Pandeism and Suffering

What is the purpose of suffering? Of feeling pain far in excess of what is needed to keep us from injury? Many years ago I went on a snorkeling trip to Isla Espiritu Santo out of La Paz, in Baja California. I had too close of an encounter with a patch of fire coral!! The pain was intense and I was stunned to the point that I feared I would drown!! After dragging myself to the surface, I got my friends to pull me over the side of the wooden boat we'd rented. I flopped like a caught fish, gasping from the burning that pulsed through my hands, shoulders, stomach and chest.

I had by then long since settled on Pandeism as my guiding spiritual principle, but as I lay there I wondered, why a thinking, designing Creator -- especially one destined to share in our sensations -- would create a Universe where such pain would be possible. The secretions of the fire coral, though dangerous in large doses, were not so deadly that my body should go so far to warn me away from such contact. The burning persisted for days, gradually declining, but forever marking my memory with that moment.

As I healed I came to realize that some suffering lets us know the blessing of the time when we are not suffering. The Creator that became the Universe did so in order to experience those things that it could not know -- not only pleasure for its own sake, but the pleasure of overcoming pain, even of escaping from suffering in the final surrender that comes with death. I was grateful that, over all those hours that I suffered from the fire coral burns, it touched only one surface of my body. Laying on my back on cool sheets helped ward off the pain.

Many look back on their painful experiences as psychic scars, shuddering to relive them but forever forgetting to cast a relative eye on their current and future circumstances. I revel in the fact that I was burned by fire coral precisely because this was a moment of revelation, a breakthrough. I revel because I healed; those parts of me that were in pain were ultimately at peace. And, I may be grateful to know that I am capable of enduring and surviving such a thing, and doubly that with such pain as I am capable of enduring, I am not now enduring it.

In a short time (compared to the life of the Universe), those who are living in this moment will no longer be, and whatever suffering we know now, will be known no more. And in some time beyond that, we all may return to the oneness which we all first came from, sharing all of these memories and sensations. You, my friends, may know how I felt at the moment I was burned with fire coral in the Gulf of California; and the seeming bliss of cool sheets against my back as I healed; you will know my joy and my peace when the pain had finally passed, and indeed my relative pleasure in all but a few moments of my life. Most parts of most of us rarely suffer, but we do not bother to recognize absence of suffering as a significant benefit. But in the end, the absence of suffering might resonate in our shared experience most resoundingly, for our suffering is fleeting even as joy endures eternal.

Most particularly, we may share the joy of knowing how much better we spent most of our lives feeling than could have been the case!!

Thoughts on Aurora

I am certain I speak for Pandeists everywhere in offering our heartbroken condolences for the victims of the Aurora shootings -- those injured by the gunman's bullets, those who escaped physical injury but experienced the trauma of being there during this horrid event, and those who lost loved ones this day.  The perspective of Pandeism may do little to salve such pain, but know that Pandeists believe that we are all simply fragments of our Creator, existing so that our Creator could share in the awesome variety of experiences attending existence as our Universe, though it could not have known before such Creation the depths of pain which life in such a Universe could experience.

But, in the end, Pandeists believe, all things return to one, and all lives share in oneness with our Creator, there for those whose lives brought joy and happiness to others to experience this joy and happiness just as it was received by others; and for those who bring anguish and suffering to other to equally experience this anguish and suffering as it was received by others.


Let us walk from this experience holding in our hearts the possibility that those who have suffered so undeservedly will experience an ultimate reward of sharing in lifetimes of positive experiences; and that, for the anguish and suffering brought into the world on this day, all men work together to create an overwhelming response of joyful and positive experience for all the world to share in.

And some additional observations....



Let us not join in the blame game instantly, if inevitably, sprung up over this sorrowful event. Rick Warren, who pastors one of the nation's leading mega-churches, tweeted on the shooting: "When students are taught they are no different from animals, they act like it." He fairly quickly deleted that tweet, once controversy sprouted. In the same vein, US Congressman Louis Gohmert commented that people have asked where God was on that day, and concluded that God didn't intervene to prevent these killings because secularists have banned God from high school graduation ceremonies and the like.

At the other end of the theological spectrum, Atheists have reacted with equally broad pronouncements, pointing to the Christian upbringing of the shooter (and that faith being shared by most of the victims) and contending that it is the violence of theistic scriptures which leads to such acts. Across the spectrum of politics as well blame has been aimed, against lax gun laws, movie and video game violence, lax policies allowing someone like this gunman to be admitted to a graduate program, and most everything else one can think of.

And the bottom line, the truth of the matter, is this. Some people are off-balance. It's not because of religion or politics or policies. It's simply the occasionally hampered workings of nature. If it were a product of religion or lack thereof, there'd be more of it, or it would correlate with the religiosity of nations. And sometimes, no matter what rigor is put into checking the mental health of people in whatever situation, whatever restrictions are put on access to weaponry, some tiny portion of people are born with an ingrained snapping point, whereupon they will find a way to wreak some degree of havoc. Such people are like a force of nature, like a tornado. And blaming religion or politics for people tipping past the fold is no sounder a thing to do than to point fingers of blame for the happening of the weather.