No, annihilation would. You know what’s worse than an earthly fascism? An eternal one. I don’t like life, I’m not too thrilled with my loving father in the sky for giving me a life that would bring much more pain, disappointment and heartbreak than fulfillement, excitement and joy, …
**The Less Abstract Reply: **Not having experienced your own life, it is hard to comment on the particular things you say without simply sounding like one of those happy, smiling people who tells the innocent man with the noose around his neck to count his blessings.
But the problem with sounding like one of those people is not that they are wrong, but that they’re annoying. The innocent man may be having his half of his life removed for no good reason, but he was also given the first half of his life for no good reason. We might argue that this man doesn’t deserve to die. And that’s true. But he didn’t deserve to live either. We did not merit and cannot merit our existence. And yet he did live. While natural, it is perverse, in some way, to let what we lose taint what we gained.
It is rather like the experience of reading a good book, only to find out that the last few pages are missing. This would annoy us,
but only because we have come to expect our books to be complete. The annoyance would be real, but nevertheless the book did not come from us and so we cannot honestly say that we have a right to those few missing pages.
Now, I might say that had I known the book was incomplete, I would never have started it. But I only care that there was no ending because I was enjoying the book until it turned out that it was incomplete. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t care. If I did not see it as a worthwhile experience that was missing some key elements, but instead thought it was a complete waste of time, then it wouldn’t matter to me that it was incomplete.
So if the book is such that I cared that it is not finished, a) then what was there must have been good, and b) I am comparing it to something that I cannot say that I have earned.
The annoyance comes from b. The fact that I can look around and see all of these other books, all these other lives, that to me appear to be complete and good, and I can see what they have and I don’t, and I can wish I had it. There is some real annoyance there, and it is mostly unavoidable, but there is no real rational reason to dwell on it.
Rather, we can dwell on part a. The very life we have is good, imperfect though it may be, and incomplete though it certainly is.
And yeah. Those people are annoying. It is said that life sucks, and then you die. And this is, to some extent, true. Life does suck in many ways. But you ask: why is it good to be pulled onto God’s playground where everything He does is good by definition? And the answer is because that is the only good there is. All playgrounds are God’s. You get what ever good you can get there, even if it’s not as much as you like, or you get no good at all. Not because God says it’s my way or the highway, but because there is no highway. You’ve been asking for one, sort of, but that is asking God to make something that wasn’t made by God. It is logically impossible to attain good that does not come from God. The closest thing possible to the highway is to be as completely separated from God as possible, and that is Hell.
The problem here is that you are still conceiving of God as the giant sky fairy that some atheists like to make fun of. Atheists make fun of the sky fairy for good reason - the sky fairy is arbitrary and crude and doesn’t actually even exist. But that is not what God is.
You say that I can have such a high and good opinion of God if I want, but you miss the contradiction in what you are implying. What is good, is God. This is a more fundamental truth than anything else we have said. If you have a legitimately bad opinion of God, then the God you imagine does not exist. God cannot be bad. He cannot be unfair, and he cannot be unjust.
The gist of your complaints so far have been essentially that you think you’ve been screwed over since birth, that there’s nothing you can do about it, and that you’re probably going to hell, and that that’s unfair. Chances are things aren’t as hopeless as you think they are (and even if they are, it’s always best to act as though they are not - because acting as though things are hopeless makes a self-fulfilling prophecy).
But if you’ve been putting how you’ve been made to the best use that you can - even if that best appears infinitely worse than the best that some other people that you imagine exist supposedly achieved - then you’re good. The servant who is handed 3 talents and produces 3 more is good, the guy given 2 who makes 2 is good, and if the guy who had been given one single lousy talent had produced a single lousy talent, then he’d have been good as well.
But he didn’t. The reason - and the only reason - why he had problems is because he was afraid that he would be unable to do what was expected of him, so he buried his head in the sand and gave up, then complained that his master was unfair.
So don’t do that. You seem to think that you have been given less than a talent to work with. I think you probably have more than you realize, but stop comparing yourself to some idealized perfect Christian that probably doesn’t exist, stop complaining about what you don’t have, and stop blaming God for not giving you things that He is under no obligation to give anyone. Rather, take what you have, do what you can, and know that God will judge you fairly. He has no choice. If He could be arbitrary and blame you for things outside of your control, then He wouldn’t be God.
But thankfully, he is good, so no need to torture myself with these questions (sigh of relief). It’s tragic that God willed that I would be snatched from nonexistence knowing full well I would not do well in either life (this one and the next). What’s not to be liked about God? But enough with wishful thinking, I’m the unwilling inhabitant of God’s territory, he is the boss, I can do nothing but say, “Yes, kind master”.
