Someone I barely knew in high school (and therefore is in my outer circle of friends on Facebook) posted this actual statement:
When a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ suffers, he or she is being drawn into the experience of Jesus Christ, for He Himself was perfected through suffering.
Get the self-justification? See how the person in question is making themselves more important by associating their “suffering” with Jesus? How much more noble this person’s pain is, because Jesus died after horrible pain and torture, amen. I mean, clearly. QED.
But what about non-believers? Do Muslims get drawn into some kind of communion with God’s bastard child when they suffer? Muslims would be very quick to tell you that no, they don’t. Neither do Hindus, or Scientologists, or worshippers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. And since it’s all entirely subjective experience, based on no evidence at all, anyone can say anything at all, even if it makes them seem callous and cold towards non-approved-by-their-God-only suffering.
Everyone suffers. It’s a universal condition. Some suffering is a hangnail. Some suffering is a parent living longer than their child. Pain can be small, or large; it can be as sharp as one person, or spread across a community or region or country. It happens to everyone, regardless of which of many Bronze Age or newer myths they choose to call their own. Or even to those of us who try to see the world as it is, without magical fairy beings who may, or may not, validate our personal pain.
Luckily, many of us still have the capacity to experience the opposite of pain, too. Let’s hope that one day, that, too, becomes universal. It won’t happen simply because a supposedly omnipotent unseeable daddy figure knocked up a pregnant woman and let him be tortured to death as barbaric payment for creating fallible creatures, or whatever the regional beliefs are.
