Good people get leukemia, terrible people live long and healthy lives. 3-year-old refugees drown trying to get to safety, war criminals escape with huge amounts of money and live out their lives in comfort. Even among the less extreme and more common examples, life isn't fair. There's no fairness in the fact that I get a make a comfortable living sitting in an air-conditioned office, while somewhere in the Congo, an old woman has to walk miles every day in the scorching heat just to get drinkable water. There's no fairness in the fact that one baby is born to loving, caring parents who take care of their every need, while another baby is born to abusive drug addicts. There's no fairness in the fact that one person gets hit by a drunk driver and dies, while another person doesn't.
Accidents of birth, accidents of life and accidents of death have HUGE impact on the course of your life. Arguably much more so than your work, talent or personal character. No one in this world gets exactly what they deserve. They can't, because there's no one in the world qualified to judge what people do and do not deserve.
And, the irony is, I believe in a just God, which means I believe that existence will be just and fair in the long run. But that's very clearly a much longer term goal. In the eternities, I think fairness will be enforced, and we'll all be rewarded or punished with perfect justice. But in life? In this world? Fairness is an aspirational goal, at best. It's not something we're ever going to acheive, and it's certainly not the current state of things.
Read other answers by Geoffrey Widdison on Quora:
- At what age and how do you prefer to die?
- I don't deserve this lonely life. This proves life is a bitch. What should I do?
- A live pig is taken to Mars in a comfortable life sustaining container and then released into the Martian outdoors to die. If we came back to inspect the carcass in a million years would there still be some live bacteria?
from Quora http://ift.tt/28elAEa
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