There is no reason to suppose that self-consciousness, the recognition of a creature by itself as a "self," can exist except in contrast with an "other," a something which is not the self.

The story [of Christianity] is strangely like many myths which have haunted religion from the first, and yet it is not like them. It is not transparent to the reason: we could not have invented it ourselves. It has not the suspicious a priori lucidity of Pantheism or Netownian physics.

Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be "given" in the facts of experience.

Lorin K. Hansen argues, "It is not Jesus' suffering per se that redeems men and women. Suffering has an effect on him, and it is that effect (or change) that makes possible human redemption. The power of redemption comes through his expanded knowledge and sensitivity, which he then expresses through his role as mediator."
... Elder Maxwell similarly explains that "the infinite intensiveness of Christ's suffering" was necessary for him to become a "fully comprehending Atoner."

It may be that this mortal existence is the only flash of eternity where we are allowed to have a veil over our minds and are allowed to experience incompleteness, pain, and sorrow, which give us such richness of experience. From this view, then, perhaps feeling lonely would not be seen as a disease condition but rather as one of the very purposes for being alive.
Pain, sorrow, suffering, and evil, then, may not be deficits to be overcome, controlled, removed, or eradicated, but rather they may be gifts from a benevolent Father that can serve as instruments for developing a divine nature. We may perhaps go so far as to see the traditionally tragic elements of life as the very tools of the trade in the construction of heavenly mansions.

In the end, many of the world's thinkers and theologians have difficulties finding a way to reconcile the presence of misery with the existence of God's omniscience, omnipotence, and benevolence. The problem, it seems to me, boils down to the premise that pain, sorrow, suffering, difficulty, and misery are tragic, to be avoided at all costs, that they are definitely not part of a benevolent plan. ...
Perhaps by reexamining the beginning premise that misery is tragic and embracing the notion that it is possible for a benevolent Father in Heaven (with a divine purpose in mind) to be causally responsible for the presence of evil and sorrow in the world, we can arrive at a ... satisfying resolution.

Demonstrating the limits of reason is not to reject reason. We can neither reject nor avoid it. We ought not to wish to do so. For reason not only helps us find solutions to problems, it sometimes sharpens the problem.

Sometimes we treat scripture and revelation as if they were simplified scientific explanations of things, but I think that is a mistake, and sometimes a serious one. For it assumes that science is the measure of all discourse. Though religious discourse may offer us explanations, its purpose is not explanatory, but soteriological: it is concerned, not with telling us how the world and the things in the world are (at least not in the way that science does), but with telling us about God’s power to save and how we can be saved.

It would not be unreasonable for a Christian to argue that since even Christ suffered on the cross, with suffering incomparable to any of our own, we have no right to ask why we suffer. To do so is impertinent, perhaps impertinent to the point of blasphemy. To complain about my suffering when faced with the suffering of Jesus Christ is, implicitly, to deny the gravity and effect of his suffering. I have no right to ask why I suffer. Here is another way to put the same point: if Jesus Christ asked the question of God’s justice while on the cross—“O God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—we have no right to think that we can avoid the same question. And if he did not receive an answer while in mortality, we have no reason to think that we can.

I believe one could argue that, by definition, embodied beings are necessarily passive as well as active. They can be acted on; to be embodied is to be able to be affected. In technical terms, it is to be pathetic, to have things happen to one. But to be pathetic is to suffer in the broad sense of the word (and, for our purposes, suffering is not best defined as “feeling pain” because feeling pain is a species of suffering, of being affected). If an argument from the nature of embodiment were successful, it would show that it is logically contradictory to create a world without creating suffering and, therefore, evil.