Faith Healers

[Trinopus]

Bryan Ekers: I’m gonna have to start up a pub, just to pay you back all the drinks I owe you.

[Slow_Moving_Vehicle]

@kaylasdad99

I suspect that the way he treats the children is more relevant than the words he uses when he is talking about them. Or quoting Dickens.

@Baker

Tell us all about the totally PC volunteer work YOU do, Slow Moving Vehicle. Then it can be decided if you have the right to criticize.

I occasionally do volunteer work with a couple of LGBT and marriage equality groups. Who would probably have a bit of a problem with me describing someone as an “invert” or “pederast”.

But after reading these two responses, then re-reading Urbanredneck"s post, I could see that he was referencing - but not actually quoting, note - Dickens, who did use the word “crippled”:

@Urbanredneck

It’s kind of like in Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol” where the crippled Tiny Tim says him being in church would remind the others of how Jesus’s healed the cripple. Plus his infirmity was a catalyst to the salvation of Scrooge.

Also, pace kaylasdad99, working with special needs kids is a pretty menschy thing to do. So, on my drive home, I planned to retract the raised eyebrow and give Urbanredneck props for his volunteer work.

Then I got home, opened up the second page of the thread, and found this:

@Urbanredneck

Well I could be all 21rst century PC and insert “handicapped” or “differently abled” or something like that but I was quoting the Bible and Dickens so they changing it would be wrong plus it would lose its effectiveness.

Did you even have a clue on what my point was? Maybe you cannot read so let me help you. I was saying the Bible says that dealing with persons with disabilities gives us as Christians an opportunity to serve.

Now we could be like the various groups who simply killed off any infant deemed “defective”. Would you prefer that?

Oh and by the way, when I look at someone in a wheelchair I keep in mind that I’m just one car accident (or in the case of Christopher Reeves, a horse riding accident) from being right there.

Apparently Urbanredneck got offended and decided to upend the contents of his outhouse over my head.

Listen, Urbanredneck, the point of the first paragraph of your post was, so far as I can tell, that the Bible (thus, presumably, God) encourages a healthy lifestyle. I suppose that relates to faith healers - you know, the topic of the thread - by being a restatement of “God helps them who help themselves” - but it’s a little forced.

Then you give two Bible verses that seem to suggest that God allows poverty and hardship so that Christians can earn merit by serving them. Seems like it would be more charitable for God to heal the halt and lame and let Christians serve in other ways, but I think you mean that as long as the poor in spirit, body or mind exist, you’re called upon to serve them. Noble sentiment, but again, has fuck-all to do with faith-healers.

Then you finish up with the Dickens reference, which is where you used - not quoted - the word “cripple”. As I said, that’s understandable given the source. Aside from that, if you think about it, “Wasn’t it wonderful of God to make Tiny Tim poor and disabled so that the rich and healthy Scrooge could be redeemed!” is a pretty shitty thing to say. I’m sure you wouldn’t say the same thing to one of the kids you work with, would you?

The bit where you and Baker seem to think that because I questioned your choice of language I was actually sneering at your volunteer work and advocating death for the disabled is a masterful bit of strawmanning. You just go ahead and beat that scarecrow to death.

@Drunky_Smurf

You two fucksticks are being retarded just to be retarded. Which part of cripple being part of a quote are you two mongos being gimpish about?

Guiniastasia, I think you should be the Gimp. I can’t fit into the rubbersuit, and I already know most of Mongo’s lines.

[vivalostwages]

@Bryan_Ekers

Does God get credit for the healing, while ducking blame for the injury and infection?

I wish someone could heal even a part of this boy’s condition—warning: some graphic images of a suffering teenager:

Yes, he is determined and trying to be positive, but it kills me to think of someone being in constant, horrible pain like this.

[Lobohan]

@Baker

Nope, I’ll be upfront and say I have no stats to show you, none that would satisfy a non-believer. It’s all anecdotal, which most people, including you, I assume, don’t put stock in.

Want one anecdote to mock? I will take that as a yes.

In 1987, while living and working in East Lansing Michigan, I attended a church I won’t name here. It was the first time I’d ever been a member of a congregation of which the minister was younger than me.

In a study group he told the story of the summer when he was nineteen, after his first year in college. He was working as a truck driver, and was in a bad accident. His lower left leg had been cut severely(He showed us the scars.) The wound became gangrenous, and he was scheduled for surgery to amputate his lower leg. He asked us “Do you know what it’s like for a nineteen year old to sign papers like that?” He spoke by phone with his father, a minister, and asked that he be listed on their prayer chain. “All I wanted was courage” he told us. The next day, during surgery, the doctor’s said the infection had retreated, and that they’d never seen such a thing. His leg wasn’t amputated after all, although he had bad scarring and lost part of the function, maybe 20%.

Now, we can trade stories back and forth. I know that the above tale has ways it can be picked apart and rationalized. Maybe I even made it up, one could say. But let me ask YOU something.

Well, you’re certainly stupid if you think that’s evidence for God, much less the genocidal moron that the Abrahamic religions revere.

Do you have evidence to show that God/Allah/Yahweh/Whoever, doesn’t exist, or act in this world?

I have just as much evidence that vampires don’t exist. I trust you wear garlic at all times and cower in fear when the sun sets, right?

[monstro]

I don’t understand why believers aren’t pissed off by the notion that God heals some people and not others.

Take the guy in Baker’s example. Let’s accept that God healed him up (though not 100%…I guess the guy hadn’t prayed enough for a full miracle.) If Baker should suffer from the same injury and have to have her leg amputated, will she feel anger that her prayers were insufficient? Wouldn’t anger be a normal, healthy reaction under such a circumstance? I would think so. It would be akin to getting a piece of coal for Christmas while your sibling gets a brand new ten speed, even though ya’ll both got straight As.

But I have a feeling being angry at God’s medical fickleness gets you put in the “bad Christian” club.

If faith isn’t sufficient to get God’s healing, then it shouldn’t be called “faith healing”. It should be called something else. And it should viewed as the cruel power play that it is.

My mother has more faith than anyone I know. So why is chronic pain her constant companion, while a heathen like me doesn’t know an aspirin from an Advil?

[Trinopus]

I have noticed a resurgence in American Christianity of the doctrine of the elect.

I’ve even heard radio preachers declare, “Jesus did not die for the sins of all mankind,” only for the sins of those elect, the minority that will be with Jesus in heaven.

The more traditional viewpoint, that Jesus died for all our sins, seems to be going a bit out of fashion. This is also reflected in the “prosperity gospel,” itself only an echo of the “visible elect” of decades gone by.

All of this is a sick way of dealing with the fact that God doesn’t heal everyone. God doesn’t give two shits for some of us, only for his favorites.

Some thirty years ago, a friend of mine was in “The Way Ministry,” and he was told by his minister, “If you wake up in the morning Right With God, you cannot be harmed that day.” He believed this, right up to the day he was in a terrible electrical accident and lost a leg. God didn’t spare him that day.

He and the Way Ministry came to a parting. It was one of those, “You’re no longer one of us,” “Oh, yeah? You can’t kick me out, because I quit!” farces.

Moderate Christianity needs to do more to distance itself from its diseased variants.