Pain is a positive existence and creation, not a deprivation of anything

[TheReturnofLive]

Swiveling like a little snake when exposed. You can't bear the light can you? If you look like a heretic and quack like a heretic, then you are one.

Therefore, if you weigh as much as a heretic, then you are made of wood and therefore a witch!

[GBoldwater]

I posit that any being responsible for bringing this thing into existence, even in potentia, is a sadistic psychopath.

Okay, quasi-Catholic, are you saying the Creator of mankind is a sadistic psychopath?

[Kreuzritter]

I posit that any being responsible for bringing this thing into existence, even in potentia, is a sadistic psychopath.

Okay, quasi-Catholic, are you saying the Creator of mankind is a sadistic psychopath?

Are you capable of reading? Don't chime in if you haven't read the whole thread. I explicitly rejected that the God of Abraham, the El of Genesis 1, who is the creator of man, is such a being. However, I would suggest that man's current physical form is at least an aberration consequent to the Fall, and especially so if it's derived from beasts. That a good God should have created man to live as a vampire, killing and consuming other things to survive and excreting putrid stinking matter is unthinkable. It's a perverse joke that spiritual being should be subject to such indignity.

Materiality is a wonder, but its form as bound by the laws of this world is in part horrific.

[Exsurge Domine]

Therefore, if you weigh as much as a heretic, then you are made of wood and therefore a witch!

Are you a child?

[GBoldwater]

I posit that any being responsible for bringing this thing into existence, even in potentia, is a sadistic psychopath.

Okay, quasi-Catholic, are you saying the Creator of mankind is a sadistic psychopath?

Are you capable of reading? Don't chime in if you haven't read the whole thread. I explicitly rejected that the God of Abraham, the El of Genesis 1, who is the creator of man, is such a being. However, I would suggest that man's current physical form is at least an aberration consequent to the Fall, and especially so if it's derived from beasts. That a good God should have created man to live as a vampire, killing and consuming other things to survive and excreting putrid stinking matter is unthinkable. It's a perverse joke that spiritual being should be subject to such indignity.

Materiality is a wonder, but its form as bound by the laws of this world is in part horrific.

quasi means "seemingly, but not really". So, what are you doing here? What you write sounds like a modernist, agnostic troll.

[TheReturnofLive]

Therefore, if you weigh as much as a heretic, then you are made of wood and therefore a witch!

Are you a child?

No, I have mature development at least to a degree to realize that human beings sometimes need humor.

Here's a story from the Desert Fathers (Saint Anthony the Great):

"A hunter in the desert saw Abba Anthony (Saint Anthony the Great) enjoying himself with the brethren and he was shocked. Wanting to show him that it was necessary sometimes to meet the needs of the brethren, the old man said to him, 'Put an arrow in your bow and shoot it.' So he did. The old man then said, 'Shoot another,' and he did so. Then the old man said, 'Shoot yet again and the hunter replied 'If I bend my bow so much I will break it.' Then the old man said to him, 'It is the same with the work of God. If we stretch the brethren beyond measure they will soon break. Sometimes it is necessary to come down to meet their needs.'"

[Kreuzritter]

I posit that any being responsible for bringing this thing into existence, even in potentia, is a sadistic psychopath.

Okay, quasi-Catholic, are you saying the Creator of mankind is a sadistic psychopath?

Are you capable of reading? Don't chime in if you haven't read the whole thread. I explicitly rejected that the God of Abraham, the El of Genesis 1, who is the creator of man, is such a being. However, I would suggest that man's current physical form is at least an aberration consequent to the Fall, and especially so if it's derived from beasts. That a good God should have created man to live as a vampire, killing and consuming other things to survive and excreting putrid stinking matter is unthinkable. It's a perverse joke that spiritual being should be subject to such indignity.

Materiality is a wonder, but its form as bound by the laws of this world is in part horrific.

quasi means "seemingly, but not really". So, what are you doing here? What you write sounds like a modernist, agnostic troll.

Do you have a counter-argument, or is that all you can say?

[GBoldwater]

I posit that any being responsible for bringing this thing into existence, even in potentia, is a sadistic psychopath.

Okay, quasi-Catholic, are you saying the Creator of mankind is a sadistic psychopath?

Are you capable of reading? Don't chime in if you haven't read the whole thread. I explicitly rejected that the God of Abraham, the El of Genesis 1, who is the creator of man, is such a being. However, I would suggest that man's current physical form is at least an aberration consequent to the Fall, and especially so if it's derived from beasts. That a good God should have created man to live as a vampire, killing and consuming other things to survive and excreting putrid stinking matter is unthinkable. It's a perverse joke that spiritual being should be subject to such indignity.

Materiality is a wonder, but its form as bound by the laws of this world is in part horrific.

quasi means "seemingly, but not really". So, what are you doing here? What you write sounds like a modernist, agnostic troll.

Do you have a counter-argument, or is that all you can say?

Pretty much says it all.

[Kreuzritter]

I posit that any being responsible for bringing this thing into existence, even in potentia, is a sadistic psychopath.

Okay, quasi-Catholic, are you saying the Creator of mankind is a sadistic psychopath?

Are you capable of reading? Don't chime in if you haven't read the whole thread. I explicitly rejected that the God of Abraham, the El of Genesis 1, who is the creator of man, is such a being. However, I would suggest that man's current physical form is at least an aberration consequent to the Fall, and especially so if it's derived from beasts. That a good God should have created man to live as a vampire, killing and consuming other things to survive and excreting putrid stinking matter is unthinkable. It's a perverse joke that spiritual being should be subject to such indignity.

Materiality is a wonder, but its form as bound by the laws of this world is in part horrific.

quasi means "seemingly, but not really". So, what are you doing here? What you write sounds like a modernist, agnostic troll.

Do you have a counter-argument, or is that all you can say?

Pretty much says it all.

Yes. Yes it does. You're low IQ, so instead of contesting against someone's argued assertions in a reasoned way in order to refute them, which you'd be able to do if you were right and intelligent, you just blather.

[GBoldwater]

I posit that any being responsible for bringing this thing into existence, even in potentia, is a sadistic psychopath.

Okay, quasi-Catholic, are you saying the Creator of mankind is a sadistic psychopath?

Are you capable of reading? Don't chime in if you haven't read the whole thread. I explicitly rejected that the God of Abraham, the El of Genesis 1, who is the creator of man, is such a being. However, I would suggest that man's current physical form is at least an aberration consequent to the Fall, and especially so if it's derived from beasts. That a good God should have created man to live as a vampire, killing and consuming other things to survive and excreting putrid stinking matter is unthinkable. It's a perverse joke that spiritual being should be subject to such indignity.

Materiality is a wonder, but its form as bound by the laws of this world is in part horrific.

quasi means "seemingly, but not really". So, what are you doing here? What you write sounds like a modernist, agnostic troll.

Do you have a counter-argument, or is that all you can say?

Pretty much says it all.

Yes. Yes it does. You're low IQ, so instead of contesting against someone's argued assertions in a reasoned way in order to refute them, which you'd be able to do if you were right and intelligent, you just blather.

That you are an admitted fake Catholic....says it all.

[Daniel]

This is a no brainer unless one is ideologically retarded. Pain is something. It actually exists.

Why the insults and name calling? And I question this idea that pain has real ontological status.

Admittedly bodily pain is something real. But let us set that aside for now. Pain in general is a privation. You ask me what's the worst pain I've experienced, and I'd say it's when I've been in mortal sin and at enmity with God. (It has the taste of hell. Makes you desire your own annihilation.) This is clearly a privation: had I the friendship with God, I would not have been experiencing the pain. (And lesser pains work the same way. If I want an ice cream cone but am unable to have one, I experience a sort of pain. Yet it's the pain of not having what I want. All pain is relative to the joyful or painless state.)
Even God in His divine nature experiences pain in this sense, cf. Genesis 6:6: He suffers 'sorrow of heart' because His creation has betrayed Him. The love that He should be receiving is absent.

Bodily pain, on the other hand, is something positive. It is ordered towards an end. But it isn't evil except insofar as it strays from that order: when it's not doing what it should be doing, or when it's doing what it's not supposed to be doing.

[Xavier]

There was no suffering in the Garden of Eden in Paradise. There would have been no suffering if the human will had conformed itself to the Divine Will. All man's suffering and all suffering in the whole creation originates in one way or the other, and is even caused by, primarily and principally the original sin, but secondarily and subordinately also, all the very many billions of mortal sins that are committed each day, all of which has hidden and unseen effects beyond what we think, according to many Saints and Mystics. That's why after Adam's sin, suffering became necessary. But in God Almighty's Goodness and Greatness, that very Suffering and Sacrificial Painful Expiation was used as the now necessary means of Redemption by Christ's Sacrifice on the Cross, so that through Christ Our Lord, Man's very mortality, suffering and death, can become the means of our salvation; in Himself, because He as Perfecct God and Perfect Man, gave His Life in Atoning Sacrifice; in ourselves because by holy sacrificial suffering, by devoutly carrying our daily Cross and following Him as true disciples of His, we can, as the sacrificial and victim souls of the Church who undergo a white martyrdom have shown in a special and exemplary manner, we can sanctify our souls, save other souls, obtain very great and powerful graces for the world, obtain great merits in Heaven, and so many other things far, far, far above the comprehension of secularists and worldlings today who attack God. We are also taught that in the Age of Mary of come, men will begin to live again in peace and love of God and neighbor, and do works of justice and charity and mercy in great abundance as never before in the history of the Church, such that a very great part of humanity's suffering will be alleviated; and the earth will become, with holy Doctors and virtuous Saints, something close to Paradise, or as close to it as we can experience this side of Heaven; the reason being that if man puts an end to all daily mortal and even venial sin - of which there must be countless trilions upon trillions upon trillions in all of humanity's history, which must be cancelled and expiated in gratefully accepted suffering from God's Loving hands before the Age of Mary comes - even his temporal punishment or temporal suffering - as we understand easily by analogy to indulgences for Works of Mercy and for Prayers and Sacrifices - will be ameliorated or reduced. Man has it in his power, by the Grace of God, if only he really desires a very deep and lasting holiness, to end or at least very greatly reduce the amount of suffering in the world, which should be a constant rebuke to our own laziness.

[Kreuzritter]

Pain in general is a privation.

No it's not.

You ask me what's the worst pain I've experienced, and I'd say it's when I've been in mortal sin and at enmity with God. (It has the taste of hell. Makes you desire your own annihilation.) This is clearly a privation: had I the friendship with God, I would not have been experiencing the pain.

I think you're confusing the cause of experiencing something with the cause of the object of that experience. You can't even avoid acknowledging there is a tangible experience of something, not a mere absence of the experience of another thing, with the way you use words like "taste of Hell" to convey meaning.

If I cut myself off from light, I will see only darkness, but the absence of light is not the cause of the darkness I see. Black is not derivable from a mere absence; a phenomenon is no more derivable from an absence of something else than nothing is capable of yielding something.

(And lesser pains work the same way. If I want an ice cream cone but am unable to have one, I experience a sort of pain. Yet it's the pain of not having what I want.

Yes, of hunger or an unfulfilled longing, for example. These experiential phenomena are not identical with the absence of ice cream, and there's no necessary reason these should be objects of my experience in the absence of ice cream, because the mere absence of ice cream in my experience and what the tangible pain in my stomach is are in no way intrinsically related.

I will concede that that on the part of loving a thing and longing for it, a kind of "pain" seems to be an inevitable corollary of it, even of love itself. I wouldn't call this longing itself a privation, but I wouldn't necessarily call it something awful either. Some things are only possible with an attendant risk and cost. I would call this an intrinsic part of being a being in the image and likeness of God, and I wouldn't blame this reality on a devil.

All pain is relative to the joyful or painless state.)

Absence of pain is not joy.

Even God in His divine nature experiences pain in this sense, cf. Genesis 6:6: He suffers 'sorrow of heart' because His creation has betrayed Him. The love that He should be receiving is absent.

Absence of love is not sorrow. Sorrow is something.

Bodily pain, on the other hand, is something positive. It is ordered towards an end. But it isn't evil except insofar as it strays from that order: when it's not doing what it should be doing, or when it's doing what it's not supposed to be doing.

As I stated at the outset, the form is unnecessary for the function. It's not only unnecessary that the means, or even the sensation, that informs a body it's being burned and to avoid it should be what it is, but, for example, when it comes to someone being engulfed in flames and inevitably burned to death, the degree to which that pain is amplified without adding any utility is not just unnecessarily excessive but sadistic. One could program a computer to detect and respond to dangerous levels of heat without any experience of pain, yet in this supposedly good" creation, even innocent babies undergo the most horrific experience imaginable because of this thing "ordered towards an end". And pain in itself is absolutely something awful, regardless of whether or not it can serve an end to  some good. Why else would devils relish torture, and human devils like the Marquis de Sade as much as any!

[Kreuzritter]

There was no suffering in the Garden of Eden in Paradise. There would have been no suffering if the human will had conformed itself to the Divine Will. All man's suffering and all suffering in the whole creation originates in one way or the other, and is even caused by, primarily and principally the original sin, but secondarily and subordinately also, all the very many billions of mortal sins that are committed each day, all of which has hidden and unseen effects beyond what we think, according to many Saints and Mystics.

This doesn't address the ontological cause of pain's existence and it being what it is. That's the whole point. Suffering from pain is only possible because pain exists and is awful, and if we go with the model of creation ex nihilo, someone had to have created it.

[Lynne]

You framed this in a way that makes it hard to argue against. Regardless, I'm not cut out to refute what you wrote.

Forgive me but I'm going to relate something about myself.

As a teenager I was pretty well lost, quite lustful, and bore a child out of wedlock.
My daughter's mother, who was automatically given custody, turned out to be an incredibly abusive person and it got worse as time progressed. The state only enabled the abuse and every time family services would give me temporary custody my daughter's mother would comply with whatever she had to and then get custody back. I hired a lawyer and took my daughter's mother to court to gain custody. My lawyer, a women (what was I thinking?), milked out the whole process with countless unproductive hearings, and the Guardian Ad Litem, another woman (court appointed) did not investigate anything on my behalf, went with my daughter's mother's side of the story, said my daughter was exaggerating, and that I was "somewhat of a religious extremist" because I go to mass and pray a lot. Full custody was granted to my daughter's mother and my visitations were restricted. I've never did anything legally wrong in my life other than pot-smoking and under-age drinking as a teen. This all hurt pretty bad. When my daughter's mother disappeared into the city of Chicago with her, nobody would help me except the Police, but they couldn't do much. After a couple YEARS of no contact with my daughter I fell apart. Typing this out isn't that bad, but it's still impossible for me to speak about all this to anybody without crying.

Eventually, I picked myself up (with help) and soldiered on. Putting myself back together caused me to fix things about myself that had always been broken, but I had always been too weak and apathetic to fix. I can honestly say that I've become a much better person from the turd I always was.

My daughter ran off to me right after her 18th birthday. Now she's attending a private Catholic university, every year has been placed on the Dean's List and receives the Dean's Award, and is also a national collegiate scholar. She get's a full-ride from her academic performance and all I have to pay for is housing.

There were a lot of lessons to be learned from the experience, for both my daughter and I. Most notably for myself: the selfishness of lust, and that bringing a child into the world out of wed-lock is as much a crime against the child as it is God. 

It's hard to say if all the suffering was worth it or not. Who knows how things could've turned out amid different circumstances?

I'm so glad you and your daughter found one another again.