Call me whatever you like. Name-calling seems fit your approach. There is a great deal of suffering in the world and no one escapes it. I never suggested that all the suffering of all people was the direct result of those individual's choices, only that ultimately, the life anyone has, is the sum consequence of all their own choices and and actions, and that most of the suffering in this world is because most individuals spend most of their lives making wrong choices. I've pointed out that almost everything you suggest are insolvable problems that make success impossible, others have overcome and succeeded spectacularly and that all the others who didn't, just failed to do what those who succeeded did.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Oct 19, 2021 8:50 pmNo, you're a troll because there isn't anybody who doesn't know that a great deal of suffering is not a result of the sufferer's choices, and you're pretending not to know that.RCSaunders wrote: ↑Tue Oct 19, 2021 4:09 pm Anyone who does not agree with your mystical world view ...Well, then, I'm a troll.
In all the world I have seen and learned about, where there is the most suffering, disease, and poverty, the majority of the people embrace gross superstitions and make no effort to learn or improve themselves, trusting in their religious teachers and political leaders (and usually local thugs) to tell them what to think, do, and believe, yet even the most depressed of such hell-holes, there are always a few who refuse to do and believe what everyone else does and find a way to escape the ignorance, superstition, and squalor of their peers--and they are almost always hated for their, "rebellion."
You call me a, "troll," but you are the one with the agenda. I have no agenda, no program to put over, no ideology to promote. I enjoy ideas, and enjoy discovering wrong ones and what is wrong with them, but I'm not interested in changing anyone else's mind or what they choose to believe or do. But you do.
If there is a way for someone to live successfully and happily in this world, totally fulfilled and satisfied with life, you would hate it. To convince people they need to be saved from something you must first convince them they are helpless, that success and happiness are not possible, that there is nothing to look forward to but misery and suffering, and that their only hope lies in something outside themselves. For those selling some social/political ideology, of course, the agency that will provide them the success and happiness they cannot achieve on their own is some kind of government. For those selling some religion, like you, the agency that will provide them success and happiness the world and their own nature cannot provide is some God.
Now, if you convince people they cannot possibly succeed in this world, they are certainly not going to try to succeed. If you convince them to give up, they will. If you convince them they can never be happy in this world, they won't be, and of course they will suffer the consequences of those choices.