Stefankeys

Nietzschean Theodicy

A thought occurred to me. What if human suffering rather than a punishment was a gift from the gods. Presumably if there are such beings as gods they would be perfect, without flaws, and so have no room for growth, invention, or discovery. This would be extremely boring, and even if they might not feel any boredom as perfectly happy beings, they would know that it is a boring state of affairs they inhabit as perfectly rational beings. There are various solutions to this, for example they could temporarily erase their memories and reincarnate as humans. They could simply refuse to know some things like a student who refuses to look up the solutions at the back of a maths textbook until they figure out the answer by himself. This doesn't necessarily mean that they would cease to be gods, for they could be in more than one place at once, even splitting their consciousness in two like in those experiments where they split the two halves of the brain apart and so one half doesn't necessarily know what the other half is doing. Likewise half of their consciousness could in the Heavens, and the other half on Earth. For all we know, we could be reincarnated bored gods who have wiped their own memories clean. But maybe we don't need to go that far as to say we are gods, the point is that it could be ultimately for own good that we suffer and are ignorant of the whole truth, because otherwise there would be nothing to strive for or to fight against, nowhere left to grow, and without these things life might be pointless, boring, monotonous and repetitive. This begs the question whether there is any point in the lives of the gods other than to watch us but perhaps it's not so boring to watch us from every single view at the same time. If by some mistake, chance, or plan we were to reach godhood I don't think it's a question as to whether we would try to recreate ourselves either. Nor do I think we would be particularly kind gods just because we have experienced suffering but I digress.

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