Alzheimer's Illness, God and Science: Who Get's the Credit for a Cure?
Shygetz does it again. Here he is in top form responding to a Christian named Leslie F Massucco (LFM), who attempted to share why God allows Alzheimer's:
LFM: Maybe this disease was everyone’s lesson on how much we can learn to be patient, kind, and use our ability to stretch our capacity of love and except and embrace our love ones, even if they changed into different people.
The person suffering from the disease doesn't get to learn this lovely lesson. So God is making that person suffer because you needed to learn how to be nice. Is that justice from your just God?
LFM: Happy can be relative in any form, and when he was ready, and our souls grew, he took them home.
Sure, happiness is relative, but what does that have to do with anything? You're saying that God made your father ill so you could learn to be more happy than when he first got the illness, but still less happy than before he got sick? And that's a good thing? And that lesson was worth your father's suffering? Wow. Just, wow.
According to your Bible, when Jesus walked the Earth, he cured people of disease rather than let them learn their lesson from God. Sometimes He did it reluctantly (Matthew 15:21-28), apparently changing His mind during the process--if Christ had wanted to show His glory or some such, why would he be reluctant? Why shouldn't God want to show His glory by healing the AD patients? Where was your father's miracle cure?
You don't think, somewhere in your darkest heart of hearts, that this is just a terribly transparent post hoc rationalization of a tragic event? I mean, seriously, how ornate a shape are you willing to twist into to avoid coming to the obvious conclusion; there is no lesson that could be learned this way that an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God could not teach you more kindly in some other manner. Hell, he could make Alzheimer's curable by love--therefore, once you learned your "lesson", you father would be well again. But Alzheimer's is not curable by love. It is fatal, both directly and indirectly, and currently incurable. Here endeth the lesson.
If and when the cure comes, I guarantee you it won't be from the prayers of the faithful or the wisdom of the Church. It will be from the hard work of scientists and medical doctors, most of whom will either be non-believers or believers in the "wrong" religion, well-funded by charitable people and government. Next time you drop your tithe into the tray at church, think about that. They promise you miracles; we are the only ones actually bringing in the results.
And when that cure finally comes down, you and those like you will fall to your knees and humbly thank a God who sat on high for millennia and did nothing about it while multitudes of families were destroyed, both emotionally and financially, by this disease. Yet you will not hold Him accountable for his millenia of inaction, but merely give Him credit for His invisible, inaudible, and completely indetectable role in finding the cure now. Meanwhile, you won't be able to even name a single scientist who actually did the work to bring the cure about.
All the while, some of you will continue to struggle long and hard to ensure that the next generation of scientists are unable to ever find cures like that because they were never able to learn the foundations of biological science, being as they are in conflict with the more literal interpretations of the Bible.
Sometimes in my darker moments, I think that there should be an "opt-out" contract presented to people before they go in for evidence-based medical care. Either you're in the Enlightenment, or you can go down the street to the barber and have him bleed you with leeches. You can't have both.
LFM: Maybe this disease was everyone’s lesson on how much we can learn to be patient, kind, and use our ability to stretch our capacity of love and except and embrace our love ones, even if they changed into different people.
The person suffering from the disease doesn't get to learn this lovely lesson. So God is making that person suffer because you needed to learn how to be nice. Is that justice from your just God?
LFM: Happy can be relative in any form, and when he was ready, and our souls grew, he took them home.
Sure, happiness is relative, but what does that have to do with anything? You're saying that God made your father ill so you could learn to be more happy than when he first got the illness, but still less happy than before he got sick? And that's a good thing? And that lesson was worth your father's suffering? Wow. Just, wow.
According to your Bible, when Jesus walked the Earth, he cured people of disease rather than let them learn their lesson from God. Sometimes He did it reluctantly (Matthew 15:21-28), apparently changing His mind during the process--if Christ had wanted to show His glory or some such, why would he be reluctant? Why shouldn't God want to show His glory by healing the AD patients? Where was your father's miracle cure?
You don't think, somewhere in your darkest heart of hearts, that this is just a terribly transparent post hoc rationalization of a tragic event? I mean, seriously, how ornate a shape are you willing to twist into to avoid coming to the obvious conclusion; there is no lesson that could be learned this way that an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God could not teach you more kindly in some other manner. Hell, he could make Alzheimer's curable by love--therefore, once you learned your "lesson", you father would be well again. But Alzheimer's is not curable by love. It is fatal, both directly and indirectly, and currently incurable. Here endeth the lesson.
If and when the cure comes, I guarantee you it won't be from the prayers of the faithful or the wisdom of the Church. It will be from the hard work of scientists and medical doctors, most of whom will either be non-believers or believers in the "wrong" religion, well-funded by charitable people and government. Next time you drop your tithe into the tray at church, think about that. They promise you miracles; we are the only ones actually bringing in the results.
And when that cure finally comes down, you and those like you will fall to your knees and humbly thank a God who sat on high for millennia and did nothing about it while multitudes of families were destroyed, both emotionally and financially, by this disease. Yet you will not hold Him accountable for his millenia of inaction, but merely give Him credit for His invisible, inaudible, and completely indetectable role in finding the cure now. Meanwhile, you won't be able to even name a single scientist who actually did the work to bring the cure about.
All the while, some of you will continue to struggle long and hard to ensure that the next generation of scientists are unable to ever find cures like that because they were never able to learn the foundations of biological science, being as they are in conflict with the more literal interpretations of the Bible.
Sometimes in my darker moments, I think that there should be an "opt-out" contract presented to people before they go in for evidence-based medical care. Either you're in the Enlightenment, or you can go down the street to the barber and have him bleed you with leeches. You can't have both.