FIRSTLY
Christian Scripture in Hebrews 12:7-11 says that all suffering is God disciplining us:
“Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live! Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.”
It just says hardship, meaning the adversities that just happen and the terrible things people do to each other.
It says that each person who endures adversity can benefit from the discipline.
The discipline is not a side effect—it is the reason why God lets the terrible things happen or be done to you.
There is a difference between terrible things happening and you trying to learn to be a better person, and the thing happening because you are to learn from it. In this view, any improvement in your character is a side effect that you create. The bad event is not about making you better; you make yourself better regardless. The side effect is created by you, not the evil. The evil itself is still useless and intolerable and thus a proof that there is no God. If you can be good in spite of evil, that is proof that evil is wholly useless and a denial that it is part of a divine plan.
This teaching—that evil is discipline—says evil is sort of good but just doesn’t feel good. It is twisted. Human nature does not want a theory of suffering that says it is good under the circumstances. It is callous and implies you should be eager to suffer.
Leads to blaming others
Some say that God may torment a person who needs no discipline so that others who deal with the person may be disciplined through that. Or He might torment a person who needs discipline, not for her sake, but for the sake of others—such discipline may be meant for others and not the person.
What if you suffer and think it is about God using your pain to fine-tune virtue in others? The thought could be seen as a prompt from God. To discipline you or anybody else, God has to send prompts. You are blaming others for what is happening to you, which contradicts Jesus’ rule that you must blame yourself before blaming anybody else. The teaching implies that the Catholic priest who rapes a child is doing that child a spiritual favor. The child should be happier about the abuse than saddened and traumatized. God is ultimately the abuser for He lets it happen and uses it as part of a plan. The doctrine is based on victim blaming.
You cannot be disciplined without it involving others, too. Those who think it is about them only are being arrogant and blind. As God says, you have to be other-centered, not self-centered—it is possible your suffering is all about training others.
If you get the prompt that it is for you, it may be that you are refusing to take it as discipline. It is refusing to say, “I need discipline because of my sins and imperfections, so this suffering is my own fault. I praise God for sending me the suffering.”
Anyway, as we know, any notion we take can be attributed to God. It is clearly superstitious to say God disciplines, for that only works if He is indeed prompting us that we or others are the problem. It always involves blaming somebody else, even if you blame yourself as well.
Means and ends
To hurt somebody to increase virtue in others is treating her as a means and not as a person important in herself. Religion may say this is not a sin if there is no other way—if, for some reason, it would be worse if God refused to treat her as a means. They would say God can do this and still be good, for He is not deliberately treating her as a thing—there is just no other way.
But it is very serious. If you are a means, you need proof that explains why. Faith, what you think are divine prompts, and other such things will never be enough. To say someone is a means, you do need discipline—but not in the way you think. It is a disgrace.
The problem of evil
The doctrine of divine discipline says: “If suffering disciplines, then the Lord has sent it.” You would not say that if you have the flu, and if the teacher tries to help you become a better person because of it, that the teacher is disciplining you. You would only say it if the teacher injected you with the virus. Suffering is God’s will.
An all-powerful God who is all-good will not allow evil to happen for any reason but to teach us the right way to live. There is no doubt that if you believe in God, you have to believe that He lets evil happen because it is best for improving us—or if not us, then other people somewhere—but it is worth allowing. The Church asks people to take consolation in suffering, for God is using it to build their characters if they let Him. We will see that the unease we feel when we get this advice is appropriate, and very appropriate indeed.
The idea that the evil God allows may not result in a greater good, but just stops things from getting worse—so that with a specific evil such as smallpox, or without it, there will be no improvement—has to be rejected. It is very unlikely that evil and goodness will break even. So God then has to be believed to bring about suffering for a better good. The sick thing about such an idea is that it indicates suffering should be welcomed! Since suffering is the experience of worthless existence, it is a liar, and nothing can justify it. Naturally, you cannot welcome the experience of worthless existence. Suffering is not pain—pain doesn’t stop you being happy—but if pain is strong enough, it will cause suffering. The suggestion that suffering is good for the soul, and God uses it for that purpose, says more about the person saying it and believing it than God!
THE INNOCENT SUFFER
God is supposed to send suffering to the innocent: babies, animals, and the insane, who cannot benefit from it themselves—for there would be no compassion if He kept it for the deserving alone. Many say that God tells us we must judge nobody and believe that the wicked have repented, even if it looks as if they have not. And we know that many so-called good people are full of malignance inside, for it is in their best interest to act good—but the teaching tells us to forget that. So, it seems there is room for compassion after all if you assume nobody deserves good.
You can exercise true compassion for a repentant monster being punished and still approve of the punishing, provided you believe that the latter is done for a good purpose. It is the same as a dentist extracting a tooth and having compassion.
It would be degrading to approve of God hurting you when you were a baby so that He could discipline others. That is not agreeable with the fact that you most surely exist and come first (the principle that you must respect yourself before you can respect others). You cannot approve of that degradation. To say God exists is to reject the view that compassion is possible—even if only the wicked suffer. It is to say there should be no compassion for them.
THE ROLE OF CHOICE
“If there were no suffering, there would be no people helping one another. Suffering makes good works possible. The Bible says that suffering is often chastisement, that is, correction, for sins, to help us become better people and worthwhile servants of God (Hebrews 12). Your own personal suffering enables you to do good works by trying to be patient, trying to be more sympathetic towards others, and trying to be more spiritual. Suffering is sent to originate and nurture holiness and goodness in us. Specifically, it makes us humble, prudent, and compassionate. We might not suffer to get stronger in virtue, but we should, and are meant to. The suffering we experience might not be intended for our benefit but for that of others, but still we must try and make it improve us. We are talking about discipline in this theodicy and not about learning lessons. It accounts for all suffering. God could harm a baby for the sake of our souls.”
So, discipline can only be discipline if we let it be. It is free will that effects the change, not the suffering. If so, then the suffering is unjustifiable—like curing an infection in a hand with bleach when you could use a gentle cream to do the same job.
VIRTUE-MAKING?
The discipline defense is bad for compassion, so what about other virtues such as patience and humility? As for patience, patience is refusing to let delay get to you—so the more impatience, the better, for the more sacrifice it will mean. Prudence is not a virtue but intelligence and remembering to think, which God could implant in you. As for humility, you only have to change your thinking, and it is cruel for a God to hurt you just because you believe you are too good for Him or others—unless you are in a position to start using concentration camps.
The strangest thing about the soul-building theory is that it always says that suffering is for building up virtue. But virtue is a good habit. You feel good about doing it and program yourself to do it so that it becomes hard or impossible to refrain from it. It makes doing good easier. When suffering is for this programming, why can’t God implant all the virtue in us in the first place, if that is the end for which He sends suffering? Whether we or God do the programming is irrelevant—what matters is that virtue is programming and a reduction of our free will. We are told He does not want the suffering, just that we be holy and virtuous. When that is all He wants, there should be no suffering. Many of the good points we have were implanted in us, and so He should have implanted the rest too. That would still leave us able to freely do good.
The suffering of others does not make a good person good, but brings out the goodness in another person that has already been there. The discipline defense is a failure. It is the same with your own suffering.
IT IS ANTI-HAPPINESS
Discipline gives you relief from pain and suffering when it gets you to the goal—but it should go on all the time to make you suffer to do or will good if love is sacrifice. It never works: you are glad when it is over, which means you have wasted it and ended up worse than you were at the start, because you should be glad to have had it and to get the virtue it gives, and be sorry to see it go. If it does such a good job at making you more virtuous, you should want it all the time to keep you in tip-top shape. Therefore, the notion of temporary discipline is at odds with the doctrine that love is selflessness and sacrifice—a doctrine required if you believe in the free will defense (the doctrine that God lets us hurt each other for He respects free will and intends us to use our will only for good). God would not give us free will if we were meant to do what we like best, but only what He wants. The theory needs the free will defense, yet it condemns it. The theory is incoherent.
There is no mistake: to believe even that God occasionally disciplines is to declare war on human happiness. Without the discipline excuse for divine apathy towards suffering and God’s role in it, God loses much of His attraction for people, who like to think God will get back at those who injure them.
SPITEFUL
The notion that suffering is divine discipline is unfair, for you cannot know what suffering does to everybody. It is vindictive and self-righteous. You are like the pupil who is happy to see the schoolmaster discipline somebody else as long as it is not you.
Any theory that claims that evil is for making a greater good is unsatisfactory. Many would say it is at best inconclusive, though the truth is it is more than unsatisfactory—it is incoherent, nonsensical, and dangerous. It means we cannot look at the action of another and say for sure it is evil. If a man murders, we might say he did wrong—but that is God’s job. What if he felt God was telling him to do it? Christians base their extreme doctrines on the idea that God tells you these doctrines are true. For example, approval of what Jesus did to himself by going on the cross is an extreme doctrine. To condone suffering is a terrible thing and a horrible trait.
BIASED
If we are going to say God is right to hurt us and make viruses to destroy our health, then why can’t we say the same about an evil president running our country? Why can’t we say that his evil is good in a way we don’t understand, and that we should assume he wants us to suffer so that we may engage in compassion? The Church answers that it is because God is good and therefore He should be trusted. So because the president is a human being and can do wrong, he is not to be trusted, and we are not to say that the evil he does is for some purpose we don’t understand that justifies it.
But it is unfair to trust a being whose existence you cannot be as sure of as a man’s, more than a man, when both behave in seemingly terrible ways. The discipline defense fails: it promotes injustice. It promotes not virtue but vice. God is a belief. If you are going to condone human suffering over a belief, then it is your duty to condone the president’s—especially if he claims his evil ways are not really evil. It is very insulting to sick people to condone suffering over a belief. Beliefs do not come before people.
The person you see should come before the God you cannot see, for you can only believe in God when you don’t see Him. By condoning divine evil, we would be believing God to benefit God. It would be kinder, then, if we are allowed to do that, to believe in the president to benefit him—for at least then we are surer he exists!
FINALLY
Christianity claims that God sends suffering to make us virtuous, and happiness is secondary to this. In other words, if we can’t be both virtuous and happy, thanks to the circumstances of our existence, then happiness has to be destroyed. Christianity complains that too many attempts to explain how it can make sense to say evil and God co-exist err, for they assume God has to put our happiness first.
But that is a very serious attitude—you cannot adopt it lightly. You need huge evidence or proof before you can promote that attitude. Religion is guilty of valuing theology and God above people. The argument that suffering disciplines, and this is the divine plan, puts virtue before happiness. It is a cruel doctrine. It is better to be evil inside but live a good, happy life that benefits others, though it is not really meant to, and that benefits yourself, than to be virtuous through suffering.
It is obvious that if there is an almighty and all-loving God, then suffering is permitted to happen by Him to improve us as virtuous beings. But it cannot improve, so there is no loving God. If there is improvement, then it is something other than divine discipline that did it.