The best logical argument I can make for tragedies is the need for perspective. If nothing but good things happened all the time then we’d take them for granted and nothing would ever seem to change or be different, just boring and perfectly fine all the time.
This seems great now, since we live with so much tragedy in our current lives, but perhaps we’d still question a reality where nothing bad ever happens if it’s all we’ve ever known?
Right so some kid has to starve to death that way we regular folks enjoy sunsets?
We have the geological record. We know that there has been about 500 million years that life capable of feeling pain has been in existence. So 500 million years of life starving, getting eaten, getting cancer, being broken randomly, being deformed, and being infected all happened just for us to be not bored?
It gets worse, somehow, when you think of humanity alone. There have been about 100 billion humans who all existed before the development of first civilizations. They were just as human as me or you.
- 33% of adult women died giving birth or immediately afterwards for their first and only child.
- Approximately 50% of those children died before age 10
- about 50% as a whole died from being murdered, a rate so high it easily makes us the most bloodthirsty mammal objectively ranked.
- For a twenty thousand year period 16 out of 17 males didn’t reproduce. Castration might have been invented then but no one knows for sure.
Now these humans loved their partners and children as much as we do. I want you to think about that. Imagine half of your children dying imagine knowing sex could lead to your wife dying imagine knowing that murder was the single leading cause of death.
For anyone who claims this argument I ask them to imagine having to explain to a 100 billion people one by one that what happened to them was needed so our 21st asses don’t get jaded about a world too nice.
