Pain serves an important protective function by warning us of potential harm, though it is a complex experience with physiological and psychological components. While acute pain signals injury, chronic pain is more difficult to treat and can intensify with depression or anxiety. Some view pain and suffering as necessary to develop character, though it is ultimately a result of humanity's free will to abuse God's good creation. Looking to how suffering can transform us, rather than why it occurs, can provide hope and make it more bearable.
Pain serves an important protective function by warning us of potential harm, though it is a complex experience with physiological and psychological components. While acute pain signals injury, chronic pain is more difficult to treat and can intensify with depression or anxiety. Some view pain and suffering as necessary to develop character, though it is ultimately a result of humanity's free will to abuse God's good creation. Looking to how suffering can transform us, rather than why it occurs, can provide hope and make it more bearable.
Copyright:
Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
Pain serves an important protective function by warning us of potential harm, though it is a complex experience with physiological and psychological components. While acute pain signals injury, chronic pain is more difficult to treat and can intensify with depression or anxiety. Some view pain and suffering as necessary to develop character, though it is ultimately a result of humanity's free will to abuse God's good creation. Looking to how suffering can transform us, rather than why it occurs, can provide hope and make it more bearable.
Copyright:
Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
One of the biggest and most controversial issues raised by
humanity is that of pain and suffering and the reasons for which it exists and rattles our lives. It has been highly debated and it still is controversial. However, before we detail lets establish what pain is. Pain is a complex experience consisting of a physiological and emotional response to a noxious stimulus. Pain is a warning mechanism that protects an organism by influencing it to withdraw from harmful stimuli; it is primarily associated with injury or the threat of injury. Pain is subjective and difficult to quantify because it has both an affective and a sensory component. Although the neuroanatomic basis of pain reception develops before birth, individual pain responses are learned in early childhood and are affected by social, cultural, psychological, cognitive, and genetic factors, among others. These factors account for differences in pain tolerance among humans. Athletes, for example, may be able to withstand or ignore pain while engaged in a sport, and certain religious practices may require participants to endure pain that seems intolerable to most people. An important function of pain is to alert the body to potential damage (nociception). The pain sensation, however, is only one part of the nociceptive response, which may include an increase in blood pressure, an increase in heart rate, and a reflexive withdrawal from the noxious stimulus. Acute pain can arise from breaking a bone or touching a hot surface. During acute pain an immediate, intense feeling of short duration, sometimes described as a sharp, pricking sensation is followed by a dull, throbbing sensation. Chronic pain, which is often associated with diseases such as cancer or arthritis, is more difficult to locate and treat. If pain cannot be alleviated, psychological factors such as depression and anxiety can intensify the condition. In spite of its subjective nature, most pain is associated with tissue damage and has a physiological basis. Not all tissues, however, are sensitive to the same type of injury. For example, although skin is sensitive to burning and cutting, the visceral organs can be cut without generating pain. Overdistension or chemical irritation of the visceral surface, however, will induce pain. Some tissues do not give rise to pain, no matter how they are stimulated; the liver and the alveoli of the lungs are insensitive to almost every stimulus. Thus tissues respond only to the specific stimuli they are likely to encounter and generally are not receptive to all types of damage. Pain receptors, located in the skin and other tissues, are nerve fibers with endings that can be excited by three types of stimuli— mechanical, thermal, and chemical; some endings respond primarily to one type of stimulation, while other endings can detect all types. However, it is merely the issue of minor pain that is raised, but rather the one of suffering, which can be consist in any physical, emotional or mental experience of a high intensity. The questions that are often raised are: ‘Why do pain and suffering exist?’, ‘How can God allow them to proliferate?’ or ‘Is suffering a message from God?’. As mentioned above, acute pain has the role to protect us from injuring and hurting our bodies. If we are to take as example leprosy, known as the Hansen Disease, or diabetes in an advanced stage, both lead to the deficiency of the nervous system and they can no longer feel pain, be it at the level of skin or visceral organs, which leads to unnoticed cuts, bruises and infections that result in the gradual loss of extremities. Because of their condition they are deprived from a normal active life, which healthy people are blessed with. Pain is not an inconvenience that we must avoid, but in many ways it serves us every day, making possible an active life. It warns us when we change our shoes, when we’ve sprained an ankle, or if something is wrong with our organs. Without it we would live a disoriented and unprotected life. When confronted with reality, most of us will have to admit that suffering can have a beneficial role in some its forms. If we didn’t have the alert system based on pain, our existence would be threatened by unknown dangers every day. There is another aspect that has been ignored almost completely, and that is the connection between pain and pleasure. Socrates said: “ How seldom we experience pleasure and yet how tied it is, curiously so, to pain, which can be considered its opposite […], nevertheless, he who searches for the first is bound to accept the other; they have two bodies, but one head”. Modern people reject the mindset that dominated the previous centuries that pain is an integrant part of life, rather than an enemy that we have to eliminate, considering only then will they be happy. But pain is part of the ocean of sensations that we experiment and most of the times it is the prologue of pleasure. We live in a world that is marked by suffering: natural disasters, epidemics and incurable diseases. What we see in not “the best world of all”, but a depraved and ailing earth. Most sufferings on our planet are caused by two principles that God placed in his creation: a physical world running on natural laws and freedom of will. They both are good, but because God decided to respect both, he allowed their abuse. For instance, wood is a useful raw material on which we depend. We can use it to build houses or to make pieces of furniture or fire. On the other hand, it can be used to hit and harm another person. God could intervene and turn the piece of wood into a sponge or something soft, but this is not what he wants. He instituted certain laws that rule the universe, but he allowed human beings to exert their right to freedom of choice, even if that means abusing them. The Bible affirms that suffering and evil entered the world because of human’s abuse of freedom of will. Even though we have rebelled against God, he still gave us the right to choose. Theologians use the expression “the fall of men” to mark the breach that was produced in creation by the first rebellion, when evil entered the world. The account in Genesis 3rd gives summary information about the consequences of what happened, but we see that the whole creation, not only the human being, was affected. Pain and suffering has proliferated on earth due to the abuse of human will. At the begging, the world was perfect, but we have strayed from the initial pattern. C. S. Lewis says: “ God whispers through our pleasures, speaks to our conscience and cries through our pain that is the megaphone through which he awakens a deaf world”. Pain is the sign that things on Earth aren’t as they should be and it constrains us to stop and search for the things that are truly valuable. Different passages of the Bible point to different causes of suffering. Genesis 38:7 affirms clearly that God was the direct cause of Er: “he was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death”. In Luke 13:10-16 the cause of the woman’s invalidity was Satan or “a spirit”. Job 2:4-7 shows that suffering can be caused by Satan only after he has permission from God and in Proverbs 26:27 we see that suffering is a direct consequence of a person’s actions. From these passages we learn that some of our actions can be followed by painful consequences and that God used suffering as a form of punishment, after repeated warnings, the second being specific to the Old Testament. However, in the New Testament, Jesus says that suffering is not always caused by our actions. In John 9, his disciples ask him whether it is the blind men who sinned and deserved to be in that condition or whether it was because of his parent’s sin. Jesus replied: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the work of God may be displayed in his life”. The disciples were looking in the past to discover the cause of the man’s suffering, in order to find out the answer to the question: “Why?”. Jesus pointed their attention to a different direction, to the future, answering the question: “What is the purpose?”. If we look in the past and try to see why things happened we won’t find a clear answer, but if we look to the future we have the hope that our suffering will be transformed. Earth is a “valley of shaping our soul”(John Keats). The reason that we are here on Earth is to be constantly changed, and if we learn that we will see the value of suffering, even though sometimes pleasure appears in the midst of pain, evil can be transformed in good and suffering can have valuable results. It is the way we react to suffering has a crucial role in overcoming it. We have seen that pain was intended to protect us rather than make out lives difficult. And if we learn to search for an answer to the question ‘What’ rather than ‘Why’, knowing that it can have a beneficial outcome for our character will make it bearable.