Very, VERY rare to witness men—especially wealthy white men—talk so openly about grief and suffering. Have long appreciated this moving aspect of who @stephencolbert.bsky.social is. 🖤🖤
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Ooof... some tough, poignant words by Stephen Colbert there. In my case, I had to suffer the loss of my dad very suddenly of suicide to understand how much it hurts to lose someone. My head has not worked through all of it and it's almost 40 years ago. That loss changed me forever.
Did you really need the “wealthy white man”? He’s a man talking opening about grief and opened the discussion up to EVERYONE no labels on Anderson’s part.
nah, disagree. you don't need to suffer to empathize or love other ppl. all you needed was to be loved so if you love others you will hate and empathize bad things happening to them. this is fundamentalist indoctrination. literally why the Devil was created. blame someone else instead of elites Fn u
just to add, i love Stephen Colbert. i have accepted his religiosity. not many do i do that for. i just take issue with the acceptance of cruelty to humanity. we all go through shit we shouldn't be. also F Anderson Cooper. he's a pos centrist elitist who has no idea about shit. peace.
How revealing to say one doesn't need to suffer to empathize (maybe you're thinking *sym*pathize) and then immediately follow that with trashing a total stranger. Well done! 🤣
Andersen Cooper isn't a stranger. he has long list of neolib transgressions and is part of the reason guys like Trump got elected. CNN is a joke of a news network. also nobody needs to suffer. 99.99% of suffering can be attributed to someone doing something wrong. doesn't have to happen at all. smh
are lots of ppl who have never suffered are you joking? lol. think Paris Hilton has suffered? smh. also, no, i don't define AC's existence just by Trump's election, i also include his decades of selfishness protecting rich class interests. he was born a Vanderbilt, he didn't have to stay one. smh
Truly is a fact. I lost my daughter at 16, because of that, I am more willing to address a friend in their grief. Not with “me too”, loss is unique. However, taking time to listen, knowing your words won’t “remind” them. They haven’t forgotten. It’s fine. Say the lost ones name.
Early parent loss is a life long challenging path. Sadly many of us have experienced it. I appreciated the honesty Stephen and Anderson brought to this difficult conversation.
This is a beautiful video of two good men having a fine conversation. You bringing race into it is stupid and pointless. If it is “very VERY rare” for you to encounter white men having deep discussions, wealthy or otherwise, maybe you should go make some white friends. 👎🏽
"I've never seen an X person talk about Y.
Its so rare to see A ppl talking about B and C.
Whoa, check out this vid of this (ideology/identity I never interact with) talking about (insert literally any aspect of the human experience), this never happens!"
Y’all have issues.
Always loved Stephen, but…
Colbert: “To be grateful for your life… you must be grateful for the suffering as well.”
Most Catholic thing ever! Does this mean pedophile priests make kids grateful to be alive? Theology makes my head suffer.
I don’t really see what relevance that has to my point. I’m not arguing that people shouldn’t help each other or be afraid to ask for help. Im simply saying that if a man chooses to keep his feelings private, it doesn’t make him less of a man. Nor does sharing them make him more of one.
Your point misses what one of the goal was for the podcast. For decades, men who were open about their feelings were in fact seen as lesser. It needs to be accepted that, sure, it doesn’t make you more of a man to be open with your feelings, but it also doesn’t make you lesser.
Which if you read back, has been my point all along. Strength comes in many forms and many types of people. But “real men share their feelings”, is as damaging as a concept as “big boys don’t cry”. How I deal with grief is personnel and in my case, private. For others, sharing helps. All good.
If that’s what makes the world a brighter place, more power to you. I’m just arguing that showing emotion, or not, isn’t the the measure of a “real man”. It doesn’t mean a “man” is hiding from his emotions, simply that they prefer to be private while dealing with them.
There’s a lot of shame there, though, isn’t there? That you can’t have raw emotions in front of other people because it isn’t manly—that’s what experiencing emotions in private is rooted in. Can’t let people see the fullness of who you are. Can’t be vulnerable and be comforted in public.
No, thats exactly the opposite of what I’m saying. Making my emotions public has nothing to do with weakness or strength. It has to do with wanting to known myself and how I feel without all the noise and baggage that other people would bring with them.
We cry at birth, in pain, in happiness, joy, and in loss! Religion takes advantage of these emotions and makes think if you give money at church you will be rewarded at death with no pain! Don’t push emotions away, feel everything! Evolved as a human!
Grief comes in all shapes and sizes. Not a 1 fits all situation. Life is how we choose to deal with all situations and in the end there is no do over. All that is left is what good you chose to pass along.
Suffering is not a gift. That’s straight from Colbert catholic indoctrination. That BS should have been snuffed out decades ago.
These two have suffered loss true. But suffering comes in different forms, some so bad it is hard to imagine.
Suffering is something narcissists like the regime
inflict on us. Some suffering befalls us through absolutely no fault of our own and yet because of the religious poison this nation drinks, it is baggage people carry and struggle a lifetime to put down. No magic deity is going to save you or me. You might as well pray to your blanket for all the
good it will do. Religion is a business that will find a reason to bring in the money and find fault at the same time. I feel for all the poor souls spending a lifetime in therapy to undo the child abuse they suffered at the hands of religion and its followers.
Absolutely two extraordinary people. When Anderson’s voice cracks 🙁 😣
But Steven no. No, no, much as I appreciate you trying to make sense of suffering, no. I will never ever be grateful that my mother died when I was 10yrs old.
My father recently died, too. I am not grateful that he died. I am broken by it.
But I am grateful that, in the future, I will now always know what other people who've gone through this are feeling. I can love another human all the more.
I think there's space for both of those things inside me.
Just popping on here to send you a 💔. That fact is the kind of fact you could hate every day for the rest of your days and it probably still wouldn’t capture how not okay it was that it happened.
Thank you.
This week we are attending a memorial service for a month old baby. I am truly struggling. How to express support without falling apart (& making it all about me)?
No good can come of telling people how to process their grief, so I think I’m going to make them some cakes
You just listen. You ask if there's anything you can do. You be a physical presence, and that's all. That's all anyone wants in those situations. To know other people are there if they DO want to talk about it, or make sandwiches, or help with arranging things, you know?
It’s been a lifetime of learning. After my mother died in 1966, and I was 10, I was told she was dead and it was never spoken of again.
We should never presume to explain anything to anyone about loss unless they specifically ask for it
Oh man. Words cannot express how awful that is.
I think we all desperately want to make it better for the person, except we really can’t. I think there is no better way to show up for someone than to be like, “nothing will ever make this okay. I can’t give you your person back, (1/2)
so instead I will sit here with you and bring you X thing.” Just being with someone and acknowledging how much it will never be okay means a lot. (I lost my mom two years ago when I was 34, and this is what I noticed about what helped me.)
I find it is helpful to tell people you have no words. You wish you could carry some of their grief even if just for a day to give them rest. Being there means a lot. Being there for them next week and in the next weeks when others have stopped will mean the most. It’s not the words that matter.
Lovely, reasoned empathy. Everyone needs to find their way to navigate grief however best they can, but it's interesting how this view seems similar to secular humanism and finding meaning in the shared human experience of mortality.
If you have not learned about grief and suffering from carefully and caringly observing and supporting others BEFORE the worst grief hits you, then that grief is not a gift, it's just an indication that you missed a step in becoming adult.
OMG. Both my grandmother and I had a crush on Stephen Colbert. She liked his dark hair. And I think we both liked his clean cut looks with his progressive attitude.
So conflicted; I 💙 Colbert but am a staunch agnostic. I think his views here are waaaaaay off. If he believes in a supreme being of infinite power & love than the fact it created suffering for us would make that being an asshole w/o creativity. You created everything & left suffering *in*? Puhlease…
Grateful for life? Dude I've hated walking this planet for the last 3000 days this is not a gift this is a fucking curse and you'll be lucky to make it to 40,000 days of miserable existence
Damn, there's a whole variety of reactions to this, isn't there? I'm an atheist and I've thought and felt this way for decades, but never expressed it quite as well as Stephen did there. I hadn't even *considered* it coming from a religious standpoint. I'm suddenly wishing I could talk to everyone..
here in an informal way, having a long and philosophical discussion about it. I think it's one of the most important topics we can talk to each other about, and I think it's a cornerstone of what it means to be human. There's so many here saying "get out of here with that Catholic nonsense" and...
while I'm not the least bit religious, I can absolutely see that point of view, and how it comes from the toxified twist on what Stephen is expressing that religion has used to convince people to accept their situations as divine or sublime or beautiful in their wretchedness. Which is, yeah, bull.
I don't think everyone could agree with his 'be grateful for your suffering', but I do hope people agree that going through pain and suffering absolutely does deepen your empathy. Incontrovertably. Or - it can leave you decimated and broken. That happens, too.
The only people I've ever met in my many decades that are truly, deeply empathetic, have Gone Through It in some manner. I know plenty who are perfectly nice, sympathetic, helpful, generous, loving, selfless, who've not experienced an undue amount of suffering in their life. You can be a good person
without suffering through trauma, of course. But no one who hasn't first-hand experienced grief and loss and really taken it to heart, can truly empathize with someone who has, can they? How could they? It would be like trying to say you know what it means to be in love before you've ever felt it.
He's a good guy for a Christian, but people who say 'Suffering is good for the soul' tend to be the ones trying to sanctify inflicting it. I get his point, from a different religion's perspective, though. I also say it's an ill thing to teach that hurting is 'divine punishment' too. That's toxic.
I have a hard time seeing even a sliver of goodness (or god) when hearing, witnessing or even experiencing a needless and pointless suffering of the innocents, especially children. Why and how is that allowed to exist.
Job said something similar in the book of Job as his life fell apart around him. He sat in misery with thanksgiving as his finances were decimated children killed and mental well being shrinking.
He’s a lovely person. I respect his POV, but some people may not want to love deeply by suffering terribly. I’m thinking especially of the suffering happening in Palestine every moment of every day. Does ‘God’ give them a choice?
I always say that the pain we feel when we mourn is the price we pay for having loved something. In most cases, it was worth that cost to have experienced the love.
Except in abuse; but that wasn’t really love. It was a baited trap.
Problem is, I am NOT grateful I exist, I never asked to be here, don't wanna be here, and not impressed with a God who would visit such suffering and pain upon those whom he created.
well, that is a western perspective on the essence of Buddhism, a dualistic switch where it must be either this or that. Buddhism embraces a paradox, western culture is very uncomfortable with this.
The desire for existence is suffering, the desire for non-existence is suffering.
The Catholics would say be in the world and not of it. It is a similar form of non-attachment to worldliness. That's how the Catholic church got a hold of so much gold. Folks giving up worldly things. Especially, things they got from other worldly people.
After my mom passed last year, I listened to every episode of Anderson Cooper’s podcast about grief. It was very good and really helped me realize it is something we all experience but are usually forced to do in secret.
His father died when he was still a child, his brother committed suicide when they were both in their 20s, and his mother died at 90-something several years back, leaving him all alone to suffer in his grief for everyone in his family and forcing him to finally realize he had buried his pain forever
I really need to do this. I have been putting this off after my dad died in 2023 because it is so hard. And I just know it will help me despite being hard. It is just still hard facing the grief and loss. He was such a life force. Thanks for sharing.
Same.
Have lost my long term partner FAR FAR too young, and my only parent.
My long term partner’s daughter has been trying to get me to listen to this podcast for a some time.
Maybe I saw this because now is the time.
I’m so sorry. I do recommend it. I also forced myself way out of my comfort zone and was in a 6 week shared grief therapy group. I dreaded going every week, yet sharing my story, listening to the others, it was cathartic and ultimately very helpful. Good luck. ❤️
I love the podcast too. Both of my parents are gone (dad over 35 years, mom 6 years) and there’s something so therapeutic about it. Look forward to season 4…think he confirmed it would happen.
Yes, I think I read awhile back he is planning another season. I’m sorry for your losses. I actually lost both parents in 2024, and am all grieved out most days. 💔
I became an orphan at 26 when I lost my mom. My father was still alive but a waste oxygen. An evil man who destroyed my and my sisters childhoods. My poor mom had to die to actually physically escape him. Some people do the world a favor when they leave it. He was a prime example of that true fact.
He's been doing this and writing about this for some time now. It obviously affected him throughout his life and after becoming a father himself looked further into it. Dealing with grief is different for everyone, helpful to share how he is dealing with it.
Hard to have sympathy though, compared it to suffering of Garcia & Venezuelans & foreign students/professors /tourists , & those who have been sacked & poss., blacklisted: those in planes that crashed; those living in fear for their welfare cheques/pensions, Gazans & those dying for want of USAID.
Wow! I was born with almost zero empathy and this candid admission, this openness about grief and it’s acknowledgment in such positive terms still floors me. But my heartlessness still only lets me watch a performance. How cold I am. Sadly.
You blame God for this? Blame people. Elon musk alone has enough money to relieve all of the poverty in the world but does he… no. He just hoards it all.
I don't blame God for this. I'm an atheist. But it's obscene for believers to imply that suffering is a gift. Elon could eliminate it, but he didn't cause it. And if you want to argue that wars and famines are caused by people, I find it horrifying that you worship a god that lets children suffer.
I've shared this video a few times with family, friends, and on social media as IMO the most crucial video on all of youtube. The compassion and wisdom that Colbert expresses to Cooper here after the death of his mother, is simply beautiful. A lesson for us all.
As much as I want to understand it, loosing my husband of 43 years, from a freak accident, hasn’t made me grateful. It’s been a year and I am still so angry and lonely.
Stephen's dad and brother were killed on the same plane crash that I lost my cousin, his wife and their 2 babies (under 2 yrs old). Losing them was bad, but the plane crashed because no instruments were available on the plane to help with bad weather and seeing a runway.
Thank you, because of that crash, your plane seats were changed to be non-flammable. The majority of passengers lived, and were found piled up in front of the doors trying to get out, but we're suffocated from the seats burning.
Thank you. To this day, the remains we received have never been positively identified. Now with DNA, we could be positive, but back then, no. My memory blocks out a lot, but I think it was 1969, 1970. There was another plane crash the same day, so this one did not get a lot of attention.
I do not believe in god and suffering is a function of social institutions and government policy. We don't have to have unhoused or hungry people or poverty. That's a fucking policy choice.
I don’t know who the “they” you are referring to but plenty of Christians from Christianity’s inception to present day love to inflict human suffering under the guise of “God’s love.” The Trump administration is full of them.
It's like an abuser telling his or her spouse "You should be grateful for me inflicting this pain on you b/c I'm helping you become a better person as a result."
Suffering isn’t a concept unique to governments or the Christian god. suffering exists because of duality & its evident throughout nature— where there is no government or religion. They are discussing the human experience, not everything is a LibPost lmao
His father and two of his brothers were killed in a plane crash when he was ten years old. Being ten and knowing your dad and the two siblings closest in age to you died by burning to death seems like it would cause some suffering.
How do you know? Can you imagine yourself saying something like this in person? Jesus. Maybe rich white men aren't the only ones lacking empathy these days.
Everyone has tear ducts, & everyone has them for the same reasons.
The greatest cause of physical illness, personal dysfunction, & societal dysfunction is the widespread refusal to engage with all of our feelings. We have feelings, even the painful ones, for a reason! Denying them causes mssv harm.
Its more his thought slavery, his refusal tovstep out of the abusive indoctrination he received to think critically about the evil of a god who gifts pain, misery and expected- demands- thanks and praise on pain of eternal torture. Colbert loses 50 IQ points when he speaks on his faith.
I was caught in a disillusioned state of existence being incarcerated. Later realizing that my spirit was gradually breaking. So my soul ruptured one day unexpectedly realizing later that I grieved the loss of my past.
I don't believe there's a god out there, and if there was, he's kind of a prick, however, I do think it's incredibly important for people, especially men, especially white men, to open up to each other about our pain and grief. If you can't do that with anyone, get a therapist. It helps.
My kiddo was born ten weeks early, and spent three months in the NICU. The trauma and grief from that, even though she made it and she's perfectly fine now, is something that I think would have killed me had I not talked to a therapist for many months.
This open discussion of pain and loss is beautiful.
The logic falls apart if explored to any extent.
That you see a close one go through something painful and horrific is not a gift, that you suffer yourself is not a gift.
It is pain and suffering.
Presenting it as anything else is delusional.
For me the logic falls apart as the same reasoning could be applied to a murder.
The gift is the ability to relate to the families that have also suffered loss due to murder.
To set that gift as any sort of equivalence to the actual events makes no sense at all.
From my point of view, and yes, all are free to hold their own delusions (I have many): this is an example of a hunt for complexity in the face of an uncomfortable simplicity.
We are all free to carry out personal delusions.
In this conversation a general case is made, in the context of personal loss, that: bad things are a gift, the gift of understanding others.
From perspective this suffers under simple review where complexity is being sought and simplicity ignored.
no, stephen is telling anderson how HE dealt w/ HIS losses & what HE gained. HIS individual perspective which is even more obvious if you'd watched the entire interview when it originally aired.
you're assuming & projecting. not everything said or thought needs to apply to every1 or even any1.
What I see here is someone who has suffered something personally terrible, but absolutely normal.
And in trying to work that out they have imposed "this must have meaning" on a consistent and standard event for all life.
And they have seen the face of Elvis in the burn marks on their toast.
A son or daughter is murdered.
There is no gift that can possibly be spoken of as an overall equivalence to this event.
No gift exists that can compare.
A husband has dementia. A wife has cancer. She has to manage her husband while going through chemo.
She then dies, or he does.
There is no gift in this.
But the logic he uses is fragile at best, and smug in the face of specific reality.
All animals live and die.
That they die is not a gift.
For me, he is imposing complexity to try and smooth and uncomfortable & simple reality.
I watched it all. And I understand it is a personal position, one that he is using to try and smooth Anderson's situation. He is saying " This is how I see it, if you see it this way it might help your current pain."
This is not a bad thing.
Talking openly about it is great.
Life is a roller coaster of trials & tribulations full of ups & downs. For those of us who have been blessed with two loving parents who nurtured us & taught us right from wrong, we have received the ultimate gift. As someone who learned empathy at a young age, it is a great gift to obtain. 🙏✝️❤️
Colbert lost his father and two brothers in a plane crash when he was 10, which has a lot to do with this; he was forced at a young age to handle these feelings.
“Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn”. What I see here is two friends acknowledging the reality of grief and suffering. Recognizing that it is a natural part of the human experience. No one should go through grief alone. Shared sorrow is essential to the healing process 💕🙏
We can be an accident of evolution and Colbert's point *still* stands because whether you call it "god" or "universal connection" or "the interconnectedness of human kind", his philosophy applies all the same. So there's that
Thank you for sharing this clip. I hadn’t seen it. Not gonna lie, I cried a little. What makes these 2 men real men is their ability to be vulnerable and show their compassion and empathy to the world. This is the antithesis of the toxic masculinity that is revered by the right and authoritarians.
Wise words from a wise man. Just wish I could have seen it without having to look at that Quisling Cooper. I’ll never forget, never forgive, and definitely never feel grateful for all the oxygen he gave to MAGA henchmen in the run-up to the 2016 election.
This is what I told my mentor 4 years ago as I knew I was entering a dark time in my life. I told him I knew once I emerged, whenever that might be, I’d be able to recognize/understand/empathize/help loved ones if they happened to go through similar.
that video is really good, yeah. 20 minutes long. I wouldnt consider me christian but religion per se interests me as a social and historical phenomenon.
I like to understand why people believe and found their interacion tobe very valuable and caring
I am so in love with @stephencolbert.bsky.social always have been since my discovery in strangers, and always will be! You’re a treasure and thank you for being an amazing human 🫶🏾
'Grateful for suffering' is how the Catholic Church has been bamboozling the world for 2000+ yrs. Jesuits were most prolific at getting this messaging across.
"Jesus Christ suffered willingly for your salvation."
A very long time ago,the story of Jesus's suffering became a tool used to bamboozle the masses into accepting a lifetime of suffering by those inflicting the suffering.
This has zipetty doo daa to do w accepting or not accepting JC as L & S.
You have no idea what I believe w regards JCs purpose bc I never said. Like most apostolates,you assume too much.I stated JC's suffering has been used as a tool to inflict suffering. Ex.,Christianity was used to justify colonisation & peoples were converted to Christianity to accept enslavement.
A very interesting conversation, even if I don't agree. You can absolutely pick and choose what you're grateful for, and to me, you don't have to be grateful for a dead child or a tumor even if there are positive things that happen in the future because of that. But it's all relative of course.
The Colbert/Cooper conversation on grief was incredibly powerful for that very reason... they showed a vulnerability we don't usually see in men of their racial & economic demographic.
In recent years i’ve come to believe that what we call depression or anxiety is, or often can be, grief. I like these guys, too, for bringing this into our “conversation.”
I'm honestly conflicted about this. I lost my dad when I was young. It was senseless and unpredicted, and it ruined my childhood as well as my faith & spirituality. Maybe losing him did teach me compassion and empathy in the long run — but it doesn't mean I'm forgiving God for taking him away.
Only issue is, there’s no good reasons for god belief. 🤷🏻♂️ as soon as someone can demonstrate the truth of their beliefs, there’s a Nobel prize waiting for you. Faith is not a reliable pathway to truth, for any position can be taken upon faith. Think, and think critically, it’s humanity’s only hope.
Comments
They believe any harm they do they can balance it out and their underlings agreed to this arrangement cuz they are the ones benefiting
and suffering!
It's not a label, to note someone's race and SES.
So the entirety of AC's existence is whatever role you feel he played in Trump's election. Fascinating.
"I've never seen an X person talk about Y.
Its so rare to see A ppl talking about B and C.
Whoa, check out this vid of this (ideology/identity I never interact with) talking about (insert literally any aspect of the human experience), this never happens!"
Y’all have issues.
https://youtu.be/wQTbkEeCTeM
Colbert: “To be grateful for your life… you must be grateful for the suffering as well.”
Most Catholic thing ever! Does this mean pedophile priests make kids grateful to be alive? Theology makes my head suffer.
As for shame, not a single bit.
💙💙
But this love of suffering?!
This sounds like Stockholm syndrome.
#ReligionIsMalwareForTheBrain
But Colbert is a practicing Catholic and his preaching would be easily at home in my parish.
Smart and witty.
These two have suffered loss true. But suffering comes in different forms, some so bad it is hard to imagine.
Suffering is something narcissists like the regime
You are a special human.
Hugs
he deluded people into thinking it was all NORMAL
COLBERT _ COOPER _ TAPPER GO FUCK YOURSELVES!!
STILL HAVE JOBS?????
WHITE MEN ON LATE NIGHT ONLY...tell us what to think!
But Steven no. No, no, much as I appreciate you trying to make sense of suffering, no. I will never ever be grateful that my mother died when I was 10yrs old.
My dad died suddenly when I was 11.
But I am grateful that, in the future, I will now always know what other people who've gone through this are feeling. I can love another human all the more.
I think there's space for both of those things inside me.
This week we are attending a memorial service for a month old baby. I am truly struggling. How to express support without falling apart (& making it all about me)?
No good can come of telling people how to process their grief, so I think I’m going to make them some cakes
We should never presume to explain anything to anyone about loss unless they specifically ask for it
I think we all desperately want to make it better for the person, except we really can’t. I think there is no better way to show up for someone than to be like, “nothing will ever make this okay. I can’t give you your person back, (1/2)
"Life alone, it is the prize"
-Billy Strings, "Freedom"
https://youtu.be/_S96DnFi6Mg?si=a3CKipiaGxFNhH_W
https://www.christianpost.com/news/stephen-colbert-talks-about-his-favorite-old-testament-figures.html
Except in abuse; but that wasn’t really love. It was a baited trap.
I know that Stephen Colbert is a Catholic.
But that is the essence of Buddhism.
I think we're just expressing what it is like to exist and deal with suffering. In whatever context we believe.
The desire for existence is suffering, the desire for non-existence is suffering.
Probably talking about it helps.
Have lost my long term partner FAR FAR too young, and my only parent.
My long term partner’s daughter has been trying to get me to listen to this podcast for a some time.
Maybe I saw this because now is the time.
💙💔💙
men emote, is a gift.
Thank you 🥰
You are right, most suffering never had to happen
It's not wisdom to accept it and say you gained empathy, is being a sucker to not see how they do it all, the elites, to control
I don’t know who the “they” you are referring to but plenty of Christians from Christianity’s inception to present day love to inflict human suffering under the guise of “God’s love.” The Trump administration is full of them.
Nah...fuck that.
It's easy to be grateful when you haven't suffered very much at all
kinda like some abused grow up to be abusers, not change the cycle.
The greatest cause of physical illness, personal dysfunction, & societal dysfunction is the widespread refusal to engage with all of our feelings. We have feelings, even the painful ones, for a reason! Denying them causes mssv harm.
But some experience hellish devastating things in their lives - starvation, horrific abuse, agonizing disease, etc.
Is it rational - or at all empathetic - to suggest these people should be overall grateful for everything?
Thank you.
The logic falls apart if explored to any extent.
That you see a close one go through something painful and horrific is not a gift, that you suffer yourself is not a gift.
It is pain and suffering.
Presenting it as anything else is delusional.
The gift is the ability to relate to the families that have also suffered loss due to murder.
To set that gift as any sort of equivalence to the actual events makes no sense at all.
In this conversation a general case is made, in the context of personal loss, that: bad things are a gift, the gift of understanding others.
From perspective this suffers under simple review where complexity is being sought and simplicity ignored.
you're assuming & projecting. not everything said or thought needs to apply to every1 or even any1.
And in trying to work that out they have imposed "this must have meaning" on a consistent and standard event for all life.
And they have seen the face of Elvis in the burn marks on their toast.
The logic delusional.
There is no gift that can possibly be spoken of as an overall equivalence to this event.
No gift exists that can compare.
She then dies, or he does.
There is no gift in this.
All animals live and die.
That they die is not a gift.
For me, he is imposing complexity to try and smooth and uncomfortable & simple reality.
This is not a bad thing.
Talking openly about it is great.
Every female baby is born with about 400k eggs and males produce a gazillion sperm over their lifetime.
So for you to be here and have a life is astounding.
And you should cherish your own life. To waste it is a waste.
Correct he said.
I like to understand why people believe and found their interacion tobe very valuable and caring
Put everything in one basket. Do you want the basket? Yes or no?
That’s not how any of this works.
Have you even seen a life?
Jesus Christ suffered willingly for your salvation.
He is not only grateful to have had the opportunity to do so, but it continues to bring Him joy and glory to have done it.
A very long time ago,the story of Jesus's suffering became a tool used to bamboozle the masses into accepting a lifetime of suffering by those inflicting the suffering.
This has zipetty doo daa to do w accepting or not accepting JC as L & S.
What you challenge/disbelieve is the purpose of His birth, life, suffering, and death.
But, the message of their purpose hasn't changed.
You just don't believe. That's your right.
Granted, people have abused the truth about Jesus from the beginning. They will answer for it.
But, don't deny the fact of your own words and their meaning.
"Thank you for this life".
He died painfully from cancer, holding on just long enough for all of us to come and say goodbye. I held his hand when he died.
And I miss him terribly.
It is...a gift.