Was listening to a youtube video of one Orion Taraban where he discusses a prayer he used to pray every morning: ‘May all beings be free of suffering’. He mentioned that he used to pray this as sort of a buddhist prayer, so he wasn’t coming at this from a Christian point of view. But then he mentioned that you really only need to think about this for about 30 seconds before you realize how silly it is. 

Before I go on, I will recount that had come to the same conclusion years ago when I used to have dialogues with Atheists online. The old problem of evil that most atheists like to propose is that because there is evil and suffering in the world, than either God is not all powerful, or not good, because if he were really good- he wouldn’t want there to be suffering, and if he were really all-powerful, then he would be able to do something about it. So IF there is a God, and there is evil and suffering in the world, then that God could not be both good and all-powerful. As with all syllogisms, they are valid conclusions based on premises. If the form of the syllogism is valid, and the premises are both true, then the conclusion must be true.  

The problem I saw was that the atheists were making an assumption about what God would want. From here, I’ll go back to the video. 

Taraban realizes that asking God to provide a state of no suffering is absurd and immature. Prayer doesn’t work like that because that’s not how suffering works. The vast majority of suffering is caused by ignorance. Most of us are responsible for the suffering we experience. What good is it to change the circumstances of external reality? He realized that his prayer was functionally asking for people to wake up and understand the extent to which they were contributing to their own suffering. 

This is the place I arrived at years ago. Just like pain is a response to a problem, to let us know that we shouldn’t do that anymore, our suffering is a consequence of our fallenness. The message of the Bible is that we humans have a sin problem, collectively and individually. If God were to take the consequences of our sin away so that we didn’t suffer from our sin, then we would have no idea that there was anything wrong. The reason we suffer is to get us to understand that things are not the way they’re supposed to be. (And we can think on that a bit too…. if life really IS full of suffering, what would give us the idea that something is wrong? Shouldn’t we look at all our ‘troubles’ and just think that’s it’s perfectly normal? But we don’t. We know it’s not supposed to be like this.) 

And if our suffering from our fallen state is what makes us look for a way out, why would, or should, God take that away? Suffering is one of the main things that causes us to wake up. It alerts us to the fact that things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be.