Honesty in pessimists? I don’t see the logic. Honesty means looking at things as they really are, right. So the pessimist seeing only the dark and difficult side of things, who believes that things are not only bad but will go worse cannot be honest for three reasons.
Firstly, he is relying at best on his limited experience of life, at worst on his limited ability to see and understand. He assumes that there can be no other truth than what he sees, knows and understands. He mistakes his assumptions for reality and passes it off as truth. How can that be honest?
Secondly, he has not attempted finding God and knowing His ways. It is quite dishonest to comment upon something which you not only do not know but have not even tried to find out.
Thirdly, and here we need not bring God, if the pessimist does not believe in God and at the same time believes that the world is bad or a sad place, if he is honest in his belief he should plunge headlong and try to make it a better place rather than lament about it or keep passing the blame to a God whom he does not know or care to know.
A pessimist is simply a weak person who is busy complaining but himself doing nothing. One doesn’t have to believe in God to be an optimist. One has to believe in oneself. It is lack of a healthy spontaneous trust in life that makes one a pessimist. There are any number of believers who are pessimists and quite some who are atheists and agnostic but optimists.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
The simple question one needs to ask is that alright things are bad, the world is bad, as one says, but what are we going to do about it? Then one becomes a hero warrior trying to solve the enigma of life and finding whatever solution is possible within one’s limited means to help those who are suffering the heat of hell.
Not that the theist is honest. Both theist and atheist are ignorant because neither has truly searched the Divine Truth or the ways of God. But the theist is at least is giving hope and solace rather than taking it away.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
