existence of a supreme evil power. With the power of evil magnified, and the stakes are higher, and one might have greater motivation to fight for principles of goodness. This conception makes a nuanced universe of good and bad a viable reality. Under this thought experiment, it would make sense if there was a good and an evil impulse within every creature, as the dual gods might simultaneously inspire creatures from two directions. Yet, under this thought experiment, there seems to be no self-evident reason why the universe would be constructed of energy particles that go through phases of evolution, unless the energy particles were axiomatic to existence and become tools of the gods. It would seem perfectly logical for this dualistic universe to be created in a more videogame-like fashion, where objects can be summoned or removed from existence with ease, without violating the laws of physics that require conservation of energy. Entropy doesn't seem like an essential law of physics for this tournament universe - no video game incorporates entropy, yet they all serve their competitive purposes just fine. If the twin gods created the universe, I would imagine that they would create it for the purpose of optimizing the nature of their game. So, for example, a chess board is optimized with a certain chess piece to space ratio - 32 / 64 or 50%. So, we might infer that a large number of planets should have life if they were to act as chess pieces for the gods. Yet, fermi's paradox leads us to the opposite conclusion - we have found no traces of intelligent life elsewhere.
Good God Follows Rules Thought Experiment
Based on my experience, most western theists assume this type of a God. They assume an all powerful God that will ultimately defeat a weaker evil, and the thing that stops God from preventing evil are divine laws. This God is almost omnipotent, but he is not powerful enough to override divine law. Certain laws must be followed like - free will, a path for spiritual progress, justice, and obedience. Under this paradigm, evil doesn't exist because the devil is too powerful, but rather evil exists because it is a byproduct of divine laws. For example, God is obligated to bestow freedom to conscious beings, therefore they might commit evil acts. God is obligated to provide a path to spiritual progress, and he cannot violate divine law by granting spiritual progress with the snap of his fingers. He must provide a path for spirits to earn their progress outside of divine magic. This spiritual progress might entail a journey through a fallen world of suffering and labor. When I imagine this type of a universe, I imagine a world where trials are cookie-cutter designed for spiritual progress. I do not imagine this world to be a world of random suffering, but rather intelligently planned suffering. I do not imagine a world where some spirits need to only experience disability and some spirits need to only experience luxury and wealth. I imagine this world more like a video game universe where every character goes through the same steps of progression. Each character has the same set of trials at different times as they progress. Each type of suffering experienced has a specific intelligible lesson attached to it, and the mastery of the lesson immediately levels you up so that you don't need to continue suffering. I don't imagine pointless types of suffering - like hunger, thirst, irritable bowel syndrome, headaches, etc. I imagine starting out, learning the lesson of fairness as a child. You learn how to share toys and play fairly. You learn reciprocity. You suffer when things aren't fair, and you have joy when things are fair. You level up when you master the lesson of treating others fairly. Then perhaps you are faced with the test of sacrificing to help others. You have the option to have fun exploring a world that for the most part is safe (wont kill you), or help someone in need (someone stuck in a trap within the world). If you ignore the person who is trapped, eventually you will also fall into a trap and learn the importance of sacrificing your own pleasure to help others. These traps don't need to torture you with insidious pain, suffering, and death, but merely cause you to suffer the boredom of the opportunity cost. You can still learn moral lessons without the abundance of invidious suffering in the world. Perhaps the next level of the videogame will teach the lesson of moral courage. Expanding upon the prior lessons, you are now faced with a simulation of all of your peers at school. Your peers try to pressure you into treating a classmate unfairly. Everyone wants to grab an innocent yet unpopular classmate and forcibly push them into one of the traps, merely to bully them. You enjoyed a time of popularity, and now you are forced to make the ethical decision on whether or not to violate a classmates rights based on peer pressure. If you fail this test, then eventually the classmates will turn on you and place you into one of the traps. Finally learning to stand up for your moral principles at the sacrifice of the adoration of your peers, you will graduate from this level, and all of the simulated classmates will disappear since they were never real to begin with. The nature of this universe is purely educational. None of it needs to be real. None of it should be unstructured random chaos, but rather every inch should be designed to support specific lessons. Gratuitous suffering is not necessary.
No God Thought Experiment
When I imagine a universe with no God, I imagine that there is a type of natural force that generates a creation out of the production of opposite pairs. Perhaps existence started from a state of zero. But then zero evolved into a pair of opposites - a negative one and a positive one. This cycle of natural creation phenomena gets repeated until it scales up the creation of a universe - produced out of nothing logically. I imagine that in this universe, things happen naturally according to the structure of the elements created therein. The materials follow predictable patterns able to be discovered by science. There would be a high element of randomness to this universe, but it might be possible for systems of increasing order to naturally be produced if there is enough complexity built into the fabric of the materials generated by the universe. Only systems that can maintain themselves would exist within this naturalistic universe - hence patterns of evolution might emerge.
Conclusion
In comparing which thought experiment most closely matches our reality, I find that the possibility of no God seems most logical in the face of the reality in front of us.
Chapter 35 - Insulting to God
Jobs friend continues on about how illogical it would be for God to respond to someone with the impudent attitude of Job.
Petty God
Job's friends imagine a God that is so petty that he cannot tolerate criticisms from humans, even if they seem fairly justified. Job doesn't seem convinced that God could be so petty.
Chapter 36 - God is in the weather
Job speaks of God's power in the origination of all natural weather phenomena.
Omni-involvement
If God is involved in every act of weather, then it is easy to assume that he is involved in every event of suffering, as is the axiom from which Job derives all of his conclusions.
His friend makes more appeals to God's mighty power, evidenced by thunder, lightning and natural phenomena.
Based on the combination of all mentions of God's hand in natural phenomenon, God is apparently personally involved in the following:
Chapter 9
1. manipulates mountains
2. shakes the earth
3. controls the sun
4. controls the stars
5. spreads out the heaven
6. walks on the sea
7. generates the constellations
Chapter 12
1. Controls the fate of every creature
2. Controls the waters
3. Controls the fate and boundaries of nations
Chapter 26
1. spreads out the sky
2. locks water in clouds
3. hides the moon
4. directs the clouds
5. defines the horizon as a boundary between light and darkness
6. makes heaven tremble
7. calms the sea
8. defeated the great sea monster Rahab
9. clears the sky
10. defeats the serpent
Chapter 36
1. making rain
2. moving clouds
3. directing the path of lightning
4. he warns of a coming storm with his thunder
Chapter 37
1. voice creates thunder from his mouth
2. directs lightning bolts
3. directs snow to fall to the earth
4. directs rain
5. his breathe produces ice
6. directs clouds
God of the gaps
The "God of the gaps" argument is a term used to highlight an informal fallacy used by theists to defend their belief in God. This argument employs the moving the goal posts fallacy. The theist first claims that God is justified by natural evidences u, v, w, x, y z. As science advances, u becomes an understood scientific phenomenon - no longer within the realm of the supernatural. The theist response to scientific evidence is to move the goal post and redefine God as not including u. But then science uncovers evidence to explain w. Again, the theist redefines God to exclude u and w. The skeptic can observe this pattern of moving the goal post and conclude that as science progresses, the number of things that can be attributed to God slowly diminishes - the gap in our understanding of the universe gets smaller and smaller, and hence God's role in the universe gets smaller and smaller. If this pattern is played out to its logical conclusion, eventually there will be no phenomenon left to attribute to God, and God will be defined out of existence. The "God of the gaps" fallacy highlights the problem of assigning the gap to God - it is disingenuous to constantly change God's definition to skirt around falsifiability, and yet, it is foreseeably a dead-end argument when the gaps in our knowledge are diminished.
The Weather Gap
As shown above, the Book of Job is replete with instances of people attributing less understood atmospheric phenomenon to God. This is a prime example of the God of the gaps argument in action. The people living 2000+ years ago obviously didn't understand the natural laws of physics and chemistry involved in these natural phenomenon, so they attributed it all to God. Now that we know how these phenomenon work, it seems silly to say that a man in the sky is directing it all. In fact, it is so silly to our modern sensibility that I have never heard a modern theist claim that they believe God has his hand in every instance of all weather phenomena. God's hand is assumed to be a rare intervention in the natural phenomena. But we can clearly see that this modern conception of a God who rarely manipulates the weather is a redefined version of the God purported to exist by Job and his friends. The modern theists have defined away God as the source of all weather phenomena, reducing his definition and role in the world.
Epistemic Humility
If the Bible was able to get confused about what was attributable to God this wrong, then that is a strong evidence against its perfect veracity. If the ancients were confused about what could be attributable to God then why should modern theists be confident that they have it right? Just as the ancients incorrectly attributed weather phenomena to God, it is quite possible that modern theists incorrectly attribute healings, coincidences, spiritual feelings, voices, dreams, and guidance to God, when it actually might just be natural phenomena of the brain and body.
Chapter 37 - Impressive equals good
His friend makes more appeals to God's mighty power, evidenced by thunder, lightning and natural phenomena. They intimate that God's impressiveness is evidence of his goodness.
Honor By Association Fallacy
Just because God has one attribute, does not mean they have another attribute. Just because God is impressive does not mean that he is also necessarily good.
Chapter 38 - God's reply - Who the hell are you?
The Lord finally speaks -
Where were you when I created the earth?
Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown dawn its place?
Have you been to the depths of the sea?
Have you seen the gates of death?
Have you comprehended the vastness of the earth?
Who brings the rain, ice, and constellations?
Do you know the laws of heaven?
Chapter 39 - Who is greater?
God continues his petty comparisons with Job - essentially saying "What the hell makes you think that you are on my level?" by asking Job a variety of questions to highlight Job's ignorance and lack of power.
Chapter 40 - Who is more powerful?
God asks Job if he is worthy to instruct God. Job humbles himself and says he is unworthy.
God then askes "Will you criticize me so that you can be right?"
He follows up with basically saying - "Are you powerful enough to challenge me? If you prove that you have god-level powers then I will acknowledge you."
He concludes with "Can you create a creature as amazing as the Behemoth?"
God-level Powers
Have an arm as strong as God's, a voice as powerful as thunder, ability to adorn yourself with glory, scatter the power of your anger, destroy the prideful men, crush the wicked, and imprison them in graves.
Appeal to Authority Fallacy
Just because someone has power and authority doesn't mean they are right.
Chapter 41 - Do you dare to challenge God?
God continues with his power play - "Can you overpower a Leviathan?"
God seems to be hinting at something like "If you can't beat a leviathan, how can you dare make a claim against me, since I am more fearsome than a leviathan?"
Might Makes Right
God seems to think that level of power is related to rightness. Those that are weak in power shouldn't dare appeal for justice against the strong.
Chapter 42 - Job humbled
Job says "Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.", "Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”
Appeal to Mystery fallacy
Job gives in to the "God's ways are mysterious" idea and succumbs to assuming that God is right and he is wrong. Job returns to complete obsequiousness.
Judgement
God then scolds the friends for not speaking the truth about God, and claims that Job HAD spoken the truth about God.
Reward
Job is then blessed with all the stuff he lost to come back in even greater amount and quality.
Job's Accusations of God - Declared by God to be TRUE
1. God pays attention to man (Job 7:17)
2. God is involved in every moment (Job 7:18)
3. God targets the righteous (Job 7:20)
4. God doesn’t pardon Job (Job 7:21)
5. God torments Job for no reason (Job 9:17)
6. God destroys the blameless and the guilty (Job 9:22)
7. God mocks at the despair of the innocent (Job 9:23)
8. God hunts the innocent to use his power against them (Job 10:16)
9. God turns people against those targeted for suffering (Job 10:17) (Job 19:12-13)
10. It would have been better to not have been born, or to have died in birth (Job 10:18-19)
11. God should leave the innocent alone so they can have comfort (Job 10:20)
12. God destroys man’s hope (Job 14:19)
13. God overpowers man (Job 14:20)
14. God traps the innocent in his net (Job 19:6)
15. God refuses to answer Job’s request for judgment (Job 19:7)
16. God hedges up the path to sabotage the innocent (Job 19:8)
17. God takes away glory from men (Job 19:9)
18. God destroys the innocent (Job 19:10)
19. God treats the innocent like an enemy (Job 19:11)
20. God is his redeemer (Job 19:25)
21. God remains hidden from the innocent who suffer (Job 23:8)
22. God does not charge the guilty with wrongdoing in the moment of need (Job 23:24)
23. God watches the ways of man with judgement (Job 23:23)
24. God will eventually give justice (Job 23:24)
25. God denies Job justice (Job 27:2)
26. God makes life bitter (Job 27:2)
Opponent Rebuttals - Declared by God to be FALSE
1. Doesn't think man is valuable to God (Job 22:2)
2. Man is naturally unclean (Job 25:4)
3. Thinks they have the spirit with them (Job 32:18)
4. Thinks Job's claims of innocence are false (Job 33:9)
5. Thinks Job's claim that God has treated him like an enemy is false (Job 33:10)
6. Thinks the idea that God has targeted Job is false (Job 33:11)
7. Believes that God is greater than man. (Job 33:12)
8. Thinks Job's claims that God isn't just are false (Job 34:12)
9. Thinks God doesn't act wickedly or pervert justice (Job 34:12)
10. Thinks that Job is wrong to impute guilt and blame to God (Job 34:17)
11. Thinks Job is a wicked man (Job 34:36-37; Job 22:5)
12. Thinks Job's words against God are wicked (Job 34:36-37)
Contractions
At first glance this seems like an example of ignorant barbarians attempting to write a wise story, and because of their poor ability to self-reflect, they accidentally destroyed the definition of God with their terse conclusion that "Job spoke the truth and his friends did not speak the truth". How can God be accurately defined by Job's words? Does any theist believe that Job described God accurately and truthfully when he said that God treats the innocent like an enemy, hunting them down, trapping them, hurting them for no reason, making their life bitter, and destroying their hope? It would appear that the authors of the Book of Job made a serious theological blunder in concluding that Job was right - because that would mean that they have defined God as an oppressor of the righteous.
Steelman
Yet, if you attempt to think of it from God's perspective, there is an argument to be made that God is answering the question in a way that Job can understand. Since God occupies the birds-eye view of the objective reality, God's perspective might be too far removed from Job's experience. By splitting reality in half between the objective reality and the subjective reality, God has the option to discuss things from Job's subjective perspective, rather than try to get Job to understand God's perspective. So, perhaps when God says that Job spoke the truth, God is merely making truth claims about Job's subjective reality, and not making truth claims about objective reality. From Job's perspective it is true that Job is innocent. From Job's perspective, it is true that God is unjust. From Job's perspective it is true that God sabotages the innocent, makes their life bitter, and destroys their hope. So, under this line of thinking, the reason God played the power game with Job was to get Job to realize - just because you know the truth about your subjective reality doesn't mean you understand the truth about objective reality. So Job can be comforted in knowing that his feelings are being validated by God, but at the same time be corrected to understand that his subjective reality is limited and that there is much more out there that needs to be understood before he should cast the final judgement.
Hanlon's razor - "Never assume malice when something can be adequately explained by stupidity"
For a long time I suffered like Job, imagining up a God who was watching over my misfortune with delight - a God of malice. This is the logical conclusion of a God who is all-powerful and all-knowing - he must enjoy watching us suffer in order to not do anything about it. But perhaps me imagining that God existed in the first place was my violation of Halon's razor. Why assume divine malice exists when my own stupidity is an option? Perhaps a type of stupidity was the explanation for why I believed there was a being watching over me in the first place. Or perhaps my stupidity lies in my ignorance of the nuances of divine law that restrict God's actions.
Occam's razor - "Simpler explanations are more likely than complex ones - all else being equal"
Its logical to give up your faith in God because overall, naturalism a simpler (more parsimonious) explanation than theism.
Solution and Conclusion
My Experience with Suffering: A Revelation about Why We Endure transcendentphilos.wixsite.com/website/post/rising-from-the-ashes
TLDR: My Solution to the Problem of Suffering
In the depths of suffering, the mind becomes possessed by the extremely salient nature of that suffering. I have learned that the mind is easily confused into a myopic way of thinking that that which is currently salient (suffering) is the totality of existence. I was fooled into thinking that because I was suffering greatly, the totality of existence was suffering. An appreciation of the Daoist yingyang symbol is a potent reminder that there is usually a duality associated with any phenomenon. Because I was in the depths of suffering, I forgot about the potential for the existence of love and joy. I realized that suffering can be justified when either love or joy are in sufficient quantity to offset that suffering. In order for me to be able to accept my suffering, I realized that I needed to magnify my love for humanity. With this love for humanity, I could dedicate my life to the service of humanity. If my efforts are able to reduce the suffering of others in the world, then my willingness to endure my own suffering will be worth it.
Mythology
After coming to this solution to the problem of suffering, I realized that mythology is replete with examples of people voluntarily accepting suffering because of their love for others. Jesus voluntarily suffers because he loves humanity. Within Buddhism is an idea of a bodhisattva - someone who is enlightened enough to exit this cycle of suffering and achieve nirvana but chooses instead to remain in the world to help more people out of compassion. This brings out a very heroic idea that if the people in heaven (nirvana) are truly noble then they will be willing to give up their paradise and deign to descend into a universe based on entropy to risk suffering in order to help enlighten other mortals and reduce their suffering.
The Hero's Journey
Almost every hero faces the crisis where they must voluntarily choose to expose themselves to harm in order to benefit those they love. In a sense, every person in the world is a type of hero. We are all victims of philosophic "throwness" where we were summoned into the world into a certain situation, the details of which are out of our control. Yet, we can choose to accept this situation and try to make the world a better place out of our love for the good things in the world. Each person's courageous attempt to accept their lot and try to make things better is a hero, because they are embracing the potential suffering of life out of love for others.
Perhaps we all start in a state of naive happiness about the state of existence. Then we encounter great suffering, and we begin to question either ourselves or God. This process of questioning can lead us to feeling jaded and betrayed. This period of being jaded gives us additional wisdom that our naive self never had - we now understand how bad reality can be. I believe the next step in our hero's journey is to accept the state of the world as a place where bad things can happen, and courageously move forward in a way that makes the world a better place.
Conclusion
The story of Job is largely an example of how religious solutions to the problem of suffering involve debasement of the self rather than empowerment of the self. Instead of Job becoming a hero who tries to help others despite his suffering, he vacillates between either viewing himself as unworthy of dignity or becoming a complainer who insists that he doesn't deserve his suffering. Job's only way of accepting his suffering is to view himself as less than the dust of the earth. The dogma of God's perfection makes Job's obsequiousness the only proper response. Job learns to question God's perfection, but he ends up retreating back to his obsequiousness by the end of the story. All in all, he fails to develop a healthy solution to the problem of suffering.
Dedication
I dedicate this composition to Jordan B. Peterson. Jordan Peterson was the one who inspired me to understand how dangerous the path of resentment was. He was the one who persuaded me to continue my wrestle with God. He was the one who reminded me that the theological axiom of the Bible was that the universe is good, and that we need to have faith in that. He was the one who taught me that the greater the suffering, the greater the meaning you need to find in your life to offset that suffering. He was the one who helped me turn my perspective outward - to focus less on my suffering and more on what I can do in the world despite that. He was the one who reified the importance of the hero myth - that each life is a chance to be a hero that makes things better. He was the one who inspired me to have a deeper desire to reduce the suffering of others. He was the one who helped encourage me to think more deeply about the power we all have to impact the world for the better. He was the one who revealed to me the importance of beauty and art. He was the one who explained to me the Nietzschean call to define your own values. By combining his ideas, I was led me down a path of finding my values, representing those values in art, and then wrestling with those principles until I received my pinnacle revelation that cured me of my resentments - that love is the reason we endure suffering. Absent Jordan Peterson, there is no guarantee that I would be here today. If I was to follow the logically selfish path, I would have ended my life in 2020 to spare myself the unnecessary suffering that was to inevitably follow. But by recognizing my love for humanity, I found a new source of meaning to propel me forward. If I can play a small role in helping humanity steer clear of collective disaster and great suffering, then perhaps that is worth a bit of suffering. If I can help make the world a better place for my nephews and nieces to grow up in, then that might be worth some suffering. So, I consider 2020 the end of my life for the hedonic purpose of maximizing Seth's wellbeing, and every year I exist past 2020 is a bonus that I hope to devote to humanity in whatever feeble ways I can.
References:
1. "Handling Resentment". Livestrong.com. Archived from the original on January 23, 2011. Retrieved August 2, 2013.
2. Trost, Zinaa,*; Vangronsveld, Karolineb; Linton, Steven J.c; Quartana, Phillip J.d; Sullivan, Michael J.L.a Cognitive dimensions of anger in chronic pain, Pain: March 2012 - Volume 153 - Issue 3 - p 515-517 doi: 10.1016/j.pain.2011.10.023
3. David A. Fishbain, MD, FAPA, Daniel Bruns, PsyD, John E. Lewis, PhD, John Mark Disorbio, EdD, Jinrun Gao, MS, MBA, Laura J. Meyer, PhD, Predictors of Homicide–Suicide Affirmation in Acute and Chronic Pain Patients, Pain Medicine, Volume 12, Issue 1, January 2011, Pages 127–137, doi.org/10.1111/j.1526-4637.2010.01013.x
4. Engelmann JM, Herrmann E, Tomasello M. 2015 Chimpanzees trust conspecifics to engage in low-cost reciprocity. Proc. R. Soc. B 282: 20142803. dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.2803
5. Axelrod, R. (1984). The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books. Retrieved on 10/15/2021 from www.eleutera.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/The-Evolution-of-Cooperation.pdf
6. Bateman, Chris. (2007) Tit for at. Retrived on 10/15/2021 from onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2007/06/tit_for_tat.html
7. Engelmann Jan M., Herrmann Esther and Tomasello Michael 2015 Chimpanzees trust conspecifics to engage in low-cost reciprocity. Proc. R. Soc. B.2822014280320142803. doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.2803
8. Robert C. Solomon, Ph.D.. "The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life" (1993)
9. Alice May, "Surviving Betrayal" (1999)
10. Dr. Nina Radcliff. "Resentment and its impact on your health" The Press of Atlantic City (Mar 28, 2021). pressofatlanticcity.com/lifestyles/health-med-fit/resentment-and-its-impact-on-your-health-dr-nina-radcliff/article_9f4eaca4-e1a9-5ee1-ac52-b38cd20c6cbc.html. Accessed June 17, 2021.
11. Baer, Ruth & Sauer, Shannon. (2011). Relationships Between Depressive Rumination, Anger Rumination, and Borderline Personality Features. Personality disorders. 2. 142-50. 10.1037/a0019478.
12. Bushman, B. (2002). Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive Responding. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 724 - 731.
13. McCullough, M. E., Bellah, C. G., Kilpatrick, S. D., & Johnson, J. L. (2001). Vengefulness: Relationships with Forgiveness, Rumination, Well-Being, and the Big Five. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(5), 601–610. doi.org/10.1177/0146167201275008
14. Zawn Villines, "How to stop ruminating thoughts" (November 8, 2019) Medically reviewed by Timothy J. Legg, Ph.D., CRNP. www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/326944. Accessed June 21, 2021.
15. C. Shepard, (2019). "Journals & Diaries" www.acolumbinesite.com/diary.php. Accessed on June 21, 2021.
16. Akira The Don. Jordan Peterson | THAT'S GOD! | 🦞🌊 Meaningwave | MV. YouTube, 26 June 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvM7KKxxQV8.
17. Libet, Benjamin; Gleason, Curtis A.; Wright, Elwood W.; Pearl, Dennis K. (1983). "Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (Readiness-Potential)". Brain. 106 (3): 623–42. doi:10.1093/brain/106.3.623. PMID 6640273.
18. Fried, Itzhak; Mukamel, Roy; Kreiman, Gabriel j (2011). "Internally Generated Preactivation of Single Neurons in Human Medial Frontal Cortex Predicts Volition". Neuron. 69 (3): 548–62. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2010.11.045. PMC 3052770. PMID 21315264.
19. Soon, Chun Siong; He, Anna Hanxi; Bode, Stefan; Haynes, John-Dylan (9 April 2013). "Predicting free choices for abstract intentions". PNAS. 110 (15): 6217–6222. doi:10.1073/pnas.1212218110. PMC 3625266. PMID 23509300.
20. Matsuhashi, Masao; Hallett, Mark (2008). "The timing of the conscious intention to move". European Journal of Neuroscience. 28 (11): 2344–51. doi:10.1111/j.1460-9568.2008.06525.x. PMC 4747633. PMID 19046374.
21. Chudler EH. "Brain Facts and Figures". Neuroscience for Kids. Retrieved 2009-06-20.
22. Milo et al. The Dana Foundation. Nucl. Acids Res. (2010) 38 (suppl 1): D750-D753. Accessed on 7/14/2021. Url at bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?id=108451.
23. K A (https://psychology.stackexchange.com/users/10227/k-a) "How large is a neurotransmitter? Max and min sizes?" Psychology & Neuroscience Stack Exchange. Accessed on 7/14/2021. Url at psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/13032/how-large-is-a-neurotransmitter-max-and-min-sizes.
24. Oliver Burkeman (2021, April 27) The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion? Guardian News & Media. Accessed on 7/19/2021. Url at www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/27/the-clockwork-universe-is-free-will-an-illusion.
25. Burns, J. M., & Swerdlow, R. H. (2003). Right orbitofrontal tumor with pedophilia symptom and constructional apraxia sign. Archives of neurology, 60(3), 437–440. Accessed on 7/19/2021. Url at doi.org/10.1001/archneur.60.3.437.
26. Stroessner, Steven & Green, Charles. (1990). Effects of Belief in Free Will or Determinism on Attitudes toward Punishment and Locus of Control. Journal of Social Psychology - J SOC PSYCHOL. 130. 789-799. 10.1080/00224545.1990.9924631.
27. Baumeister, R., & Brewer, L. (2012). Believing versus Disbelieving in Free Will: Correlates and Consequences. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 6, 736-745. Accessed on 7/19/2021. Url at www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Believing-versus-Disbelieving-in-Free-Will%3A-and-Baumeister-Brewer/82847254d5b4f698a9e4354dc4a7f71bee37766d.
28. Association for Psychological Science. "Destined To Cheat? New Research Finds Free Will Can Keep Us Honest." ScienceDaily. 1 February 2008. Accessed on 7/19/2021. Url at www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080129125354.htm.
29. POPOVA, M. (2014, January 29). Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives. Brain Pickings. Url at www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck-mindset/.