Why Bad Things Happen to Good People
“Why do bad things happen to good people?” This is one of those questions that is often asked but rarely comprehensively answered or seriously thought about. I’d like to take a stab at it.
Today I’d like to criticize an element of Buddhism that rubs me the wrong way. I wish to make the critique both because I think it is a good criticism and because I think that Buddhism is generally given a bit of a pass by Americans and Europeans–it is not subjected to the same level of scrutiny that the Abrahamic religions routinely face.
Yesterday I made the argument that core of the modern left’s political philosophy, that all people are worthy of equal concern, is reliant on determinism. I pointed out that this means that determinism is not merely an innocuous plaything for armchair philosophers, but a substantive moral position in its own right. This obliges us to take it out of its philosophical box and bring our worldview into consistency with it. I then posed two questions, which I intend to attempt to answer today: