I am finding myself more and more irritated when i hear someone make this statement in response to tragedy. From a lost puppy to wrecked car to death of a child to dinner burning to hurricane devastating a country. I wonder if people are so removed from others pain and the mindset of "THANKING god" it did not happen to them, that they trivializa their pain to avoid actually questioning their own belief system.
I dont believe the accidental death of a young child has a reason-- who will learn from this and is THEIR learning worth the death of a child and the pain of the family? Is it really a belief that GOD causes this accident to help someone else with a lesson in life? really??? i find it interesting those that say it have tended to not have the same tragedy. I think its said without really thinking of how the person in pain will feel when its said.
And a hurricane that rips through communities with such devastation that it will take years to rebuild REALLY part of a reason? Gods judgment? anger? sin? WTF?
Are women who are raped and tortured going through this for a reason? What? to make them better people? to make them not put themselves as a target? REALLY? Are we so quick to diminish a persons pain by trying to help them see it as a lesson from God?
A child who develops a terminal illness --is there a reason?
Cant we say many horrible things happen and there simply isnt a reason? There is no god orchestrating horrible things in order to bring someone to Him or to a new life or to repentance and if there is--He is a tyrant and a evil bastard. As a believer in Mother Earth/Goddess I know She would not hurt people to prove Her love for them or to make them prove their love for Her. The divine is expressed through perfect love and thus it is not evil or hurtful.
Horrible things happen and all we can do is deal with the pain and the sorrow, figure out what to do next and then start healing. We can LEARN from tragedies but tragedies dont occur for our own lessons--it is simply part of life.
I am becoming closer and closer to telling someone to shut the fuck up the next time the pithy, dismissive and diminishing excuse is given rather than I am listening to you and here for you.
What i believe I can learn from tragedies is just being there for hurting people. Just holding a hand, wiping a tear or letting them feel safe in expressing all the emotions they have--and letting them know ALL they feel is normal. As my disaster class said " normal reactions to abnormal events"
1 year ago
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Planet earth is on its own path around the sun. No one interferes with its existence. The planet warms. The planet cools. Ice ages come and ice ages go. The land masses move apart and collide. Life forms develop, then live, then disappear. The human era is only temporary. Another life form will become the dominant species. All that will be left of humanity is our stupidity. Build a city below sea level and whine when a common hurricane destroys it and kills those who have chosen to live in such a precarious place. Put a city next to the Mississippi and whine when it floods, as it has done for thousands of years. Build a nuclear reactor and whine when it malfunctions and poisons the ground for thousands of years. Humans are not so special, just very clever mammals. We are self-aware. Chimps appear to be as well. They see their own reflections in a mirror and know it is a reflection of themselves, not some other animal. We see our reflections and whine that we don't see Christie Brinkley. We send members of our species to our planet's moon and think we are very special, all the while killing members of our own species and many others for whatever reason suits us at the moment. Get a reality check, humanity. We are on an ego trip. We are not so special. When the statue of liberty is neck-deep in what was once the Greenland ice sheet and crop failures mean we can no longer feed the survivors of our own hell-on-earth, will someone please remind The Idiot Bush that, yes, indeed, global warming is a reality and, yes, indeed we in the industrialized world caused it and yes, the wealthy-beyond-avarice industrialists were the ones paying idiots to say it was not a problem. God isn't going to save us from ourselves, so don't ask. Just pray he doesn't send us another idiotic stooge of big business who proclaims that the almighty told him he must become president. We are all on our own. The sooner we realize that we, in what is left of a piece of the earth that was once amazingly abundant in natural resources, must take care of those who, through accident of birth, have not been as lucky as we, the sooner we begin the process of healing and survival of that horror that we have set in motion and is probably too late to reverse. Our blind race toward riches and power will probably mean the destruction of most of the large, and small, mammals and birds of the earth as humanity becomes extinct. But, the earth will survive and, in time, produce other wonders that we take for granted and use and abuse because god put us over all of nature. Perhaps the next species-in-charge will do a better job. In the meantime, it's about to be payback time. And, I assure you, it won't be pretty.
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