Is that better. Sorry.
True. IMHO.
Yes, that could be true, also. Seems to be true for many here. I did not mean to offend you. Would you like me to bow at your feet and repeat that? 
Waitaminute, lemme slip on my sequined Jimmy Choos . . .
Then seek the answer for yourself. Most people want to know about higher intelligence, if there is one, what is It like, etc. However, they want someone else to supply the knowledge to them. They want God to fix the world for them. They want God to tell them all about how everything happens, but they are too lazy to do research, crack a book, or listen to anything contrary to what they believe.
Some, of course, have all the answers. They read them out of a book written thousands of years ago by men who were struggling with the same questions we do today.
Life is not for the faint-hearted, it takes a lot of courage to do the right thing when it is not to your own advantage. It takes strength of purpose, and patience to wade through thousands of pages of written material and listen to millions of words in order to seek truth.
If you want to know – seek – look within yourself where the Kingdom of God is and learn the truth that goes beyond good and evil. Learn to love, learn to give, learn to forgive and withhold judgement. If you are willing to work at it you will find the answers to all your questions, not within the illusions of this earth, but within the reality of God.
Love
That’s a signal for those who have faith in God to go and assist (and pray for) those in need and not always be centered on ourselves and our own daily laments…I believe that He’s weeding out the faithful from the non-faithful through free will, that’s all.
My wife and I answered the call and started a day program for the developmentally disabled and it was the best move we’ve made in our lives…helping by creating a meaningful purpose in life for the people we serve, no matter how big or small that purpose is…and I feel the presence of God when one smiles when they sees us or does something that they have never done before and is exuberant when they do it for the first time…that justs makes my faith in God that much stronger. Do I see them as a burden? No, I see them as an opportunity to give comfort, love and prayers to a fellow man/woman/child and to try to acheive spiritual fulfillment outside the walls of our church.
As for death…none of our bodies are perfect at anytime in our lives (we all have some sort of “deformity” with our bodies, some noticeable - some not as noticable (mental, psychological, etc.)), and passing on with the belief in God in our souls will give us perfect form in heaven if God wills it and our faith in God carries us there. The young and innocent who have suffered on earth will be among the first to enter heaven because of their lack of sin in innocence. God gave us Jesus to be free of sin and prepare ourselves for heaven should we become burdened with sin.
You know something…this post is starting to become a Chick Tract…:eek: (although I detest his methods of spreading the word with heavy-handed bigotry and ignorance)…the real and underlying message is that Faith in God is the heart of the matter.
I actually agree with lekatt…Get off your duff and seek the knowledge. I’m constantly learning about God with the people I help/work with, in life, illness, and occasionally, in death.
Well, that’s the way I see it…your mileage (belief) may vary…
I see. That’s really generous of God to strike so many other people with illness and suffering so that you can learn more about him. That must be a great comfort to the families of those you’ve seen die.
I think that’s the point here. If God wants you do learn something, why doesn’t he find a way that doesn’t mean someone else has to suffer or die? If he wants you to learn something, why doesn’t he strike you with the disease? Like if he wants me to learn something, I would rather he give me cancer than kill my child with SIDS.
from filmore
Wish I could answer this for you, but I personally dont think God has anything to do with making little children sick. He is not “up there” randomly making people sicken and die…or even doing so according to some larger plan. Our lives, for better or worse, our are own.
Now, does God have power to prevent children getting sick? Yes, I think he does, but he doesnt. Why? Well think of it this way, you have the “power” now to find a homeless person bring him to your home and reshape his entire life. But how many of us do that? You have the power to go to Africa and help the poor and sick…but do you? Why not? Simply having the power to do something doesnt mean you use that power. We all have “power” but seldom do we exercise it to the fullest extent. Why? I have no idea, but perhaps if we can figure out why we dont use our “power” maybe we can figure why God doesnt use his?
whoa! someone tell me how to abuse sex, that sounds pretty hot.
However my response to your post is: Why deform babies when babies should be pretty much free of sin?
God delivers disabled children to test us. We must show our compassion. The society we live in is measured on how we treat the weakest.
Rather hard cheese on the disabled children, isn’t it?
No Eve. The poor little children dont know any different. We must protect the weekest among us or we risk eternal damnation and hell-fires.
What disabled children have you been around? The disabled children I’ve known sure as heck aren’t too happy about their predicament.
Like these children born with Xeroderma Pigmentosum. It’s a condition where the sun will burn their skin so they have to stay indoors all the time. How awful for them and those around them.
If God came to me and said, “I need to teach you a lesson so I’m going to give your daughter Xeroderma Pigmentosum,” I’d probably just kill myself right then. If God’s way of teaching me a lesson is to give a child a disease, I want no part of it. I’d end my lesson early.
XPriest, who decides who is the weakest among us? I thought God was the only judge of men? How do we decide good, evil, weak, and strong? Sure, you can say the bible points to good people who did good deeds and evil deeds and so on. However, The Bible supposedly includes God telling us what’s good and evil. Maybe we mortals are not supposed to make that decision and life should be survival of the fittest-style. Maybe we should be beating up on the weak and stealing from the strong. Maybe The Bible was written by many men over a thousand years and some guys over the course of a few hundred years gathered all of these stories in order to set standards of morality for their people for the rest of our years on earth. Maybe these guys just did the best job anyone could do in their task, but perhaps they weren’t exactly guided by a higher power. If this is the case, than screw it all, we should be pounding out our neighbor’s faces when they leave the freagin’ Christmas lights up until August. I just find it difficult to lead my life based on guidelines created by men. If “They-who-art-above” really wanted me to follow those rules they would come down here face to face and tell me. They are all knowing and all creative, aren’t they? I just want a little guidance here, XPriest. Why should I do a darn thing somebody tells me God said? Why believe those guys?
I’m glad that you weren’t my father/mother…that’s taking the easy (selfish) way out.
I have a few developmentally disabled clients that take quite a bit of medication to the point that they have to stay indoors (out of the sun) for the summer months and also on cloudless days. They still learn, love and laugh like the rest of us. I hate to think that their parents wanted to “end the lesson early”, so they weren’t burdened so they can go about their own self-interests.
My wife has a sister who is PROFOUNDLY retarded and throughout her life, her parents do as much as they can to enrich her life without the thought of “ending the lesson early”. Her mom and dad are devout Catholics and realized their daughter for what she is - a family member…and took care of her to the best of their abilities, until they became too old to care for her and sought assistance from local care givers. My wife is now the custodian for her sister and she visits her and follows up on her sister’s medical concerns (g-tube feeding and possible onset of renal failure), but euthanizing her is still not an option because it’s not up to us to decide when enough is enough. She is comfortable though.
Was it not for her sister being born, my wife might have not taken interest in the developmentally disabled, nor get a degree in human development and together, and also not started a business of caring for the developmentally disabled. We are helping about 150 people and their families make the best of what is available to them, all because of one baby born with severe oxygen deficiency back in 1955. Are we glad that she was born that way? No, but her accepted existence has helped hundreds of people get together and help each other. Whether you want to blame God (or not) for being cruel to one baby, then give Him credit for joining hundreds together to bring positive change in this world.
Makes me wonder what all of us would have been doing instead if she had died before my wife was born. Through freewill, I think we would have been chasing other self-serving careers. But hey, I’m glad that she is living and we (through freewill) decided to help. That is probably why they have been regarded as a “special blessing”. She will have an easier time getting into heaven than you or I will…
As for the girl suffering from XP, there are people who took up the cause and are searching for a cure and how to cope. The girl’s smile in the picture is all I need to see to know that her parent’s made the right decision not to “end the lesson early”.
And whose to say that a perfectly healthy baby ends up growing into a miserable drug abusing criminal that murders another person for $10 for his next fix is more deserving than a child born with an affliction and learns to live deals with their affliction the best they can with the support of others who feel the need to give it?
sadnil…everyone has weaknesses at some point in their lives and will need help from somebody. Everybody makes decisions every day on who is weak and needs help the most…this is a dynamic system that changes year to year, month to month, day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute. Your faith tells you what to do, your freewill dictates whether you take action or not. My faith dictates to me not to beat up the weak and my freewill gives me the choice of helping or not. I do attribute my faith to God and I do the best I can on making the right decisions…sometimes I don’t make the right decisions with freewill. God is not forcing anyone here to do anything, but I try to do what I (or better yet, God) think(s) is right.
Yeticus I got the impression that filmore was trying to say that he’d commit suicide before letting God use him for such a bone-headed lesson in whatever the lesson’s supposed to be, not that he’d kill himself if his daughter had a disability. But the post was a little obscure, and maybe I’m wrong.
Why does God create Diabled Babies?
Probably because of something YOU did!
(with much respect to Jack Handey)
Life is obviously not “fair”. Good people don’t just have good and bad only get bad. It would lead one to believe that the “lesson plan” does not discriminate. Although I do believe our purpose here is to become more emotionally and intellectually evolved, I don’t think the process is being orchestrated, beyond starting the evolutionary process. We’ve been given a nudge in the right direction and been left to find our own way. If you don’t believe in G-d, there’s no one to blame for bad things and you just suck it up and try and make things better. If you believe in G-d, you can blame him for the bad, but also have to credit him for the good. And then you still have to just suck it up and try and make things better. Blame seems pretty pointless, unless you’re somehow hoping someone else will hear your whining and come in to take care of the problems. It’s not gonna happen.
From Yeticus
If faith dictates that you do not beat up on the weak, something is wrong with human nature. God messed up, if that’s the case, because some people are born away from religious sources and do not have “faith” in that sence.
I’m sorry I wasn’t clear before. I didn’t mean that I would kill myself if my daughter was diseased. I meant that if God came to me and said he was going to give (at some point in the future) my daughter cancer so that I would learn some lesson from it, I would kill myself to prevent him from giving cancer to my daughter. This all assumes God comes to me and tells me what he’s about to do.
Just to clarify again, I didn’t mean I would commit suicide to reduce my burden. I would commit suicide so that my daughter didn’t get the disease.
So does the ends justify the means? You seem to think it’s acceptable that 150 or so children were made disabled so that these families could help each other.
So God invented XP so that humans could find a cure for it? I’m sure the children who have XP can take pride in knowing that.
Who’s saying anything about disabled children not being as deserving as healthy children?
I think I have figured out why we don’t always use our “power” - The reason that the vast majority of people do not do such philanthropic acts is because the disruptive impact it would have on their lives outweighs the feel-good sense of satisfaction they would receive for doing others a good turn. Like every other decision we make we rely on either a conscious or sub-conscious cost/benefit calculation.
This leads me to believe that an omnipotent God (should one exist) chooses not to prevent children getting sick because it would interfere with his day job or is just too much hassle.