MovieChat Forums > Earthlings (2005) Discussion > Pain and suffering is just part of life

Pain and suffering is just part of life


Without pain you wouldn't feel the joy of relief, the joy of pleasure. You need something opposite to contrast that feeling/meaning. Happiness wouldn't exist without sadness. To me it's one in the same. They complete each other.

Doesn't mean I'm condoning the suffering of animals that we see in this documentary. But it's nature being nature. How can you expect all 7 billion human beings to be completely ethical to the treatment of animals? There is at least 5% highly irrational people on the planet and at the least 1% extremely irrational. Those numbers turn out to be 365 million that highly irrational, 73 million extremely irrational people. Which is the total of 438 million completely unstable people.

So the odds are there always going to be some form of abuse to animals and human beings. We're hard enough on our fellow man, how much more on other earthlings like animals? The pain and suffering is inevitable. You maybe able to curb it a bit. But to stop mass production of food, clothing, entertainment, wide spread experimentation on animals is impossible. Just like the war on drugs. A pointless one sided war.

And what is driving all this madness? Demand is driving this, the power of money. The same thing that drives anything that's in mass commodity.

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The thing is, a lot of the animals never experience joy, relief, or pleasure. It's pain and suffering from birth to death. And yes, pain and suffering is a part of life, but why create more of it?

You say that we can't expect everyone to be rational/ethical, but should that really be the reason we lower our expectations? We can't expect everyone to not murder and rape, so should we stop enforcing laws against those things because it's going to happen anyway?

In a way you are right- it is a pointless war. In the same way I just mentioned murder and rape will always occur. But, shouldn't we always seek to lessen pain and suffering? The closer we can bring pain and suffering to all life on earth, ourselves included, to zero, the better off we all are.

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You are right in that suffering is a part of life. Im Buddhist and that's a big part of the he philosophy. But human beings are capable of contemplating our actions and how they affect others. Why would you WANT to contribute to the suffering of anything on this planet?

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