Mindful
Diamond Member
- Banned
- #1
In the blood-soaked jungles and plains of the animal kingdom, thousands upon thousands of carnivorous beasts are tearing each other to pieces alive in a world of perpetual screaming, according to the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, who was more realist than pessimist about the suffering in the world. He viewed the hellish bloodbath of grotesque survival in the Wild as: “The agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer.” However, I believed humans suffered more, due to their consciousness and intellect. He wasn’t religious, but he had high regard for Christianity, especially Catholicism. He was also struck by the ethos of the Old Testament and the Fall of Man, by which worldly human suffering is inevitable. He said the only thing that reconciled him to the Old Testament was the Story of the Fall, despite it being “clothed in allegory”; and that our existence resembles nothing so much as the consequence of a misdeed, punishment for a forbidden desire. In his essay On the Suffering of the World, he writes: