Welcome to a new week on the Ask Pastor John podcast.

We head into Thanksgiving in a few days in Pastor John.

There was recently a discussion online among non-Christian philosophers and it started out

with an old Woody Allen line he once said in a movie.

He said this, if one guy is starving someplace, it puts a cramp in my evening.

Which raises this question, can a person truly experience happiness without ignorance and

apathy of the suffering of others?

To be completely insensitive to suffering in this world is to be a sociopath.

To be completely sensitive to the suffering of others, you would pretty much die of grief

from the collective suffering of the world.

So if empathy means you cannot enjoy dinner with a starving child staring at you near

the dinner table, yet your dinner can resume normally if that starving child exists behind

a wall.

Does it seem that ignorance then is an important requisite for happiness?

So here's the question, Pastor John.

Does my happiness require ignorance or even apathy with the suffering of others?

I doubt that I have a fully satisfying answer to this even for myself and I'm not sure

there is a theoretically satisfying answer that deals in quantities of knowledge and apathy

and happiness.

I suspect that the answer to this is found in becoming a kind of person in the image

of Christ who learns how best to love within the limitations in this world of suffering.

Having said, I'm not sure there is an answer, here's my best effort to say something helpful,

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