"God works in mysterious ways" basically means "this doesn't make any sense to me, but I'm gonna ignore it"
Side note, does it count as a shower thought when it was conceived while sitting on the toilet? Do we have toilet-sitting-thoughts communities?
Worse. It’s “attempting to understand this might cause me to question my faith, so I’m not going to even try.”
I think is more like: "I dont have any explanation that wouldn't prove that god doesn't exist"
Meh. I think of this (and similar sentiments in other religions) as the equivalent of an aknowledgement of the butterfly effect, unforseen circumstances and the reality that we as humans have little control over the world and can't see into the future.
TLDR: maybe the baby needed to die.
"it is what it is, fuck you" how I translate it.
Toilets work in mysterious ways
Toilets are different though. If you've ever tried to fix one you'd eventually figure it out.
Most people would call a plumber and pay the bill for swapping the feces-capacitor-unit or whatever is billed, and that's how toilets work to them. They don't think it's magic, they think it works because the plumber was paid.
To anyone who has tried to fix one, it also isn't magic. It's just a really clever design consisting of several valves controlling the input and output of water in different pipes. I won't try to explain as there are several different designs, but the main idea is that valves work just like logical gates. On/off. Just like a computer has bits and booelean operations, toilets work by manipulating the gates(valves) either by user input (pressing the flush buttons) or by conditions changing (the pressure of water at certain levels).
Toilets are logical. You can run Doom on toilets. Try to run Doom using the bible.
One time at baseball camp I was an outfielder because I was always too busy thinking about more interesting stuff than baseball. Eventually the ball ended up near me somehow, and the whole crowd was yelling at me as I came out of my reverie. So I threw the ball in the opposite direction by accident. The other team ran everyone around the bases while laughing at me.
Anyway cool reply, have fun with your Doom toilet.
What if i print traces on the bible and run doom on those?
If they were that logical it wouldn't have taken Europe 1500 years to rediscover plumbing dummy
They surely do in Tokyo...
That thing was smarter than my smart TV.
"It's all part of God's plan."
"Yeah, well God's plan fucking sucks. If I was God, I'd just snap my fingers and skip to the end of the damn plan, instead of scheduling little kids to be molested by my clergymen."
Honestly, if I was a God, I would create the universe, then just watch how it unfolds, why would I interfere to save what is the equivalent of ants to me?
I think that you are overlooking a lot of things here. If you are God in the traditional modern sense then you would already know how the universe will unfold. You would be gaining nothing by having the "ants" live and suffer. As the creator of the universe you would also have a responsibility for the lives you put in it and you would be responsible if you chose to not intervene in their suffering as well. As the creator it would have been within your power to create a universe without suffering. When we start to consider those points it paints morbid picture. That's not to attribute that kind of callous cruelty to you, the implications of such a hypothetical are probably not something we've spent much time sorting out.
God DOES work in mysterious ways.
Mysteriously similar to random chance.
Children dying of cancer
God works in mysterious ways
I fucking hate religion.
Children abused by clergy.
Good works in mysterious ways.
It get worse than cancer.
"My external locus of control comforts me and I'd prefer it not be challenged thank you very much."
That's an interesting line of thought - see, standard human religions involve actors with often inhuman motivations who often react emotionally... It's not necessarily locus of control. It's a powerful actor changing the environment, and as your own actor you can choose to attempt to influence them (through anything from appeasement to outside intercession to trickery), you can adapt your own actions (like changing to more drought resistant crops), or you can throw up your hands and say "times is tough, it's not my fault - it's because the gods are fighting"
Then you have the Roman Catholic God (aka the Roman religion deliberately engineered to make for good subjects to an empire and using Jesus's name).
Almost all religions, including Judaism, have this idea of a creator (translated as master of the universe for Jews, the yawning void ginnugagap for the Norse, etc), but the Creator isn't really an agent - it's beyond understanding for even the gods. They're the source, and living in harmony with their design brings good things and going against it brings misfortune. The creator only interacts indirectly, mostly through creation or emergent properties of systems
Then you have gods - like the God of the Israelites. They have power, agency, have limits (great as their power might be), and can be influenced by individual or group actions of humans.
But then you have the Roman Catholic God - it combines the omnipotence and omniscience of the creator with the agency and motivations of a god, and it is the only supernatural agent, the others are just constructs serving its will
My point being - if you have this one agent creating everything, who cares about you individually and shaped reality based in part on your actions as an individual - is that not an absolute internal locus of control? If your reality is being personally tailored by an all-powerful, perfect agent, then your actions become absolute... You don't have the power yourself, but your actions and experience become able to shape everything based on the judgement of this all-powerful God
It's interesting to think about
Any time spent trying to puzzle out "God's plan" is wasted effort.
Just be good to yourself and others.
If God isn't happy with that, we were all doomed to begin with.
"Don't fear the gods; don't worry about death; what is good is easy to achieve, and what is bad is easy to avoid." -- Epicurus
my unemployment, anxienty, depression, and alcoholism need to have a chat with Epicurus..
Have a waffle!
God heals, but always within the exact parameters of what is possible by the modern medicine of that exact era.
Amputees unfortunately can still go fuck themselves.
https://whywontgodhealamputees.com/ top tier website
Unironically a great read.
Yeah I don't understand religions that view medicine with scepticism but practice prayer with complete confidence. If I was religious I'd see modern medicine as a mericle. We can cure most cancers easily. Granted not all cancers but most.
I'm not religious, yet I spend a lot of time in church. Consider this: many of life's problems are solved by brainpower. I get about 90 minutes a week of uninterrupted time to sit and think about anything I want. Plus, people sing to me while I think.
God is a scapegoat for actions you don't want to claim responsibility for.
Every word I say is a lie. In fact, I'm lying right now.
(Does that count as one?)
The sentiment appears really early on in the book of Job which has the character Elihu jumping in to what was effectively an adaptation of the earlier dialogue on the injustice of suffering in the Babylonian Theodicy to claim that God's purpose and motivations are unknowable because why it rains and where snow comes from is beyond human understanding.
Now that why it rains is literally a nursery rhyme, maybe we should really adjust our thinking about just how undecipherable a potential creator of the universe is.
For example, religious traditions that believe God is light (1 John 1:5) and believe it was an intelligent designer of the universe might want to think a bit more on the design detail that light when unobserved can be more than one thing at once, and can even be different things to different eventual observers. At very least, you'd think that would give them pause in their commitment to the idea of absolutely defining who or what their God is for everyone else.
It’s some sort of cognitive dissonance that also gives credence to coincidence.
"A quantum collapsed to an unfavorable state"
Story of my life.
What it really means is “Despite how horrible this situation is, I’m not going to close myself of from recognizing good things that also happen, possibly even as a result of this”.
When people are badly hurt they tend to filter out perception of positive things, which is bad because life goes on even after (and during) a tragedy, and if you can’t perceive good things you starve.
Another way to put it is: “I’m not going to let this ruin my life”.
Or I can put it yet another way. What is the ethical value of an event? Is it the sum total of all the pleasure, minus all the pain, that the event causes? How could this be measured? Even if you can quantify it in the present, there’s also the future to think about.
Like, breaking your foot is a bad event. But if it means you’re in the hospital getting it cast the day you otherwise would have been hit by a drunk driver, then it’s actually good.
That’s “God” working in a mysterious (unpredictable, unknown) way. You won’t ever know that the broken foot saved you from the drunk driver. That’s the mysterious part. You don’t actually know what’s going on.
God being the omniscient meta person whose viewpoint isn’t constrained, who does take everything into consideration. That point of view is necessary to know with whether something was good or bad, but is unattainable to the human mind.
It’s very loosely similar to the saying “This too shall pass”. That saying will temper one’s judgment of existence. If you’re currently scared or sad, “This too shall pass” means that will end. Same if you’re happy.
If your judgment of a situation is coming up 100% terrible, ie you’re looking around you and see nothing but badness, a friend might temper your conclusion with a reminder that there is information beyond what you know: “God works in mysterious ways”.
Getting back to a tragedy situation, it means don’t give up hope, because your hopelessness is based on a limited point of view.
I mean, your given example isn't actually an example of your previous points. Its not a "every cloud has a silver linings" statement, it's a "I still believe in God even when bad things happen. This isn't proof of neither his non-existence or his non-caring." Eve your example is a poor thought experiment because it assumes a limited power god who can only break your foot, but can't actually prevent the drink driving accident in any less painful way.
It's a "I'm going to pretend this was supposed to happen and is a good thing regardless of whether good things come from it."
It's the response to "earthquake kills 1000s".
The other, less religious reasoning you provided is much more clear and less stretches with a lot better phrases. Even your descriptions would work better than providing the phrase itself to someone who is currently hurting. This phrase ultimately defends the bad thing as a good thing instead of telling the person shit happens, play the cards you were dealt, you can still win even when you're coming from behind.
Yeah, I'm gonna disagree here.
My favorite two arguments for this are rapists and babies with cancer.
So, babies with cancer are pretty straightforward - there's no way you can explain it as something good and there's no way to explain this in any logical sense. That's when people start feeling uncomfortable, because they know it doesn't make sense, but hey, they have the ultimate argument! "God works in mysterious ways."
The other one is a little more complex, but let's go. Someone rapes some other person, let's say a young man rapes a young woman. She has trauma for life, is scarred for life and is never gonna be the same. Let's say some 40, 50 years later he truly is sorry for what he's done, which I also can see happening. It doesn't really absolve him in my eyes, but hey I'm not God and my ways are quite simple and not at all mysterious. The lady has been a good person all her life, so both of them go to heaven. And one day they meet in heaven. How is that fair to her? How is he able to get to the same place of rest as her? Well, the answer is simple, "God works in mysterious ways."
So no, people don't use it to mean “I’m not going to let this ruin my life”, they use it to say "I don't really know how to respond to that because there's no way that the answer would make logical sense".
It can be both, and I'm not sure I see the distinction. It's a coping mechanism, and that's not actually an awful thing.
Growing up in church, nobody was creating hypotheticals and then trying to explain it using religion. It's just not what it was about. But I guess if you brought up babies with cancer, then yeah the "mysterious ways" argument would have been a prime cop out to avoid challenging faith too much.
Most commonly, people just wanted to know how to handle the (typically less hyperbolic) challenges in their own lives. They believed they were good and faithful and didn't understand why God would allow bad things to happen in their lives. Ultimately the "mysterious ways" line was just a coping mechanism, that came with advice to search for the silver linings, and think about past challenges and how they resolved, as evidence of the mysterious ways. Of course it also served to avoid challenging their faith too.
At the end of the day, religion has its very bad elements that I won't defend. But it's silly to ignore that for most people, they're looking for ways to interpret life in order to find meaning, or maybe cope with struggles. For myself, I'm not religious, but if I were trying to help a friend dealing with something difficult in life, I would still encourage them to look for silver linings and to reflect on past challenges. Not to use it as evidence for some god working in mysterious ways, but just to give them perspective to realize that they have the strength to overcome challenges.
Of course I can explain baby with cancer in a good way. Baby was Hitler. Done.
You completely missed my point if that’s your example.
I don't believe in god. However, I can see this argument having some merit. Think of all the stuff we do to and for our pets that probably confuses the crap out of them, like putting them in a car and taking them to the vet.
True, but I bet you'd communicate that to your pet if that was within your power to do so. In fact, if you could magically cure your pet you'd do that too.
I think we tend to drastically underestimate animals... Keep in mind, most of our pets are insanely inbred social animals who are undersocialized and basically left in solitary confinement for most of their life
But AI has led to some interesting results - we can now plot languages as high dimensional shapes in information space, which is basically the core of an LLM. All human languages have similar shapes - so they started to use similar techniques to create language models for animal languages.
We don't have nearly enough data to train one yet, but already we're finding that language is everywhere - what we thought were instinctual signals turn out to be a lot more like learned, symbolic languages than we've ever imagined
For example, names are everywhere - cats, dolphins, whales, and birds definitely have names... We've found language and names everywhere we've looked closely enough, and in even plants and fungi this might exist through chemical and electrical signals.
My point being - animals have their own internal model of the world. Do you think programmers are magic when you watch them change a few words and modify a program? Maybe, maybe not. I think artists are magical when they draw something from nothing... It genuinely blows my mind every time, because no matter how much I study it they're doing something impossible for me
Some animals understand - we had a Boston terrier that genuinely understood vets were necessary, he absolutely hated it but would begrudgingly hop on the table and let them pose him or give him shots... Just like a person, he would do his best to disassociate and do what it took to get it over with ASAP. He wasn't really an obedient dog - but he was cooperative. He was stubborn as hell until our interests aligned... We established he could scratch the door to come in or out, and he would secretly go off on adventures. One day we found him a mile away from our house, walking down the sidewalk with purpose - neighbors would sometimes tell us they saw him leaving the neighborhood, but he always looked before he crossed the street and used the sidewalk.
Our next dog loved to watch dog shows - one day my sister got a medal, and we put it on her and she smiled like her dream came true... Took it off and straight face. Put a lanyard with keys on her to see if she liked the weight - nothing. Put the medal back on - huge smile
It's really ingrained in us that humans are unique in experience... We're not. Animals can learn arithmetic and play video games, they can use Instagram and form rudimentary systems of government (crows are a great case study). Dogs can use pubic transport to travel between their den and hunting grounds. Animals can choose to seek out drugs or commit suicide. They can learn to use money and engage in prostitution, they can learn to cook food, they can seek out humans and ask for help. They can have language and understanding of the world - the big difference is they don't have the same motivations.
So do they think humans are magic? Some of them do, others figure out how to work the light switch themselves, others just accept that lights turn on when humans are around
We aren't omnipotent and omnicient though, taking merely a thought to make all the bad things go away.
Nope, it was proven that animals know vets are helping them. They just don't know they need to be helped. The argument doesn't have any merit. If you don't know something, you should tell yourself "let's figure it out" instead of "there's a reason this all powerful being does this weird shit".
The problem really boils down to a lack of QA.
always does..
God of the Gaps..
You would go mad otherwise
"Yeah, a bit too mysterious for my taste"
I have a smoothbrain
It's also a central principle of many beliefs. It's common for a person to think that they are smarter than gods or that they know all the facts of the universe and what is right and wrong and then they judge the things around them based on their little ideas.
God works in mysterious ways is a thing that a humble (realistic) person should keep in mind. A Human is a tiny insignificant creature and a human brain isn't going to comprehend the reasons, events and magnitude of things. We don't even know anything about the past except the stories we've heard and made up. Let alone the future.
Whether you believe in deity or not, it is a good model and perspective. A piece of age old wisdom, even if you don't like the words it had been put in.
“God works in mysterious ways” is blaming things on gods when your god may have nothing to do with it. That signals you’re trying to me smarter than your god way more than saying, “Let’s figure this out.”
It’s not always in reference to negative things. In my experience it tends to be for strange or unexpectedly positive ones tbh.
This is full of falsehoods and outright lies. We do understand the past, we do understand how we got here, we do comprehend the reasons behind almost all events that happen as they can almost universally be explained by science. If we don't know, we keep doing science until we get the answer - which we, invariably, do.
This may have passed as wisdom a century ago but in the modern age of mandatory education and freedom of information, it just sounds uninformed and naive.
It’s common for a person to think that they are smarter than gods or that they know all the facts of the universe and what is right and wrong and then they judge the things around them based on their little ideas.
i cant decide if this is outrageously funny or incredibly naive... both?
please, cite your fact based source
Have you ever heard of a reverse exorcism?
It’s when a demon tells a priest to exit the child’s body.
Yeah, little babies with cancer surely make sense. And so does the saying "God wanted him/her there sooner!". Like that fucker couldn't just skip giving the parents trauma and create a baby at heaven directly. And I could think of dozens examples more.
