"everything happens for a reason"

[marnanel]

Please, stop telling people that everything happens for a reason. It defies experience. It's pastorally insensitive. Most importantly, it can't possibly be true-- at least within human experience.

Let's assume that this is in fact a just universe. Every good act is eventually rewarded; every bad act is eventually punished. There's a happy ending. But a happy ending is a description of a well-structured story. If you sliced the series of events any other way, you'd have at best an unhappy ending, and at worst just a list.

If we stop reading Cinderella before the end, it's not a happy ending: Cinderella is still crying in the kitchen, or she's lost contact with the prince. If we keep going after the end, it's not a happy ending: life goes on, Cinderella gets cancer, the prince gets Alzheimers, whatever. So also with the universe: humans never see the story except in slices. And the fact that the whole story of time is about justice doesn't mean that there'll be any sign of justice in any particular slice of it.

Comments

[boutell.livejournal.com]

Word. It's unfathomably asinine. I came across this question on a dating site recently. People I am otherwise compatible with click "yes, everything happens for a reason." Hurricanes kill teenagers for a reason? F*** you, mouthers of comfortable banalities.

[boutell.livejournal.com]

I suppose some of those people are very, very literal-minded and are thinking "well yes of course, cause and effect blah blah blah, there was a low pressure area..."

[marnanel]

I blame that butterfly myself. Bastard insect.

[treeowl]

Aye, and the ultimate ending will be horrible, whether big freeze, big rip, or whatever, long after the Sun and all known life are dead.