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I was bored with my Tumblr account and I needed a change… I still love all you guys.

People always say, “If G-d was benevolent, he would have created a world without pain. But the world we have is full of pain. Ergo, G-d is not a benevolent god, if He exists.”

I think this is based on a huge assumption: that pain is a bad thing.

First, I can echo C.S. Lewis by saying that pain and pleasure aren’t really all that far apart. There are a lot of things that feel good that really, when you think about it, hurt (sex being the obvious one). Eating a sour candy or ketchup-flavoured potato chips hurts. Sinking into a really hot, hot bath hurts. An aching in your muscles as you slip into bed after a day of walking hurts. And so on.

There are people in the world who don’t feel pain. We call them lepers. Leprosy attacks your body’s ability to feel pain. If you have leprosy you could easily burn your hand off on a stovetop burner, scrub your skin through to the flesh with a washcloth, or kick something hard enough to shatter your toes. In a weird way, I think the existence of lepers, people who can’t feel pain, is a stronger argument against G-d’s benevolence!

Pain has been encoded into you by billions of years of evolution. It’s vital. It lets you know when you’re fucked up. It lets you know what you should and should not, can and cannot, do. In short, it lets you know you’re alive.

I think that pain is a gift from G-d. And yeah, there are many examples of gratuitous suffering in the world, and I, like many religious people, have to resign them to that huge X-Files cabinet of mysterious ways in which He allegedly works. But me, right now, I can take my pain, my anger, my sorrow, whenever I have these things, and choose to see them as a communication from G-d.

apocalypticmeasures:

danceswithfaeriesunderthemoon:

Exactly.

People always seem to forget that Jews weren’t the only ones.

“Jews had white privilege during the Holocaust.”

Oh, okay.

Goodbye, SJ! I am done with you, Critical Race Theory!

Fucking hell.

I don’t think anyone forgets about the other people who died in the Holocaust. There were 11 million victims. 6 million of those were Jews. The other 5 million, and I admit that I’m not sure how the breakdown goes within that 5 million, were LGBTQ, Roma, socialists and communists, activists (often Catholic clergy), people with disabilities of all stripes (predominantly Down’s and MR), welfare moms, and, of course, people of just about any race that wasn’t “Aryan,” including black people.

(I have to say that I distrust the term people of colour and its acronym POC because it doesn’t really say much about the group it describes. I’m white. Well, actually, I’m not, I’m more pink than anything. But that’s my point: I am, technically, a POC. We are all people of colour. Which is absurd. It’s the same with “African-American,” which lumps together all dark-skinned people based on the fact that they share a continent, which might not even be the case, because sometimes Melanesians and similar people get lumped in there, too.

As my mom said watching a fashion show once, “If you’d say ‘people of colour,’ you’re dangerously close to ‘coloured people.’”)

The reason the Holocaust is a Jewish tragedy first and foremost for two practical reasons:
a) More than half of the victims were Jewish.
b) Those victims constituted more than half of the contemporary Jewish world population. Hell, they ALMOST constitute more than half of the current Jewish world population…

The Nazis destroyed a 2,000-year-old culture of Torah study in Europe overnight. What’s more, they were actively seeking to expunge Jews and Jewishness from the earth.

(Source: super1eklectic, via tributary)