Anyone who has spent time in church or around Christians for any length of time has experienced something like the following:
A member of the church or a family member becomes seriously ill. For this sake of this post, lets say that this poor person has an organ shutting down and urgently requires a transplant. This scenario almost always goes one of three ways.
1. The person makes a full recovery.
2. The person continues struggling with their for some time.
3. The person dies.
No matter which way it works out, Christians figure out for themselves the will of their God. In the first case, God gets the credit for healing this person. I find this baffling because if you believe in God you must believe that He created the faulty organ or the disease which caused the illness in the first place. Imagine if I punched you in the head, causing you a headache. Would you be that grateful to me for giving you an advil to cure the headache that I, myself, caused?
In the third case, the person dies and God is wonderful because he called the person "home" to heaven. It seems odd to me that if this paradise that is Heaven is somehow lacking for the presence of this wonderful person that God would choose to bring this person there by means of a terribly painful disease.
It's in the second case that you'll find the true nature of Christianity to be entirely make believe. Ask a Christian why this person is suffering and why God permits it and you'll get as many opinions as there are people as to what God's will for this person is.
All the while, Christians are busy praying for this person and if asked why their prayer wasn't answered the way they asked for they usually answer in some variation of the following.
God answers every prayer. Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes the answer is not now.
How convenient to have every angle covered. How convenient yet how totally unconvincing. After all, that's the same result you would get if making a wish on a star or in a fountain or by praying to your toaster.
If God was ever really curing diseases, then I have a few questions. Why is life expectency increasing as scientific understanding of health increases? Is it a waste of resources training people to become doctors when ultimately all the decisions of a person's health are decided by God? Why do we build hospitals? Shouldn't we be building more churches, instead?
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