Leave them alone, they need their faith.

Many Christians share their faith stories online now.  I’ve followed several over the years.  One is a family losing a little girl to cancer.  Another lost a toddler who got caught in a window-blinds cord while they were upstairs.  A recent one is the father of the young woman ravaged by a flesh-eating bacteria infection.

Even many atheists leave these people alone.  They say they need their faith.  But is this true?  Don’t many people cope with loss without faith?  When we defend faith in these situations, we are keeping it around ‘just in case’, like the last vials of smallpox, nuclear weapons, suicide or relapsing into an addiction.  We are saying that faith is sometimes necessary for some people.  If that’s true, then fine, but are we sure?  The worry is that treating faith this way encourages us to think it is sometimes essential, when it may not be.  We might stop our search too early and miss out on something better.

When suddenly faced with losing a loved one, people are very vulnerable.  Faith that God has a plan, even for the worst things in life, is a ready nostrum.  But it is only ready because we make sure it is familiar and abundant.  We keep it around, like garlic hung on our doors, as if we have learned nothing for centuries; as if it is effective; and as if we have nothing better.  And adopting faith at such times is suspect.  We don’t normally make important decisions when we are so far down.  In this light, faith looks like an opportunistic infection that can only get a foothold in desperate people.  At minimum, we should review our decision later, in the calm light of reason and equanimity.  Faith should not come from impulse or infatuation.  And it should have nothing to fear from inquiry.

So, perhaps if we removed this last taboo, if we questioned whether faith was necessary even at life’s most difficult moments, we would find that there are better ways to deal with life that don’t require faith and its attendant problems.  It would be a shame not to find out.

Problems?  What could be wrong with believing God has a purpose for everything?  This father finds great comfort in faith.  He posted this as his daughter was about to have her hands and remaining foot amputated:

“Proverbs 16:4: “The Lord has made everything (to accommodate itself and contribute) to its own end and His own purpose; even the wicked (are fitted for their role) for the day of calamity and evil.”

The above scripture from Proverbs is the verse of the day on Bible.com and it was placed there for us. God has a purpose in everything and he has dominion over evil.  God is in control and I have to trust in the direction He’s taking us.”

If she recovers, no matter how wounded, he’ll claim victory for his faith.  What will he say if she dies? The same thing.  God uses us for his great purposes.

Let’s start charitably.  Suppose it is good for God to use our children, allowing them to be maimed and killed, for his inscrutable aims.  If it’s necessary, well, he’s doing the best he can.  But why would it ever be necessary?  Couldn’t God achieve his ends without taking our kids?  Perhaps he couldn’t. Maybe he made some sort of covenant that he can’t break.  In that case, it seems he gambled our lives at some point in the past.  I wouldn’t make a promise that might require me to stand by while my kid is tortured.  Couldn’t he see that coming?  Even if he couldn’t, why would he risk us that way?

Many believers seem content being pawns in God’s schemes, but they don’t realize what they are giving up.  They surrender any notion of Goodness.  If we say God is Good no matter how he treats us, then it means nothing.  So this father is apparently ready to trust God no matter what happens to his daughter.  This is the very definition of being in an abusive relationship.

Why would a smart, loving man remain in such a situation?  Because our culture celebrates it.  In Muslim cultures, young men are encouraged to beat and kill their sisters if they dishonor the family by dating or being raped.  We are bewildered at this behavior, yet it seems we practice a version of it. Believers are encouraged to accept whatever treatment God allows.  They thank him for respites, and turn to him for strength during their beatings.

At this point, believers say “Oh, God isn’t responsible for any of the bad stuff.  That’s all due to man’s rebellious nature”.  Really?  How did human nature cause Aimee to get necrotizing fascitis?  EVEN IF this were the case, it would be an unfair system.  Sins could accrue to each sinner.  If God allows innocents to pay for the sins of others, he is cruel and unjust.  And God set up natural law which determines how much havoc an evil person can accomplish.  Are we to believe that he has already calibrated it for minimum cruelty?  Any doctor can answer that.

So what’s going on here?  It seems this father is coping in the best way he can.  The problem is he may not have been exposed to all the ways to cope.  And it’s likely he has stopped looking.  Faith is like that.  It encourages you to rest, stop your search and ignore any drawbacks it may have.  This is more alluring to some people than others.  Of course, if dad is content, he has made his choice.  But we don’t have to be silent.  Is there anything  wrong with what he’s doing?

I think there is.  We can be selfish in our need for God.  There is something obscene about saying God is watching Aimee’s torture and that we are supposed to believe it is all for the best.  It is truly distorting.  It bends our ethical minds fully round, so that cruelty looks like love.

He quotes scripture again:

“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.”

We all experience periods of despair, but when you mourn you need to question what you are mourning. Are you simply pitying yourself? Are you throwing in the towel and quitting? If you are then God will not answer you. Be selfless, love those around you and believe in only the best possible outcome. That’s what I believe. That is what Aimee needs. I know this is true, because I have been here before.

BELIEVE”

Hm.  Is necrotizing fascitis the best way to teach perseverance?  I’m pretty sure a lot of people have learned to persevere in other ways.  God’s pretty clever.  It seems he could do better.

Does God really ignore us if we doubt?  Loving parents and doctors don’t withhold lifesaving aid for that.  Why?  Because it would be sadistic.

This passage was written by a parent of a 5 year old child with a terminal brain tumor. In the course of her treatment, she and her daughter have gotten to know other kids who have cancer:

“My daughter asked me ‘Why am I doing so good & Jude isn’t?’ Her little friend Jude definitely hasn’t done as well as she has & when we saw him at the hospital last month she had a lot of questions about him. Then came the bombshell…’God can work miracles, right? If He wants my tumor to stay small forever, He can do that, right?’ Oh boy…so we talked a little bit about how, yes, God can work miracles, but for reasons that we’ll probably never know, sometimes He doesn’t. God COULD make her cancer go away, and maybe He will, but if He doesn’t, it’s not because He’s mad at her or because she’s done anything wrong.”

To keep a loving God, this is precisely the point where thinking has to stop. It was loving for the mother to make sure the kid didn’t blame herself. But the kid has it right: God COULD stop the tumor, or he could have set things up so that it had never occurred.  We know this because most kids don’t even get them.  If he could do better and doesn’t, then we have to ask why.  If we don’t ask, then we are following plain old authority.  We’d like God to deserve his great power by also being Good.

At this point, some believers say to me: “Are you omniscient? Do you know more than God?” My answer is, “I don’t have to be. I have all the information I need. We have a defendant who knows about a kid’s plight, he is able to help and does not. It doesn’t matter what the reason is. He’s guilty of neglect before or after the fact.”

The believer can not say “it’s a mystery” just about the bad stuff. If suffering is a mystery, then we don’t know what God is like.  That means we don’t know if he’s good, either.  They can’t have things both ways. They want to say that they know just enough about God to know that he is all-loving and all-powerful, but that they don’t know why he allows suffering anyway.  They can say God is innocent until proven guilty, but we don’t want God to be merely innocent of evil.  We want him to be Good. Many apologists seem to think that, if we can’t convict God of evil, that makes him Good.  This doesn’t follow at all.  O J Simpson was acquitted of murder, but that doesn’t mean he’s a saint.

It’s clear that such people have decided in advance that God is good. Their view isn’t based on an even-handed assessment of the evidence. They’ll cite good things as evidence for God’s goodness, but they don’t treat bad things as evidence of his evil. This is inconsistent and casts doubt on their testimony.

Here is a recent comment about little Jude.  Mom had just gotten the good news that their daughter’s tumor was still stable:

“Today I feel especially blessed because, as our daughter was drifting off to sleep on the operating room table, her little friend, Jude, was taking his last breath, succumbing to the brain cancer that he has so bravely been fighting for just over 1 year.”

It’s natural to be glad that one’s own child is doing better than other children.  Evolution made us this way.  But when we say that this state of affairs is the design of a loving God who could have set things up any way at all, we are morally adrift.  And we are supporting an unnecessarily cruel regime.

A recent post:

“So tonight we were watching a show about a 6-year-old little girl who was diagnosed with a brain stem tumor, and how strong she was, but how she died before her wish of going to Disney World was fulfilled. As we listened to her story, my daughter said, ‘That’s like me. Except I didn’t die.’ I answered, ‘No. The radiation treatments worked well for you.’

She is brutally aware that none of us knows what the future will hold for her. I have so much hope for her, feel so much promise in her future that I can’t help but think of what a blessing these last 20 months have been to us….the blessing that we now know what an incredible gift our kids are, how important every second is, how special the Grace of God is in our lives.

Faith, Hope, Love, and the Grace of God. What better gifts could we hope to receive this Christmas season.”

Does it really take a brainstem tumor for parents to appreciate their kids?  Of course not.  This is a touching rationalization on the mother’s part.

Of course we are happy that this mother, caught in a terrible vice, where every cough and wobble could be the beginning of the end, has found a way to cope.  But notice the price.  She must say that Bad is Good.  She is an abuse victim, and a willing one.  When people are trapped in abuse, they grow around it like a twisted tree, dealing with it the best way they can.  Therapy consists of getting them safe, then helping them master more worthy coping skills.

We can’t remove the abuse life heaps on us and our children.  But we can remove the abuser.  We can admit the obvious, that there is no superfriend who set up this world, this way.

We can face the fact that life is a risky business, that bad things happen.  We can circle the wagons and hold each other tightly, knowing that we can fend off many attacks, and suffer the rest together.

What we don’t want to do is say that infections, accidents, addiction, mental illness and pediatric cancer are part of a plan.  This would make the Planner a sadist.  Worse, he could have devised a better plan.  How do we know that?  By looking around.  We know some people suffer less than others.  We know he left some horrors out of creation.  He could have left out one more.  That’s all we need to see that, even if suffering were necessary for an omnipotent God, he does not allocate it fairly.  Does he have to?  No, he’s God.  But if we follow him anyway, we are submitting to mere power and condoning the abuse of our loved ones. No matter how we squint our eyes, it seems the buck stops with God.

This is a passage written by a father of a 2 year old boy who died after getting tangled up in a window-blinds cord.  Right after his death:

“Although I am happy to know that Joey is in a far better place then we all are, I still can’t say I’m not just a little disappointed that God did not give him back to us.  We really, really wanted that.  But as I’ve said throughout this whole ordeal, “It’s God’s will, right!”  And I’m going to have to keep saying that day, after day.  Until I see him again.

As for all of you who have lived this with us, I pray that you all continue running towards God.  Please don’t ever stop, because He wants us with Him.  And when you all get there you can give Joey a big hug yourselves, because I can gaurantee he’ll be waiting there for you.”

‘I still can’t say I’m not just a little disappointed…’  That line tears at me.  I’d like him to know there’s no purpose to his son’s death.  It was a senseless accident, and that it is a good thing that it was not planned and has no meaning.

About a month later:

“I’m trying not to make this sound too depressing but if I’m going to be honest, it is.  There is such a void in our lives right now that for the time being it feels like nothing will fill it.  Not even God.  I could stay up for hours reading books we have received about Heaven, Grief, or God’s Love and it inspires me, yes, but it does not bring Jojo back.  Which is all I really want.

I know that God is in control of all this, and that He did this to us for some reason beyond me and Halley, but I’m still not happy about it.   In fact I’m still a little mad about it.  Yeah I’m mad at God for allowing this to happen to us.  We had life right where we wanted it and God pulled the rug right out from under our feet.  Is that fair?  Is all this really necessary?  I ask God those questions all the time, and the answer I’ve got so far is…..nothing.  No answer yet.  But my faith tells me, yes.  It has to be.”

It has to be?  No, it doesn’t.  Life includes many awful things.  But to say it was set up this way on purpose makes it immeasurably worse.  There does not have to be a God who uses our kids to further his purposes.  In fact, it seems obvious there is not.  It is only when our defenses are down, grieving and desperate, that such an idea can take root.  And it can only be maintained by ignoring its horrid consequences:  that we would live in a ghastly scheme, full of unnecessary agony, our minds twisted into giving thanks for torture and loss, or for their temporary cessation.