Question for Christians Re: Cures

by serotonin_wraith 29 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  serotonin_wraith

  jgnat-

  1. That does seem unusual though. That Jesus would come and cure people when God had set things up so that we'd have diseases. If he wanted to help us then, why not help us right back at the start and stop these things even happening?

  2. Those things are what we control as a species. We set them up to help us. Banks, etc. With diseases it's part of us that was 'designed by God' and we fight against that. If he set us up to get sick, what does he want? To make us sick or for us to not get sick? I may answer my own question here in a way, but I'm considering hunger/starvation too. We're set up to need food to survive, but that need also kills us when there is none available. So is hunger a bad thing to set up, or is it because of us that it goes against us? Hmmm...

  3. I've always seen original sin as being about the sins being passed on to us all, because Adam and Eve fell. And it didn't 'just happen' to them, they deserved it. Therefore, we do too? A universe could have been set up so that we'd all grow wings if they fell, anything could have happened, so it's not that it 'just happened'. It still needed to be planned by God, because he would control everything.

  4. "A. Perhaps because God doesn't want us to suffer?" That's the system he set up though.

  Deputy Dog-

  I do feel lucky to have life. From the atheist viewpoint it is still amazing that out of all the countless billion sperms and eggs and babies that die, I made it. I don't feel I deserve it. But if there is a God, do I deserve to get sick and suffer? If I have a baby, is it okay to inject it with a virus just because I created it? Yet if we are 'God's children' that is okay? If the Earth is supposed to end up a place where we don't get sick, and it's to restore the Earth to the way things were, then how things are seem to be related to our fall and it's what God wants. Why question that? Or it may be like Sad Emo said- God made us to possibly get ill straight off the bat.

  Could we ever reach the point where we cure all sickness ourselves? If we do that, what need is there for God to do it for us? We're a long way from that though. Sorry for the rambling, I don't believe in a god but this kinda thing is still interesting to think about.
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  Deputy Dog

  If the Earth is supposed to end up a place where we don't get sick, and it's to restore the Earth to the way things were, then how things are seem to be related to our fall and it's what God wants. Why question that? Or it may be like Sad Emo said- God made us to possibly get ill straight off the bat.

  I just want to make it clear that this is not my Theology. I'm not a witness.
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  serotonin_wraith

  That's cool. A lot of Christians do believe that, and I don't know everyones specific beliefs here so I wanted to cover all the bases. Thanks for clearing that part up though.
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  Sad emo

  Do you believe in evolution then? I believe the appendix was useful in the past, but evolution has changed our bodies in such a way as to make it dangerous now. You agree it's changed too- so if you believe in evolution (which is small changes as you described), where do Adam and Eve come into it?

  Yes I believe in evolution and that God was behind/involved in it. I don't take an absolutely literal view of Biblical creation but I believe it contains truth. If we, however many thousand years later, haven't managed to get our heads round evolution and genetics, why would we expect it to be recorded all those years before?! The creation account is written in a way that the people of that time would understand, not in great scientific detail. At the moment my thoughts are that there was at least a first man and woman (but maybe more than one couple, maybe evolved from/related to apes) with whom God chose to have relationship (the 'Law' was written on their hearts?), at some point they chose to break that 'Law' for the first time and then things started to go wrong from there.

  Science is concerned with how and when, theology is concerned with who and why, I see little conflict between the two.
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  serotonin_wraith

  I'm not sure how anyone could get anything of the kind out of Genesis. It's not that it was simpler to understand, it's a completely different story. 'And ape changed to man and God blessed man' would have been simpler. Humans as we know them today were still around over 6,000 years ago. We'd invented glue by that time. God then made Adam from dust, and Eve from Adam's rib, even though the Earth already had many many humans- I just don't see how the two fit together. Their sin passed on to the humans that were already on Earth? Sorry, I just don't get that at all. They seem like opposing accounts to me.
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  Sad emo

  I just don't see how the two fit together

  You missed the point:

  Science is concerned with how and when, theology is concerned with who and why.

  You're mixing them together - the creation account was written about 4-6000 years ago - the people who wrote it were looking further back than that and for want of a better word, 'speculating' the creation in the light of what they knew (hence the similarity between the other ancient texts) - maybe the way we in our era have 'speculated' about the theory of evolution.

  For fun, lets imagine if the Genesis account was written in our time (this is VERY rough, not meant to be dissected in detail!!!!):

  "In the beginning, God caused the big bang"... "then he said lets make some pond life and there was pond life, the third period of x million years..." .... "then God said, ok, lets give these evolved humans the awareness of our presence, we'll speak with them and show them the best way to get on with each other and the rest of creation"

  That worked well for a while but then for some reason people decided to ignore that communication, did their own thing and paid the consequences - separation from relationship with God (spiritual death) and gradual messing up of the planet which continues to this day.

  btw - what do you think we're made of? What is dust made of? What was the original spacedust made of? I think the Adam's rib account is saying something else, another 'truth' not necessarily connected with creation.

  It really is a case of leaving the written story on the page and looking behind it to see what its telling us, like parables or fables.
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  serotonin_wraith

  I believe we are space dust, and that the matter we're made up of formed when our sun did. The Earth formed after the sun. In Genesis the sun came after the Earth.

  New suns are born from the matter of dead suns that have expelled their matter, and so on back to a time when there was nothing but mostly hydrogen in the universe. What came before the big bang, no one knows.

  According to my information, Genesis was written sometime between 1513 and 1200 BC, not 4-6,000 years ago.

  the people who wrote it were looking further back than that and for want of a better word, 'speculating' the creation in the light of what they knew

  I completely agree. This is why I don't think it was inspired. Your version is excellent, it would still hold up today. Maybe less people would have seen it as an uninspired scientifically inaccurate account if it had been written that way.

  I can't improve on this argument from page 286 (in my copy) of Sam Harris' The End of Faith-

  To be sure, occult, alchemical, and conventionally mystical interpretations of various passages in the Bible and the Koran are as old as the texts themselves, but the problem... is that they are perfectly unrestrained by the contents of the texts themselves. One can interpret every text in such a way as to yield almost any mystical or occult instruction.

  A case in point: I have selected another book at random... The book is A Taste of Hawaii: New Cooking from the Crossroads of the Pacific... While it appears to be a recipe for wok-seared fish and shrimp cakes with ogo-tomato relish, we need only study its list of ingredients to know that we are in the presence of an unrivaled spiritual intelligence.

  snapper filet, cubed

  3 teaspoons, chopped scallions

  salt and freshly ground black pepper...

  The snapper filet, of course, is the individual himself- you and I- awash in the sea of existence. But here we find it cubed, which is to say that our situation must be remedied in all three dimensions of body, mind, and spirit.

  Three teaspoons of chopped scallions further partakes of the cubic symmetry, suggesting that that which we need add to each level of our being by way of antitode comes likewise in equal proportions. The import of the passage is clear: the body, mind, and spirit need to be tended to with the same care.

  Salt and freshly ground pepper: here we have the perennial invocation of opposites- the white and the black aspects of our nature. Both good and evil must be understood if we would fulfill the recipe for spiritual life. Nothing, afterall, can be excluded from the human experience... What is more, salt and pepper come to us in the form of grains, which is to say that our good and bad qualities are born of the tiniest of actions. Thus, we are not good or evil in general, but only by virtue of innumerable moments, which color the stream of our being by force of repetition...

  That such metaphorical acrobatics can be performed on almost any text- and that they are therefore meaningless- should be obvious.

  In the same way too, when you think there must be a deep meaningful message behind the story of God taking a rib from man and making woman, or the way God made everything in the account is some kind of metaphor for evolution, I feel that you're taking it too far. Any meaning whatsoever can be got from the Genesis account if it can be played around with like that.
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  Sad emo

  First:

  According to my information, Genesis was written sometime between 1513 and 1200 BC, not 4-6,000 years ago.

  I knew the dates but it was after 1am and my mental arithmetic skills were fading along with the rest of me!

  That was a good excerpt, thanks for posting it I tend to disagree slightly with his last sentence though - the way I see it is that if a text - yes any text, shows an individual something about themselves, or the universe around them, or God (if they believe in Him), then it ceases to be meaningless to that individual.

  You see a tree, I see a part of God's creation with its branches stretched toward heaven in praise, when the leaves rustle in the breeze, I hear their songs. We all see things different ways, there's a certain beauty in that diversity - and sometimes horror and pain too - the paradox of our existence.

  Back to your original topic, this is possibly why some Christians (and I think mouthy hinted at this) don't necessarily see sickness and disease as an entirely bad thing - therefore it's ok to seek a cure. They can see the paradox. It's not the experience itself that we should focus on - but rather what we do with it and what we learn from it - that's what keeps us growing and healing both as individuals and as the human race. The experience is in the moment, what we can learn from it lasts a lifetime.

  For some reason I'm reminded of the healing of the man at the Pool of Siloam - the guy who'd been crippled for 38 years, and Jesus saying to him "Do you want to get well?" - as if the guy was gonna say "no thanks"! And yet in his heart he was possibly quite happy in that 'comfort zone'. Paradox!!
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  jgnat

  serotonin, Christians are not homogenous in their beliefs or their approach to God. There's a segment that treats the bible as holy and flawless as God himself. This sets themselves up for all kinds of logical fallacies, as they try and reconcile over a thousand years' of literature in to a cohesive whole.

  Are there contradictions between the Genesis account and accounts of Jesus' compassion? Absolutely. Must I reconcile the two? I don't.

  From my own experience with God's actions in my life, He has restored and healed my family in many, many ways. But I and my children have not been spared all suffering. My personal conclusion is that in some circumstances, God is NOT all-powerful, but is constricted by a set of rules I am not privy to. That is, I prefer a loving God who wants to erase all suffering all the time, but can't. I know I am a kinder and better person for having come through the experiences, good and bad, that are the sum of my life.

  But I would be a fool to turn down an aspirin if I have a headache.
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  serotonin_wraith

  Some people seem to be satisfied for the time being with the paradoxes and contradictions. I don't think I personally can be. But I appreciate everyones responses and help.