Everything Happens for a Reason…
Ariela Haro von Mogel June 25th, 2008
If there’s one phrase I can’t stand and find completely odious is “everything happens for a reason.” What exactly does this mean? I have thought about this long and hard, and have completely offended close friends and family members with my less than objective perspective on it.
Some pretty horrible things happened to me as a teenager and, in turn, I did some horrible things to myself. Whenever I would turn to my mother and ask her for help in understanding the world, she would say “everything happens for a reason.” Now, my mom is a devout Catholic who has attended church every single Sunday of her life, but she is still pretty liberal and open to reason and debate. When I asked her what that phrase means, she made a very nebulous comment that god doesn’t give us “tests” that we can’t handle and horrible things happen to make us better people. This made no sense to me at the time and makes no sense to me now. Why do some people get b.s. heaped on them like no other, and many other people go though life relatively unscathed? And the people who have had the most heaped onto them generally do not become fantastic people, but withdrawn, depressed and defeated individuals. There are a few great exceptions to this. Ayaan Hirsi Ali became a terrific social advocate because of nasty experiences with her religion and society. But Hirsi Ali is a truly exceptional case and most people are not like her.
Bottom line: There needs to be evil in order for good to come out of it.
I would rather people not be murdered, tortured, raped, robbed, and abused in any other way so some goodness may come out of it. I would rather these things not be rationalized away and the problem itself dealt with.
“Everything happens for a reason” always seemed like a lame and lazy attempt at dealing with some seriously profound and contradictory issues. I really didn’t expect my mom to have philosophical dialogues written as to why the world is the way it is. I just expected her to console me, and saying “everything happens for a reason,” did not make me feel better whatsoever. I just got confused and angry. What reason is that? I thought. Is it some supernatural reason? If so, then god is messed up. Is this a causal claim? (Which of course it isn’t. That would be tautological and self-evident). Is this to say that I have a fair amount of control over my life, and that if something negative does happen to me, I can always choose how to respond to it? If so, that could have been said. But I don’t think that’s what is meant.
A really good friend of mine had a terrible family situation and remarked, like my mother, that “everything happens for a reason.” At that point, I knew I abhored that phrase. This person deserved none of the abuse that she got, and I was really angry that she could just be so fatalistic about it. This is not to say that she did nothing to help herself. She most certainly did. But, it was as if she was saying to me “god has thrown sh*t at me, and I have chosen to deal with it positively.” Which is great for her, but not great for god. One does not have to interject the unnecessary. Bad things happen in life. And that’s just reality. I don’t think that there is some divine plan and god set it up that way to see how you would react. But this is the subtext of that statement, as I have only heard it from religious people that don’t have a good answer concerning life’s woes.
“Everything happens for a Reason” should sound more like this: “Bad things happen in life. I’m sorry about that. How are you going to deal with it?” Ultimately, any supernatural subtext should be taken out of the equation as it makes god look like a culprit in your bad fortune. It isn’t. Bad things happen because humans do them, or because impersonal natural disasters make life very difficult. Et cetera. We, as individuals, have a pretty fair amount of control over the systematic and sometimes random crap that gets thrown our way. And that’s the way I like to think of it.
I hate this phrase, too. It’s completely unhelpful and dismissive of human suffering.