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I had to break the news to maybe 200 people over the past 6 months that their cancer was fatal. Including maybe a dozen children.
I had to clean out the suppurating wound in a patient who had a mandibulectomy for a orofacial carcinoma. When I removed the bandages, coated in pus, he could have played a flute both ways. I suppose his incoherent prayers and moaning were of no avail because they ended up directed simultaneously to heaven and hell. Then again, that ward has poor cellular reception.
I have heard earnest praying and fevered pleas for divine aid. It was never forthcoming.
What facile excuses for miracles you recite. If that's the standard of evidence you deem acceptable for the sweeping claims of Christianity..
What sin did a two year old child with ALL commit, such that she wasn't worthy of a miracle while your remission from UC was? Wrong deity I presume? The post-office does a better job directing mislabeled mail. Do you think a "fast" done by your family outweighs the RCTs showing that prayer, both direct and directed, is useless?
Thankfully I have not had too many cases of people thanking the Lord/Allah/Ram for their cures, or I'd have gone to jail for strangling them. Most of them are far more genuinely grateful for the actual miracle that is modern medicine, and by
Godwe've got more to show for it.What sin did I commit, getting ulcerative colitis and spending months in agony? What sin did anyone commit to experience any amount of suffering at all?
You stand upon others' graves and claim that their suffering was for naught. I stand upon my own experience and disagree in the strongest terms possible. Each moment of life, even when experiencing some of the worst pain imaginable, is still better than even. In our very worst, most agonized moments, God has seen fit to grant us greater and more meaningful pleasures than the pain which we experience. It's simply a matter of being able to recognize it. I have spent hundreds of hours in physical agony, but relative safety and calm, so I've had time to think about this and know it better than most.
The true tragedy is not the dead children, who have been taken to heaven and will be reunited with their family eventually, but the parents and siblings forced to cope with their absence for decades afterwards, lacking any knowledge that their child is okay. I promise you that that kid is okay, though, and that all of this will eventually work out to everyone's benefit. There are greater joys meant for humanity which we must be prepared to receive.
To be clear, I have seen miracles far greater than the ones I've shared. The greatest, to me, is the miracle of my own conversion and moral growth, but there have been plenty of others. I'm glad I didn't share them--you would probably be calling me a liar directly, rather than just insinuating it. I've already told you that I don't think I deserved any cure for my UC, but that the timing of it does indicate its miraculous nature. And I've already told you that even such miracles don't outweigh RCTs for me, but that they did give me confidence enough to continue investigating, including by conducting my own trials.
Given that we've already discussed all of this, and that I've already addressed each of your points in detail, I'll choose to interpret the substance of your comment as a result of your anger at the problem of suffering rather than as deliberate bad faith argumentation. I understand--it's certainly a problem I grappled with as well. Next time you do experience serious pain, I encourage you to slow down and experience just one instant of the pain at a time. It soon becomes clear that no matter the severity of the pain, a single instant of it is really quite tolerable, easily outweighed by the simple joy of other sensory inputs. The real trouble comes when our brains run ahead and try to experience all of the suffering at once, both feeling the pain of the instant and dreading the countless instants to come.
The same is true of all suffering. It may feel unjust, it may feel like God has unjustly condemned us to suffer agony for nothing, but the pain teaches us, and God has also unjustly granted us countless joys to pad life out and outweigh even the worst of our pains.
Who is “us” here exactly?
Countless humans and sentient creatures have not been granted “countless joys” to outweigh their suffering. Your theology deals with this moral inequity by saying god will make up for it in the afterlife.
Only problem there is the lack of evidence for said afterlife.
As I said, the simple pleasures of existence, rational thought, and physical sensation outweigh physical pain.
There are plenty of other joys, but just one or two of those are sufficient to outweigh pain.
"us" is everyone and virtually everyone has been granted such gifts or has died very quickly after birth.
This is like... your opinion. There are countless persons that live in constant pain, unable to escape it, with thoughts constantly dominated by their pain. For many of them non-existence would have been a gift, not their worthless lives.
I was one of those people in constant, inescapable, attention-grabbing pain. Existence was still a gift. I enjoyed every day despite being essentially incapacitated and often lacking the mental faculties to do more than endure. It's fact that some people, at least, possess the same capacity to enjoy even very bad circumstances. It's my opinion, but I think a well-founded one, that everyone has such capacity.
Well, my experience is the complete opposite. I am in constant, inescapable, attention-grabbing pain and I wish I were never born since I can remember, even when I was not in such dire circumstances. Success does not bring me joy, achievement does not bring me joy, relationships do not bring me joy. I am quite disgusted by the world and by existence at large. I have the mental faculties to endure otherwise I would have killed myself years ago, nevertheless I still do not think that it is worth it. My only consolation, as I said in the Sunday thread, are my escapists fantasies that I know one day will stop working, because their efficacy wanes and every time I get up again they become less and less appealing. Good for you for not experiencing such hopelessness, but it is not the rule, mostly because there are no rules.
It sounds like we're talking about somewhat different things.
When I say attention-grabbing what I mean is that it seizes control of your thoughts and leaves virtually no room for anything else. It's not that reading a book or watching a show is unenjoyable while in pain, it's that you're not mentally capable of doing it because so much attention/mental capacity is directly occupied by the pain.
What I'm saying is that if you were currently in this level of pain then you wouldn't be browsing TheMotte, let alone writing comments.
That's not to diminish whatever it is you are going through too much--I'm sure you're in a lot more pain than I am now, and it sounds like you've been in pain for much longer too--but I want to make it clear that I don't think physical pain is your problem, as much as it may feel like it is. Success, achievement, relationships, etc. should operate on a totally different channel than physical pain and be mostly unrelated. In other words physical pain should not diminish emotional joy. They should remain separate and you should experience them as two different sensations happening simultaneously.
When they do interfere with each other it's usually not due to the pain itself but due to how you feel about the pain. The only reason pain should directly harm your mood at all is if you are doing what I described and trying to experience all of your future pain at once. Not only experiencing pain in the moment, but looking ahead at all the expected future pain-filled moments and dreading them.
Physical sensation cannot hurt your mood, or diminish other sources of joy, unless you let it. The sensation itself can be fruitfully separated from the emotional impact of the sensation.
There are plenty of indirect reasons pain should harm your mood--for example, maybe you're disappointed that debilitating pain renders you incapable of performing most jobs or accomplishing most goals--but these are normal emotional states to be dealt with like any other problem. You mention achievements and relationships, so it sounds like there is some hope to that aspect of things.
You have my sympathy. If you feel hopeless, though, I think depression or aimlessness are more likely culprits than physical pain.
Ok, have it the way you want. I don't really care.
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