The reality that God doesn’t heal amputees is a bit problamatic for Christians. If you believe in medical miracles, why are the healings always internal, away from the naked eye? It would be a lot more amazing if an external healing took place such as a missing limb regrowing, maybe to the point that it would convince hardcore atheists that God is real.
But there is still the reality that amputees are never ever healed no matter how much prayer. I believe I know why, but it is from a spiritual perspective so I’m sure this will be auto-rejected by atheists.
To get the answer, you must go back to the fall of man. Man was first created as a perfect eternal being. Our bodies were designed to be vegetarian, and free of any sickness. However, after the fall, drastatic changes took place. Sin was introduced into the human body. Sin is a force that is opposite of God. God is peace, love and life. Sin is death, fear, and pain. Sin changed our physical makeup. Cellular breakdown began in the human body. Sin is the reason our bodies crave harmful things. We became meat eaters as well. like an infection, the sin nature was passed to every human being ever born corrupting our physical body.
So if you are asking God to heal an amputee, he are asking him to create out of thin air a part of flesh that is sin corrupted. God can not exist with sin so this just isn’t possible with His nature. I think we are given one body, one life to live on this earth ,and if we ruin that body by accident or our own actions, there is no replacement.
But this bleeds into a bigger question of mine. Does God actually design and create our physical bodies, or did He just create the initial mechanism for childbirth and set things in motion? I lean more towards the latter because of things like birth defects. I can’t imagine God purposely designing a human body to suffer from disabilities.
I think this thread will end up in the Great Debates forum, where the usually posters will first ask you to prove there is a God before any of the rest of your reasoning will be considered, but good luck.
Wouldn’t this mean that no injuries or ailments, amputation or grazed knee, couldn’t be healed? After all, no matter how grave the injury, surely it’s equally corrupted flesh…
If you’re going to step in here with mere assertions and half-baked ideas, what is it you expect people to respond with? If proof and evidence isn’t respected, then we’re only left with wild-ass guesses that we made up one night while drunk. I mean, your points aren’t even supported by scripture. Take these, for instance…
Since when has Yahweh shied away from a good old-fashioned blood bath? If he meant for us to be vegetarians, why did he demand blood sacrifices from the Jews? If he’s “peace, love, and life”, why does he order his followers to kill infidels? Why does he not only approve of war, but actively assists one army against the other through such acts as stopping the sun in the sky?
And since when is anything impossible for God? That goes against your own religion’s doctrine.
So if I scrape my knee, it’s against God’s nature to allow the skin to grow back over the wound? GEEPERS, your idea about this seems like it could be applied to any injury at all.
Your assertions seem simple, and obviously trying to retrofit a solution to a problem that is solved much easier by agreeing there is no god to do the healing.
Humans are not “meant” to be vegetarians. If so, we would be able to digest cellulose. As it is we can be vegetarians but need to be careful to make sure we get our protein allowance by eating quinoa and beans. Tofu/soy is iffy because I believe that humans have trouble with unprocessed soy beans and tofu is a manmade creation.
I do not believe sin corrupts a part of the body. Instead it corrupts the soul.
You may be referring to Matthew 5:29-30
but that is a directive to do whatever it takes to stop sinning and not that the body part in question is actually corrupted by the sin.
And I have always had trouble with that chapter of Matthew. It starts with the Beatitudes but starting with verse 13 Jesus changes his tone. Depending on your views, you could say that he is engaging in hyperbole to make a point (it ended with him commanding us to be perfect like God) or he is pissed. This may seem Monty Pythonesque but I could picture a verse 12.5 where someone in the crowd yells out “Blessed is my ass!” and Jesus goes off on him.
Your point about the apparent inconsistancy of Jesus’ and/or God’s healing is one that I think everyone struggles with. There’s another thread here about a Jesus/barber analogy that tries to address that issue with little success. God and Jesus as written about in the Bible would never allow natural suffering of babies with disabilities. One could take the Deist approach that God said “Fuck it.” after creation but that his hard to reconsile with Jesus’ work. The best I can do is to say that if God is truly infinite and omni-everything that us trying to figure out his plan would be like an ant trying to figure out our motivations.
And then of course there are those that believe suffering is a test to strengthen us or test us a la Job. Convienently left out is how to reconcile an omnibenevolent God with making others suffer to test us. For example, God lets Job’s family die to prove a point. WTF?! :eek: What did they do to deserve getting flattend by a collapsing house?
Wait, if we are a perfecteternal being, why do we need to eat?
Why were the other animals punished for our transgressions? Also, are you maintaining that Sharks were originally vegetarians?
I’m not sure how this follows - why not simply make the amputee able to regrow his or her own limbs, like some lizards do? Further, if this is the case, then how is any healing of the body possible?
Isn’t this essentially what God did by changing Eve’s nature so that Childbirth is painful?
God curses the serpent by changing it’s diet and it’s body structure, in Gen 3:16, God directly changes woman’s nature: “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”
Did you know some lizards can re-grow a lost tail or limb? Are lizards without sin then?
Do you believe God changed our dentistry at that time we were expelled from the garden of Eden? We don’t have the teeth of a herbivore.
What, fundamentaly, is the difference? How is creating mechanisms that can lead to birth defects any different from creating them directly? I’m assuming you believe in an omniscient God, able to forsee the consequences of any processes it sets in motion.
I don’t know whether this would be persuasive to religious people, but the OP is right that it wouldn’t be persuasive to anybody else because it doesn’t deal with why things are the way they are. OK, say human bodies are corrupted and God can’t create anything corrupted- why the corruption and why the fuck create a situation where a god can’t do anything about it? What kind of designing is that? And if God can’t create flesh, how are things like pregnancy possible?
As a vegetarian- no, they were not. We can survive healthily on that diet, but it’s pretty clear humans and many other primates evolved to be omnivorous.
That seems very dubious to me once you consider how long germs and bacteria have been around - including gut flora that we need to live.
I’m aware of the theory that the first people were immortal, but I don’t think I’ve seen anybody suggest that all their cells were immortal.
The solution being “there is no God” is the harder one though. Then I would have to believe that my friend’s cancer disappeared through natural causes. But science and medicine tells us that cancer multiplies, it doesn’t just disappear overnight.
On a broader scale, an atheist would have to explain encounters with the supernatural. It’s simply too easy copout to claim that everyone is just hallucinating. Same thing with NDE.
Even if I ignored all that, I would find it bothersome that current and recent events are playing out exactly the way the Bible prophesied. The Jews were scattered to the wind, they became greatly persecuted in WW2, became a nation again, and somehow this tiny nation is the focal point in current events. Way too concidential.
And I just opened up a big can of worms. lol
Cancer does go away through natural causes, though. And through medicinal causes. Science tells us that spontaneous remissions don’t happen much, but they do happen. If one believes in God, one might ask why that doesn’t happen constantly instead of in a small minority of cases.
Of course, atheists do have explanations for those things (whether or not you’re persuaded by them). Anyway, if you want to talk specifically about the healing of amputees, you’re going to want to avoid broadening the discussion this way. If this turns into another general God vs. no God debate, your original point is going to get lost.
Actually, it’s pretty much the same answer we’d give: your God cannot heal amputees because he is impotent. He is weak. He can’t even bodge together a bionic arm like a human can.
The difference is that atheists know why he is impotent: because he doesn’t exist.
If you wish to have an honest debate on this topic, less “And I just opened up a big can of worms. lol” gotchas and more cites and logical arguments might serve you better. Just sayin’.