(This is in reply to Kunoichi as well)

The both of you, Osumashi and Kunoichi, are lying. Sorry, there is no other word for it.

Osumashi first:
And no one said anything about about every lesson in life is through hardship.
And that includes me. All I said is that Lewis claims that there are some lessons that can only be learned through hardship, which he does, explicitly, right there in the quote. I've gotten quite used to you, accidentally or on purpose, misinterpreting or twisting what I say to suit your point. This, however, is the second time in this thread that you've simply invented something I'm supposed to have claimed. Quote me claiming that all lessons can only come through hardship, otherwise you are lying.

Kunoichi:
you have taken it upon yourself to define what a "lesson" is, which seems to be both extremely narrow and extremely ambiguous at the same time, thereby making it impossible for any example to meet your expectations. Convenient.
Nowhere in this conversation have I given any definition of what a lesson, in general or in the specific cases under discussion, is. Nowhere. Neither explicitly or implicitly. And you have the audacity to not only claim that I did, but also to specify that non-existent definition of mine, namely that it is both narrow and ambiguous, and claim that I constructed it that way to pre-emptively exclude all possible examples.
The only limit I put on what the relevant lesson can be is that it has to be impossible without the hardship, and that is not part of any definition I gave, but is stated explicitly in Lewis' quote.
Quote me defining the lessons under discussion both ambiguously and narrowly, in a way to exclude all possible examples, otherwise you are lying.

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. You two owe me an apology.

___________

SUZANNE: This comment quite deliberately at least rubs against some of the rules of your comment policy (5,6 and - depending on how you look at it - 1 come to mind). I'm sorry about that, but Osumashi and Kuniochi are lying about me and I'm not willing to let that pass.

Hm, I phrased that rather badly. What I meant to say was what lesson she could possibly have learned that she could not possibly have learned any other way, not what (if any) specific lesson she has learned (or will have learned). We obviously cannot know that.

For every hardship imaginable there is at least one lesson that is only learnable (is that a word?) through that hardship. That what you, Lewis, Osumashi et al. are claiming. Well, call me unimaginative, but I can't think of any.

"you have to agree that this lesson is worth it, in your own eyes"
I never said that or anything remotely like it. Whether or not the possible lessons are worth the hardship is a whole new can of worms. Let's first find some lessons before we start evaluating their merit.

I'm still wondering. Looks like Janus will turn out to be right.

I don't think anybody denies that good things can come from hardship and pain (if I may summarize your point that way for brevity's sake), but that is not what Lewis is claiming. He's claiming that a) some good things can only come from hardship and pain and b) from every hardship and pain there comes some good that is unattainable otherwise. No, his views are even worse than that, because he's not talking about good things happening but about lessons being learned.

We could stick to my rather general examples, but the question remains valid even for your specific cases: What lesson has Tim McLean's mother learned that she couldn't possibly have learned without having her son butchered and eaten?

You simply cannot use the shadiness of an illegal activity as an argument against it's legality. It's completely circular.

Enjoy your dhimmitude.
It's like one of those jokes in bad comedy. At first you think it's stupid, but then it gets funnier with every retelling.

"whose fifteen minutes ended AGES ago"
Really, Osumashi? Is that how you view that? Unwarranted attention seeking?
She testified before a congressional committee (completely uncontroversial testimony, by the way). That is all she ever did.
Limbaugh went on a 3 day rampage over that, calling her everything from slut to prostitute and requested her to have sex on camera for him.

Who's the attention-whore in this scenario? My money is on the fat guy.

Ask women who have been called that and who truly suffer. See how that one word literally means stigmatisation or stoning to death in some countries.
Sometimes you scare the living daylights out of me. Is there nothing in your ideology that you would not justify by pointing to other people elsewhere doing worse?

When talking about looking down on promiscuity, it is always worth noting that promiscuity has only ever been looked down on in women. Men are respected for it.
Any woman whose sex life is anything other than "one stable partner, ideally in the form of a husband" risks being seen as promiscuous. No man ever is. Men are respected for levels of sexual activity that would have pushed women well away from 'promiscuous' and into 'nymphomaniacal slut' territory.

God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.
I wonder what those lessons might be. What important lesson is there in having, for example, your whole family gunned down in someone's killing spree that you couldn't get any other way? What's the take-home message of being paralyzed from the neck down after a car crash? What is God teaching a ten year old child when his/her mother hangs herself in the kitchen? What point is he making to a child soldier who by the time he's eight has been forced to kill more people than we've killed mosquitoes? What's God telling a woman by letting her be raped in a car park?

Most abortions (and the ones this guy performed) are illegal in India, so how exactly does this show that "abortion is a shady business"? Is pub-owning a shady business because alcohol is forbidden in Saudi-Arabia and bars that serve alcohol there will be (by definition) shady?
Illegal abortion sure is a shady business, but then the 'illegal' part of that would tend to imply the shadiness.

Well, maybe I misunderstood you, but from your writing I gathered that you're in favor of this:
"I strongly suspect that a legal framework would be established so that no such thing [investigation/prosecution of people in the cases I mentioned] happens."