It used to annoy me when something bad would happen and someone would say, “Well, everything happens for a reason!” I would say that’s bullshit, everything is random, there is no reason for anything. And I would think the person who said it was not very intelligent.
If everything happens for a reason, why do African children starve to death every day? Why are innocent children raped and murdered? Why are people born with severe mental retardation? There can’t possibly be any reason for these things. At least not with certain presuppositions.
In response to “Everything has a reason,” which is usually said by religious types who also say, “God works in mysterious ways,” I always touted the well-known atheist argument: “If God is omniscient (knows everything), omnipotent (all-powerful), and omnibenevolent (all good), then evil wouldn’t exist in the world.”
I don’t think there’s some human-like, all-powerful god watching over us. But I do think reality goes far beyond what we’re aware of, meaning we’re not aware of the true grand scheme of things. Things that seem bad or senseless very well could, and probably do have reasons beyond our comprehension. This is still assuming “good” and “bad” are real. Maybe there is no such duality as good/bad or good/evil. Maybe the duality is imagined, a product of our human minds, much like time, solidity, and colors.
Try to keep an open mind here, whether you’re a hardcore materialist or atheist or Catholic or whatever you might label yourself. I used to be a staunch materialist (philosophically, not regarding money/possessions), a total skeptic of everything spiritual/divine, and I was very close-minded with regard to those beliefs. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but I started being a bit more open-minded and reading a lot of spiritual writings. I started meditating and having spiritual experiences. Now, although I won’t pretend I know the answers, nor will I say I 100% believe (i.e. “know”) that what I’m about to say is true, I do believe things happen for a reason, although we can’t necessarily understand the reason at this point in time.
First of all, lots of seemingly bad things that happen to us turn out to be good things. Great, amazing blessings even. When I was almost four years old my dad got into a motorcycle accident and lost his leg. Terrible thing, obviously. Long story short, it resulted in our family moving from Japan to the U.S. What a blessing in disguise that was. I can’t imagine growing up in Japan under the tyranically stringent school system they have, the result of which is an alarmingly high teenage suicide rate. As a direct result of that motorcycle accident, I was able to grow up in the Land of Opportunity.
We need to realize we can’t yet understand the eventual effects of any one incident, so it’s best simply to accept things as they happen, to accept people as they enter and leave our lives. Nothing is good or bad, it just is. Things only seem good or bad to us as humans.
Maybe what you’re going through completely sucks and you don’t think you deserve it. But when you recover from it all, and you will, you will look back on this time in your life and realize it was a great growing experience, and it will make you much more appreciative of your future circumstances. Maybe you can help others get through similar life situations so your current troubles will end up benefiting many people. You don’t know.
I know I didn’t enjoy my life as much when I was fat and depressed. I was so unmotivated, so unhealthy, so dumbed down by watching 4-6 hours of tv every day that everything seemed hopeless. But looking back on that time in my life and remembering what it was like makes it much, much easier to enjoy my current circumstances, and it has allowed me to help others make the same changes I did. I’m glad I went through that, and I can say the same of any tumultuous periods in my life.
Each one of us is equipped with all of the necessary tools to conquer any disadvantageous life situations. We’re all able to triumph in the face of adversity, no matter the circumstances. Most of us will triumph. Some will not. But it’s ok.
I believe within each of us is an eternal consciousness which is non-physical in nature. Our consciousnesses crave experience, good or bad, in order to expand and grow. An awesome way to gain experience and grow is to incarnate in a physical world such as our own. When we’re born into this incarnation, we willingly place on thick blinders so we’re totally immersed, like actors in a play who don’t know they’re in a play. And when we die and the play is over, the blinders come off, we return “home” to the eternal, non-physical realm, and we review the experiences we gained. Then we crave more experience, more incarnations, and we do this forever, creating, expanding, learning, growing. Sometimes we want to be born as an African kid who will die of starvation when he’s 12. Again, there’s no good or bad, no matter how much it may seem so to us. Remember – we currently have on our blinders. To our consciousness, it’s all just experience, a chance to grow, a chance to learn.
In these terms it’s (hopefully) easier to see that everything does, in fact, happen for a reason, although we may not understand the reason until the blinders come off and we leave our physical shells. The kicker is even if I’m wrong and this life is all there is and our consciousnesses cease to exist in any form once our brain dies, living our lives believing that an eternal consciousness fuels each of our relatively insignificant existences is a much more pleasurable way to experience this existence because it keeps everything in perspective. Bad things won’t bother us as much, good things will make us happier, and we’ll find more good things around us.
Enjoy this incarnation, this human experience as fully as you can, knowing that it will pass one day. You’ll leave your shell and return home to review all you’ve learned, alongside all of the people you loved who passed before you. Then you’ll want to do it all again. After all, how can one know what chocolate tastes like…without tasting chocolate?