That rant in full:

Nothing Happens For A Reason.

Everything happens for an endlessly complex web of reasons, stretching unbroken all the way back to the big bang.

According to mainstream physics, things also go one way rather than another entirely at random: quantum mechanics predicts the chances of things happening in a given set of circumstances, but as far as anyone can tell, everything beyond that is purely random. There are causes for everything, but nothing is fully determined.

So much for physics!

Usually when people say they believe everything happens for a reason, they’re not really thinking about causality in a scientific sense. They’re more hinting that things are part of some Grand Plan. Call it Fate, or God, or Karma, or whatever. I think people find it comforting.

I don’t find it comforting. It bothers me.

If the universe is fundamentally arbitrary, if the reasons why things happen all arise out of physics and the many layers of reality built on top of it, then we are free to say and feel that sometimes things are just really bad. They are wrong, and unjust, and should not happen.

If it was true that Everything Happens For A Reason, that suggests that it’s okay, really that sometimes kids die of cancer, and people do awful, awful things to each other. Like: Ah, well! I suppose that it’s all for the best.

What if it’s actually just bad?

I’m discomfited by the suggestion that this is the kind of world that would be created by a deity who is personally invested in the lives of human beings. I do not find it reassuring to think that everything that happens is somehow justified.

Sometimes I want to shake my fist at the void and scream. I am under no illusions that the void is listening, but I do live in hope that other human beings will share in my righteous rage at the injustice of it all.

Maybe screaming together will make things a little bit easier.

Maybe once we’re done screaming, we can work on fixing as much of it as we can.

@ferrous Made no sense to me either.

I saw the web.

@ferrous Also, I have a limited use for too much destiny in a fantasy tale. Because that can be another form of trapping someone.

And the author may or may not realize it, but sometimes that is not the tale that is told.

@ferrous
A happens and latter B.

A is a bit shitty and B is sort of OK.

I often take comfort in that.

But I don't feel the need for gratitude for five extinction events and a history of patriarchal genocides to enjoy a quiet moment.