I am working on being better at networking. As such I connected recently with a woman who runs writing courses and who may be interested in partnering with me for editorial work. We are virtually strangers at this point, and while I start with a neutral trust meter, I am still cautious. In my mind this is very business related, so imagine my surprise when she wanted to discuss religion.
Of course, like many people I run into, the extremes of the religion I grew up in were shocking to this person who grew up in a Jewish home. Her family was religious, but not extreme in their beliefs and certainly nowhere on the same level as an Evangelical Pentecostal family. I told her that over time I slowly came to realize that I just didn't believe in a lot of the things I had been taught. I tried to keep things vague because I am not out to convert/deconvert anyone. There is little point to trying to tell someone all the reasons why I have deconverted. That was not enough for her though. She started to prod. But surely you believe in a god? No? Again, another vague answer about how I believe that we find our own purpose and if there is a divine being, I don't think that creature really cares about us. It was at this point that she asks if she can tell me a story. Ya'll, I had my own person Tim Minchin/Sam Thank You God moment. This woman tells me some story about a strange growth on her neck. It had appeared a few weeks ago and was pressing on her vocal chords, causing speech issues. She and her doctors were very concerned. Then, the night before her MRI, she read this book about prayer that told her that she was just praying wrong. That if she wanted healing, she needed to pray for mercy. So she prayed for mercy and when she woke up the next morning, the lump was miraculously gone. Nothing showed up in the MRI. The doctor said, since it went away so quickly and nothing was showing up, it was most likely a swollen lymph node or a goiter and they have been known to go away. But obviously, she is convinced that because she prayed this new way, that was the reason it went away. And she is telling me this story because she is hoping it will convince me of what? Healing? A god? The power of prayer? So let's break it down. My first thought was, okay...so the reason people all over the world aren't getting miraculously healed from things is because they are praying wrong? What kind of capricious god squabbles over the semantics of how a prayer was prayed? And why did that god refuse to leave clear instructions in at least one of the holy books so that everyone would know how to pray? Why did he wait ti reveal himself to some tree hugging spiritualist who lives in Nevada (I looked the book up)? So you are telling me that there is a deity out there with the power to heal things, like lumps in someone's neck, but only if they pray a particular way? And even if there was a god who was doing these things, how do you know it is your god? How do you know that the creature who answered your prayer was the one you were praying to and that it is benevolent? Past that, I am not remotely convinced that the reason this thing went away is because she prayed. Correlation does not equal causation. Since she didn't know what the thing was before the MRI and it disappeared before more tests could be run, it's not like there is proof that this was cancer for instance and it was magically healed. However, the doctor, while a little miffed by how quickly it cleared up, also had a good guess as to what the condition was and there is documentation of these things going away overnight. So again, we aren't really in miracle territory here. At best, we are in, that's-a-mystery territory. And finally...why her? If this was a healing, then why in the hell does this creature keep picking middle class white women with health insurance to heal. If this deity was benevolent, shouldn't it be focusing on those who have little chance of being helped? The mother of five kids in Sudan who is trying to protect her family from starvation? The child with cancer living in a poor town in Haiti? And the whole time she is telling me this shit of a miracle story, I just kept hearing Tim Minchin's song in my head. Do I believe that she had some kind of growth or goiter? Yes, I do. Do I believe it went away overnight? Absolutely. Do I think it is because she prayed in a special new way and this is why it happened? Not remotely. Do I think it was because of a god and was supernatural? Absolutely not. Nothing about this story is supernatural and there are very reasonable, logical explanations. The most I will say is, isn't the human body do weird and interesting?
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AuthorThis is a personal, but secret, blog archiving my deconversion from a Christian to a non-believer. Archives
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