The Specifics of Evil: Why Saving a Fallen World Requires Deep Understanding of What's Fallen

     

Introduction

    (Disclaimer: Since I have a wide Christian audience, for the purpose of this text I'm treating God and Jesus as the same person. Obviously, LDS believe Jesus is God's son. This shouldn't have too much effect on the premise of the blogpost.)

    The primary premise of the Christian faith is fascinating. We are sinners, and thus are not naturally worthy to be in the presence of a supremely benevolent being, our creator God. God's solution? Put himself in our shoes. That is what the atonement is, God experiencing our suffering, experiencing our sin. In order to save us, God had to learn what imperfection was like. He had to learn what our suffering was like. He had to take on every burden. This, supposedly, was the only way to redeem a fallen world. 

    Whether God suffered that we all may be saved or not, our world is still a fallen one. Yes, for Christians, an eternal perspective is important. Preparation for the infinite life to come is doubtlessly a good idea. But it is not the only thing that should be important to the Christian. Why should the Christian care about temporary suffering? Why should the Christian be willing to expend large amounts of their energy to understand and understand to help the worst struggles of the worst-off among us? Because that's precisely what God did. If the Atonement is the most important thing God ever did, then fighting to understand and help others through temporary suffering cannot be very low on the Christian's to-do list. 

Take This Cup From Me

    Like Jesus, the idea of spending the vast majority of our energy on fighting to understand, appreciate, and ultimately help those who are suffering is terrifying. We're not built for that kind of lifestyle. We don't have that kind of endurance. We're not...well, we're not (the son of) God. Going through our own suffering is hard enough. Attempting to grasp and fight against suffering well beyond ourselves? That is very draining. If fighting temporary suffering caused God to bleed out from every pore, surely it is too much for us. We've all had moments when helping a family member or friend where even trying to understand that singular person felt like too much. But the thing is, it's what you had to do to make the situation better, right? You had to fight to understand their demons, to help them carry that weight. 

The First Step towards an Ethical Life

    I believe the biggest reason an ethical life is so hard to live is that the first step is arguably the hardest one. Moreover, I think the first step is widely underappreciated. That first step, as you might have guessed, is understanding what is wrong with the world. This includes but is not limited to what is wrong with you, what is wrong with your relationships, and what is wrong with the lives of the people (and animals) that you do not know. If every human life matters as much as the next, then all of these questions should matter to you. Why is understanding what is wrong the first step? Because if you don't understand what is wrong, you cannot even begin to ask what needs to be done to make things right. 

What Understanding Wrong Means

    The thing is, understanding what is wrong with the world is deeper than being able to list facts. To show you what I mean, here's a list of facts of things that I'm pretty sure are wrong with the world. 

    1. More than 820 million people are involuntarily hungry. Link

    2. 1 in 3 people do not have access to clean drinking water. Link

    3. Over 700,000 people commit suicide each year Link

    Obviously I could list many, many more. But three is a good number for now. 

    What did you think when you read these facts? Did you think that you could do something about them? Did they feel like insurmountable barriers? Your answer to those questions are most likely no and yes. My focus here is on WHY those were your answers. I think they were your answers precisely because you do not know enough about them. 

    Wouldn't you feel more confident there would be some way to help the number of people hungry to go down if you understood the reasons why it's as high as it is? Would that not give you the tools to do research on what charities would be best to support or even (perhaps) what policies might prove most useful? You probably would. The trouble is, we don't want to know why 820 million people are starving. It's already sad enough that they are, we don't need to spend time grappling with the nature of that fact. But the thing is, unless we do grapple, hope will never come. It's counter-intuitive, but you have to dig deeper into the suffering to have any chance at relieving it. You can see how this would apply to the other two facts as well. No one wants to think deeply about why people commit suicide. In fact, it's honestly hard to think of many topics more depressing than that. But you have to think about it if you want to help move things in the other direction, because you cannot solve a problem without knowing what the problem is.

So, You're Not God. Now What?

    Now you might be thinking, Chase, I can't think deeply about all those things! I have really long work hours, or a family to take care of, or very taxing personal trials. Or any combination of those things and many others! And on top of all that, I need time to rest! And to that I say, yep! That is precisely why you cannot think deeply about every problem. Even thinking deeply about one problem is very taxing. That's part of why it's so easy to be wrapped up in our own lives. It's not really our fault. So what's the solution? How do we become more conscious of the nature of the world's problems without completely draining ourselves? Well, I think that is something I'd like to research in the future and make its own blogpost, but in the meantime here's a few tips that may or may not work.

1. You do not have to think deeply about every problem. You can even just think deeply about one problem. And you can do it for like, five minutes a day. Say you want to learn about depression. Google "what is depression" and watch a five minute explanatory video. One idea is to do this with several of the world's problems you know about. If any of them catch your interest, consider picking up a book or an audiobook about the subject. 

2. The thing is, I'm sure there's at least one problem that someone has looked at it through the sort of lens you're used to! Are you a lawyer? I'm sure there's someone who's written on one of the world's problems through the perspective of law. Doctor? Obviously many options there. Do you work in finance? I'm sure there's a book on the financial situation of world hunger. 

3. Do not put pressure on yourself to learn a lot in a short period of time. Learning anything is a step in the right direction. Like I said earlier, our mortal bodies and minds already deal with so much. Taking any amount of time to understand the world's problems more deeply is something you can be proud of. 

It's Really Complicated

    The solution to any major problem is never easy. There's probably a lot of different directions we could take to make these problems less...problematic. I think the other reason why a deeper understanding of the issues is so crucial is that it allows us to see the shades of truth in many varying perspectives about them. When you get into the weeds, you realize the story of these problems is much more gray than all of us tend to see. And if we don't recognize and understand the gray, we will continue to shout at each other in black and white and fail to get anywhere.

Conclusion

    Hopefully, this blogpost has provided with you with one more perspective in this gray world we call home. Maybe some of it spoke to you, maybe it didn't. Regardless, I thank you for reading. I truly believe you can't win these ethical battles without understanding why we are at war with them.