[Topics]

“Existence is a gift.”

Written: 2019-07-13
Addition: 2019-10-28
Addition: 2020-01-11
Addition: 2020-02-15

Where does the Bible teach this? The grace of God is the gift. Even atheists like Dawkins claim the same nonsense. If you are sick and ugly and a loser and clean toilets for a living, I’m certain you’d think otherwise. You like your existence. Fine. I don’t like mine, and I don’t have to, given that we ought to hate ourselves.

Apart from that: Ecclesiastes 4:3; Job 3:3; Jeremiah 20:14-18; Philippians 1:21-23. If we are saved, we can then praise God and our existence. But we are not there yet. And from an atheistic perspective, existence, in case you’ve been dealt the short straw, is just a sick joke.


(2019-10-28): [Topic]

Let us not forget the nature of this analogy: a gift does not always have to be something you are glad about. I still side with my own view that God does not create us, but that most of the time, it is the free will (and lust) of others that is responsible for us existing. Even in the case of rape, it is lust that is responsible. Christ was conceived without lust. Our lowly origin is meant to humble us: Wisdom of Solomon: 7:1-2. The horrible genes I inherited I see as a result of the fall.


(2020-01-11): [Topic]

Another observation: the death penalty is sometimes seen as being “an easy way out” or “too good”. This also shows that in hell, existence for those in it will be a curse. (Andy Nowicki makes the same point about hell and life being a “gift” in Considering Suicide.)


(2020-02-15): [Topic]

In Learn Latin by Peter Jones, Mr. Jones writes that while some slaves were able to rise in Ancient Rome, for many death certainly was a release.


Gómez Dávila:

One could object to science that it easily falls into the hands of imbeciles, if religion’s case were not just as serious.

The two most insufferable types of rhetoric are religious rhetoric and the rhetoric of art criticism.

The impertinent attempt to justify “the ways of God to man” transforms God into a frustrated schoolmaster who invents educational games that are both cruel and childish.

When the theologian explains the reason for some act of God, the listener wavers between indignation and laughter.

The heart does not rebel against the will of God, but against the “reasons” they dare attribute to it.

The imbecile does not discover the radical misery of our condition except when he is sick, poor, or old.

Modern society is proceeding simultaneously to become inhospitable to the old and to multiply their number by prolonging their lives.

I would not live for even a fraction of a second if I stopped feeling the protection of God’s existence.

In order to cure the patient it injured in the 19th century, industrial society had to numb his mind in the 20th century.
Spiritual misery is the price of industrial prosperity.