"God works in mysterious ways" basically means "this doesn't make any sense to me, but I'm gonna ignore it"
Side note, does it count as a shower thought when it was conceived while sitting on the toilet? Do we have toilet-sitting-thoughts communities?
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What it really means is “Despite how horrible this situation is, I’m not going to close myself of from recognizing good things that also happen, possibly even as a result of this”.
When people are badly hurt they tend to filter out perception of positive things, which is bad because life goes on even after (and during) a tragedy, and if you can’t perceive good things you starve.
Another way to put it is: “I’m not going to let this ruin my life”.
Or I can put it yet another way. What is the ethical value of an event? Is it the sum total of all the pleasure, minus all the pain, that the event causes? How could this be measured? Even if you can quantify it in the present, there’s also the future to think about.
Like, breaking your foot is a bad event. But if it means you’re in the hospital getting it cast the day you otherwise would have been hit by a drunk driver, then it’s actually good.
That’s “God” working in a mysterious (unpredictable, unknown) way. You won’t ever know that the broken foot saved you from the drunk driver. That’s the mysterious part. You don’t actually know what’s going on.
God being the omniscient meta person whose viewpoint isn’t constrained, who does take everything into consideration. That point of view is necessary to know with whether something was good or bad, but is unattainable to the human mind.
It’s very loosely similar to the saying “This too shall pass”. That saying will temper one’s judgment of existence. If you’re currently scared or sad, “This too shall pass” means that will end. Same if you’re happy.
If your judgment of a situation is coming up 100% terrible, ie you’re looking around you and see nothing but badness, a friend might temper your conclusion with a reminder that there is information beyond what you know: “God works in mysterious ways”.
Getting back to a tragedy situation, it means don’t give up hope, because your hopelessness is based on a limited point of view.
I mean, your given example isn't actually an example of your previous points. Its not a "every cloud has a silver linings" statement, it's a "I still believe in God even when bad things happen. This isn't proof of neither his non-existence or his non-caring." Eve your example is a poor thought experiment because it assumes a limited power god who can only break your foot, but can't actually prevent the drink driving accident in any less painful way.
It's a "I'm going to pretend this was supposed to happen and is a good thing regardless of whether good things come from it."
It's the response to "earthquake kills 1000s".
The other, less religious reasoning you provided is much more clear and less stretches with a lot better phrases. Even your descriptions would work better than providing the phrase itself to someone who is currently hurting. This phrase ultimately defends the bad thing as a good thing instead of telling the person shit happens, play the cards you were dealt, you can still win even when you're coming from behind.
Yeah, I'm gonna disagree here.
My favorite two arguments for this are rapists and babies with cancer.
So, babies with cancer are pretty straightforward - there's no way you can explain it as something good and there's no way to explain this in any logical sense. That's when people start feeling uncomfortable, because they know it doesn't make sense, but hey, they have the ultimate argument! "God works in mysterious ways."
The other one is a little more complex, but let's go. Someone rapes some other person, let's say a young man rapes a young woman. She has trauma for life, is scarred for life and is never gonna be the same. Let's say some 40, 50 years later he truly is sorry for what he's done, which I also can see happening. It doesn't really absolve him in my eyes, but hey I'm not God and my ways are quite simple and not at all mysterious. The lady has been a good person all her life, so both of them go to heaven. And one day they meet in heaven. How is that fair to her? How is he able to get to the same place of rest as her? Well, the answer is simple, "God works in mysterious ways."
So no, people don't use it to mean “I’m not going to let this ruin my life”, they use it to say "I don't really know how to respond to that because there's no way that the answer would make logical sense".
It can be both, and I'm not sure I see the distinction. It's a coping mechanism, and that's not actually an awful thing.
Growing up in church, nobody was creating hypotheticals and then trying to explain it using religion. It's just not what it was about. But I guess if you brought up babies with cancer, then yeah the "mysterious ways" argument would have been a prime cop out to avoid challenging faith too much.
Most commonly, people just wanted to know how to handle the (typically less hyperbolic) challenges in their own lives. They believed they were good and faithful and didn't understand why God would allow bad things to happen in their lives. Ultimately the "mysterious ways" line was just a coping mechanism, that came with advice to search for the silver linings, and think about past challenges and how they resolved, as evidence of the mysterious ways. Of course it also served to avoid challenging their faith too.
At the end of the day, religion has its very bad elements that I won't defend. But it's silly to ignore that for most people, they're looking for ways to interpret life in order to find meaning, or maybe cope with struggles. For myself, I'm not religious, but if I were trying to help a friend dealing with something difficult in life, I would still encourage them to look for silver linings and to reflect on past challenges. Not to use it as evidence for some god working in mysterious ways, but just to give them perspective to realize that they have the strength to overcome challenges.
True, I was perhaps too dismissive, it can be both. Though it's ultimately the same thing - escaping from something you don't like by making up stuff.
Of course I can explain baby with cancer in a good way. Baby was Hitler. Done.
You completely missed my point if that’s your example.
So, to summarize, it means absolutely nothing.
Everything’s meaningless when your mind isn’t working.
What a hateful thing to say. Your christ would be disgusted.