Why having chronic illness hasn’t turned me to god
As an atheist, I am often told that I shouldn’t criticise religion, as it offers comfort to people in difficult situations. When you suffer every day, the faithful tell me, you need the hope and meaning that religion gives you – the implication of course being that atheism is a luxury, something that only privileged, comfortable, healthy, able-bodied people can indulge in.
These same people are often surprised to learn that I have a debilitating chronic medical condition, and in fact I do suffer every day. And yet, I have still not turned to god. I still do not believe in an afterlife, despite the fact that in my Earthly life, I will probably never feel truly healthy or ‘normal’ again. Among the community of the chronically ill and disabled, I’m by no means alone in my atheism, but I am in a minority.
The vast majority of people with my medical condition are religious, as evidenced by messages on the internet support group of which I am a member. There are hundreds of members, and messages with religious content are a daily occurrence. Often, sufferers require surgery – when this happens, emails whip round asking for ‘surgery prayers’. When an operation is successful, god gets part or all of the credit: on one occasion, a woman wrote that she knew the surgeons had done their bit, but the real reason she survived and benefited from the surgery was that god had been watching over her.
Of course, when things go wrong, it’s a pretty safe bet that god doesn’t get the blame. As though the deity were a favourite child who can do no wrong, there is no end to people’s willingness to let god off the hook. When someone dies of the condition (deaths are thankfully rare), god is praised for taking them up to heaven to be with him. When surgery fails to help a person and they continue to suffer, again god is thanked and praised for not making things any worse. When things do get worse, it is presumed that god has a mysterious reason for allowing this, and the prayers continue to be solicited, the thanks still given. One woman wrote thanking god that she could hear the children playing outside while she was ill in bed; presumably it didn’t occur to her to blame god for the fact she was bed-bound in the first place. And so it goes.
I do not find these types of messages either comforting or inspiring, and nor have they convinced me that I must turn to god in my hour of need. I find these views irrational and distasteful, and reading them has galvanised my atheism. In fact, I have found that being an unbeliever actually helps when coming to terms with chronic illness.
If one believes in an all-powerful deity, it follows that this deity must have caused or allowed one’s illness. It follows that your suffering could be relieved, but isn’t for some reason. This raises a multitude of questions: why would god do that, have I sinned, am I a bad person, is it a test, and so on. The search for ‘why’ is made so much more complicated and anxiety-provoking if you posit a supposedly compassionate god. Whereas, I am comforted by the explanation that one of my genes is faulty, that this was a random event, and there is no further ‘why’ to be investigated. I am not being punished or tested – I have just been unlucky. Bad things do happen to good people.
One of the ways in which the religious chronically ill seem to reconcile their faith in an all-powerful, compassionate god with their own medical conditions is to subscribe to the view that their suffering is somehow beautiful or meaningful. I have a self-help book written for the chronically ill, which mostly fulfils its stated function as helpful, except for when it comes to how to find meaning in one’s condition. Then it lapses into a bit of vague blather about Jesus on the cross (surely the most potent symbol of how Christianity can fetishise suffering), before quoting a woman in very ill health, described as “a model for us of graceful endurance”, who cheerfully opined: “God never gives us more than we can bear.” [1] Which raises the question, what kind of deity is this who knows how much each individual can bear, and decides to cause or allow suffering up to that limit but only for certain people? A sadistic one? A contrary one? A psychotic one? I can’t decide, it’s just too bizarre. Likewise, why is it good to endure pain and other symptoms ‘gracefully’? What’s wrong with being pissed off? How is denying reality and real feelings supposed to help people cope?
There is perhaps one Christian figure who has done more damage than most in the ‘suffering is beautiful’ vein: Mother Theresa, who called suffering ‘a gift from God’. Many atheists, particularly Christopher Hitchens, have written extensively criticising her. Her acolytes, however, continue to spread her poisonous message: only a few months ago, on the UK television programme The Big Questions, one such acolyte spoke earnestly about Mother Theresa’s vision, how she saw meaning and beauty in the suffering of those in her care. Perhaps she was unaware that Mother Theresa also denied them medication and a proper bed to sleep in [2].
My response to this is simple: suffering is not beautiful. When you feel like crap, it is not an amazing spiritual experience: you just feel like crap, and you want the feeling to go away. The idea that there is anything positive about suffering at all is profoundly insulting, and as though it weren’t bad enough on its own, there is also the knock-on implication that if people fail to find their suffering anything other than an ultimately uplifting experience, they are somehow a deficient person (Barbara Ehrenreich confronts this issue in her book about breast cancer, Smile Or Die). Essentially, ‘suffering is beautiful/meaningful’ meme is just a dodge whereby the religious ignore the inherent contradiction in the idea of a compassionate, illness-causing deity.
So how do I find meaning in my own suffering? Basically, I don’t. My view is that meaning is essentially a human concept, so we can choose to find meaning in whatever we like, and not everything in our lives has to have it. For me, my medical conditions don’t have any meaning, they’re just there. My suffering doesn’t have any meaning, it just happens, and I would prefer that it didn’t. My life as a whole has meaning though, in that it means something to me, regardless of my medical status.
As for mentally coping with a lifetime of ill health, there are many psychological techniques that can help a chronically ill person, which do not involve maintaining an unreasonable hope that there will be an afterlife in which the pain and other symptoms will magically disappear, or the delusion that one is somehow getting brownie points from god by enduring one’s suffering ‘gracefully’. In not holding out for eternity, I direct my attention to things which give me pleasure and distract me from my illness in the here and now – my partner, my family and friends, my garden, a good film, music, and so on. When things get very difficult, I go for counselling to help work through emotions such as anger, frustration and anxiety – emotions that I am allowed to feel and express, seeing as I’m under no obligation to be grateful for my ‘gift’. It works – and there is no need to believe in anything supernatural.
Some people may argue, what if all you have is god? What if there’s no partner, no family or friends, no garden, no counsellor etc… just suffering? My response to that is, you may as well ask what if you’re stranded on a desert island and all you have for company is a volleyball with a face drawn on it? An imaginary friend is an imaginary friend, whether it’s Wilson from Castaway or Jesus, and just because comfort is derived from them when a person is desperate, it doesn’t mean that they must therefore really exist, and, more importantly, it doesn’t mean that the belief in their actual existence should be coddled and supported at the expense of real help.
Surprising as it may seem, I don’t actually blame people for grasping at straws when they are suffering chronic illness: when my first symptoms began several years ago, I did this myself by indulging in some alternative medicine. (It’s not something I would do now.) We also live in a society that encourages belief in the supernatural, that tells us faith is a virtue, that approves of the false and contradictory ‘comfort’ of religious practice. Perhaps, with more emphasis on reason in our society, people would react to and cope with their illnesses more effectively, as they realised that they weren’t being punished, or tested, or expected to find their suffering meaningful.
These days, having been accurately diagnosed, I am lucky enough to receive the help and support of excellent trained medical professionals; sadly, several years of illness have taught me that medicine is a woefully underfunded discipline, as is social care, which provides assistance for those living with ill health and disability. Real help for chronically ill people does not involve prayer and false hope, it involves money being made available for training of new doctors, for research into conditions and development of new treatments, for the provision of disability aids, for the financial support of sick people and their carers. Whenever a new research paper is published about my condition, I get a real, true sense of hope and comfort from the knowledge that people are working to help me and others like me. It is a wonderful feeling that no god could ever give me. Conversely, I get pissed off whenever I read about the church’s ‘charitable’ tax-exempt status, or the newest faith school opening, funded by public money: because religious institutions are draining money away from real-world, scientifically proven ways to help people.
It is ironic, furthermore, that in order to get to the clinic of one of my specialist consultants at UCLH in London, I have to go past the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, where patients are given publicly-funded vials of water as placebos for their ailments. Enough said, really.
Religion, and indeed anything supernatural, is not truly a comfort in hard times: in the long run it actually makes hard times harder, and often more complicated and confusing. This, added to the fact that I refuse to compromise my reason, is why I have never turned to god in all the years I’ve been ill, and I never will. Atheism and skepticism are not luxuries: they are necessities.
[1] Paul J Donoghue & Mary E Siegel, Sick and Tired of Feeling Sick and Tired (2000), pp xvii-xviii
[2] Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position (1995), pp 39-42
Thank you for this lovely and inspiring post. As I’ve gotten older and more prone to the ills that flesh is heir to I am ever more conscious of how little religion has to offer to the suffering.
I recently read Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America by Barbara Ehrenreich. When the author was diagnosed with breast cancer, all the suppor she could find was “positive thinking.” Fear, anger, anxiety were all forbidden in the culture of what amounts to “blame the victim.” All you need to overcome poverty, illness, and relationship problems is the right mindset. Sort of a religion for the non-religious. It’s a very good book.
Thank you for this, Amy. Your thoughts closely reflect those of my wife during her struggle with MS, which, in the end, led her to Zurich and Dignitas. Although she was the wife of a parish priest (in Canada), she was not a believer, and often reflected, in the journal that she kept, on her suffering in relation to the idea of god or life hereafter. She found no comfort either in the idea that there might be a god, or that there should be a life to follow this one. As CS Lewis points out, at a lucid moment in A Grief Observed, given our experience here there is absolutely no reason to think that, if there were another life to follow this one, it would be any less miserable than the one we have now. (The saddest moment in that book comes when he says, “I can believe again now.” An act of betrayal in my way of understanding, and of almost palpable self-deception.)
At one point in her journal my wife says that she is convinced that Nietzsche must be right in saying that god is dead, but at a later point, when the limits of science had been reached, and there was no more relief, either from the ongoing assault on her body, or the increasing pain, she suggested that perhaps, after all, god did exist, and was a sick, sadistic bastard who took pleasure in giving pain.
But the idea of pain and suffering as redemptive, in the Christian way, is just a way for Christians to keep their beliefs despite the contradiction involved. It’s also the reason that Christians continue to oppose assisted dying for those who have reached the limits of suffering and disability, since they must believe, since god is in charge, that suffering has a purpose. The purpose that suffering had, when Jesus was crucified, was to take away the sins of the world. (Well, that’s the idea anyway.) Somehow, they think, since people still suffer after Jesus “paid the price of sin”, our suffering must be related to Jesus’ suffering. The biggest problem with this is that this should mean that we should not interfere with it at all, but bear it nobly, since if god knows how much we can bear, and will give us no more than we can bear, and bearing it is a spiritual good, then we should bear all that god gives us. You won’t find many Christians doing that, and refusing pain medication, but it is strictly inconsistent with the claim that suffering has a spiritual purpose.
But religion is filled with contradictions like this. The reason there are contradictions, of course, is that there is no god, and the belief that there is collides with reality. That more people don’t notice this is, I believe, because recognising self-deception would, for many, completely destroy the world of meaning they have created to protect themselves from suffering and death, even when that world is already in the process of collapsing. It is much better, I think, to face serious illness in the way that you do, without illusions. That way, at least, as my wife said, you can learn things about yourself you never knew. Fooling yourself with goddy dreams is, after all, to refuse to learn anything at all.
I wonder if you ever share your disbelief with the people in the internet support group. Perhaps others feel the same way, and would welcome expressions of disbelief, instead of having to pretend to believe things which have, through suffering, gone dead on them. There must be some.
Once again, thank you for your reflections. I hope that, despite your illness and your suffering, there are moments of joy and insight, love and good fellowship. These are the things that count.
Thank you, Amy. Thank you.
Thank you. The beauty of cold reason is invigorating. I married into a family affected by HD, which has made me familiar with the religious rationalizations of people undergoing extraordinary suffering. I am both sympathetic toward, and incredulous of, such rationalization. If your life is centered on an understanding that we owe tribute to a supernatural agent, then I can understand how you have no choice but to regard your suffering as redemptive. But how can you possibly explain why the designer who demands your devotion can’t be bothered to do a sixty base pair deletion?
I too am a confirmed atheist nor do I knowingly hold any spiritual beliefs but I can’t help but object to the ultra-rationalist tone of this post. I can’t really see what is so objectionable about holding irrational beliefs along side rational ones. Many (maybe most?) atheists find themselves unwittingly praying at certain moments in our lives as in “Oh god, let him/her be OK” or even “God, where’s the bloody bus?”. There are also countless examples of implicit & explicit superstitious thoughts & actions that help us in some unquantifiable way through our lives. I can’t see what is wrong with this – providing of course it isn’t instead of rational thought & actions.
Even when we say something to ourselves like, “I hope everything is going to be OK” what measurable good does this do & to whom is it addressed? It may as well be god. & of course god is good. He/she/it may not exist as a supernatural being or whatever but it exists as a concept – as an addressee of our hope. We or a loved one goes into an operating theatre and our real faith lies in the expertise of the doctors & nurses & we may focus on the actual odds & what we know of the science & medicine involved but surely we still hope & sometimes against reason. We still cross our fingers. We want a good result – & for many people god means good. So when god is addressed in this way it is like addressing the very source of goodness. Of course this god is not blamed when the result is bad.
The suffering argument is more complicated & I have no sympathy whatsoever with the view that pain & suffering is in any way a good thing. Perhaps it makes us stronger in some ways but is also weakens us in others & anyway it is only after it has ceased that we can think like this. Pain is always ultimately unendurable & destructive. But again, irrational thoughts, actions and beliefs can help & I don’t know why. The rather sick sounding “God never gives us more than we can bear” is a way of facing the unbearable or unendurable. The perversity of the statement lies in the idea that god/goodness is the source of the suffering. My atheist interpretation or version would be that “more than we can bear” is inconceivable to us. All pain is ultimately unbearable but we bear it anyway & for some people this capacity for enduring the unendurable is god-given. The real problems begin in religious power where the human capacity to endure suffering & to cling to hope is exploited by others.
I am too aware of my own irrationality to feel so self assured in the face of the beliefs of others. I also don’t see what the big deal is about the irrationality and moral inconsistencies of individual beliefs (the church & religious power is a different matter) – they appear to do neither harm nor good. Although I completely understand why all those god/prayer comments on the forums would be be so annoying.
The idea that God does not give people more suffering than they can bear is morally disgusting and if there were a God it would be false: have those who assert this ‘comforting truth’ thought about the proposition for even five seconds? Or looked clearly at reality? And imagine if it were true, and that God spends his time providing carefully calibrated doses of suffering to everyone…
Again, something that became very clear when a very close friend of mine (brought up a Methodist, but since late adolescence a-religious) was dying of cancer some years ago, was the way in which primitive ideas of agency and punishment to account for his situation were aroused, not only in himself when his spirits were low but in others, one of whom (a New-Ager) told him to his face that his cancer was due to the savagery of the criticism he had written (since strong criticism of bad books and films involves the harbouring of negative feelings), and others of whom (Buddhist or Christian) assumed it was a punishment for some un-named sin. But being New-Agers, Christians or Buddhists, they were unable to see how primitive their responses were. Badgers bite the trap that holds them, assuming it has agency and has bitten them. In Pascal Boyer’s excellent critique of religion, he quotes some anthropologist in Africa (Evans-Pritchard, perhaps) who says that though the members of the tribe he was studying were perfectly aware that there was a good material reason for, say, the store-house collapsing (termites), nevertheless the fact that it had collapsed at that particular time and injured those particular people required further explanation in terms of agency – which meant some supernatural agent or a witch was involved. There is surely no difference between this magical way of thinking and that of the assorted New-Agers, Christians and Buddhists mentioned above. I think it was the Bishop of York who asserted that the floods in Northern England of a few years ago were due to the growing acceptance of homosexual unions, and I recall the responses of many Christians to the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina as well as to the tsunami in East Asia. Fundamentally, all religions derive from and depend upon the same primitive and powerful feelings, and those who suppose that their religion is more advanced are deluding themselves.
Thank you for writing this. I hope that all goes as well with you as it can.
@Gordon. You wrote:
That may be true, though I have not heard it used in that way. It is usualy employed by someone else trying to convince someone who is suffering severely that they should be able to bear it. It’s an accusation, not a promise.
Religion is rules, I don’t believe in religion. Don’t do this, Don’t do that, pray this way and pray this way. I accepted Jesus as my personal savior 5 years ago. My life hasn’t been the same sense. Has it been a bed of roses, not at all. I’ve been tested repeatedly, which has made me appreciate my faith more and sharpened me. As the bible mentions, “As Iron Sharpens Iron, So Man Sharpens Man”. (Proverbs 27:17) I can’t speak why you are chronicially ill. Some of the best and most admired people have been through extreme struggles. Maybe that is Gods plan for you.
Sounds like you are definitely a person can describe what has happened and think through things. All I can reply is something that stuck, I’d rather live on earth believing there is a God then dieing and find out there isn’t a God than the other way around. Eternity is a long time. :) Two books that I found inspiring is 90 minutes in Heaven and 23 minutes in Hell. These are two personal accounts of the “after life”. I chose Heaven. Most people who care for others like Mother Teresa don’t want anything in return, seemed to be “good people”. They aren’t greedy, selfish, prideful. Traits that either a God fearing person or not usually in my experience aren’t appreciated too much. Most people I know would rather have a patient, caring and compassionate, sounds like motherly qualities.
I question repeatedly why God would chose this type of way to “implement” his plan. The bible says basically he is God and I’m not. Because of Sin, things are broken in this world. That is just the way it is. After some thinking, I accept that as fact and don’t worry about it. I hope and yes “pray” your chronic illness passes and you can experience peace on earth. Having accepted Jesus as my savior has provided a heavenly peace to me. I sense some bitterness in the post. According to Jesus, I can hand over tough things I can’t handle to him. I’ve done that a lot, things seem to disappear. I’ve been blessed and thank there is a God, who shared his son Jesus!
Eric, I’m sure you are right – that’s it’s mostly one of those things said to the sufferer by one who is not suffering. In a way that’s my point – that we always need to be careful about our opinions on the suffering of others including opinions about their beliefs.
On Amy’s point about religion taking the credit for the successes of science here is a good (as in bad) example of outrageous appropriation by the church of a ‘miracle’. The man walked out of hospital after an amazingly successful operation – gee I guess that must have been cardinal Newman and god, not them mere mortal doctors & nurses.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11186584
On that BBC story – notice how the insane claim of a ‘divine favour’ is the headline while medical science only appears much further down as “skeptical experts’.
I fear we must expect a rash of this garbage in the British media as the visit from the ex-Nazi in a silly hat approaches.
Hi Amy, You have put into words thoughts that have been rumbling around in my head for ever such a long time now – thank you.
For the past 17 yrs or so I’ve been a Jehovah’s Witness and have been trying (unsuccessfully) to reconcile pain and suffering with a supposedly loving god. Eventually I gave up in this fruitless pursuit and left the JWs – which in itself was a huge relief. As a chronic pain and migraine sufferer I’m extremely angry at god right now, but I’m working through that and hope to get to the point where I can believe he doesn’t exist – it would be much less complicated.
Reading your viewpoint on the matter has been extremely helpful for me. I trust that medical science will keep moving ahead – for your benefit and mine, as well as the millions of people around the world who simply want a decent quality of life free from pain and suffering.
Best wishes – Magenta
Just want to say thanks for all the supportive comments! I’m really touched at the response and thanks for sharing your own stories.
Madeirapark, that’s one of the books I mentioned in the piece – it must have a different name on the other side of the Atlantic, because it’s called ‘Smile Or Die’ here in the UK. The effects on chronically ill people of the cult of ‘positive thinking’ would be a whole post in itself probably, but it does work in much the same way as a religion, I agree. I’ve been on the receiving end of that mindset and I do find it irrational and very aggravating!
Gordon, I think hope (as in hoping things will be okay, even against the odds) is very different from religious belief. Desiring a positive outcome is surely not the same as asking a supernatural being to provide that outcome for you? I don’t think hope is necessarily addressed to anyone or anything, it’s just an emotion we all feel and express when we want things to go our way. As long as it’s possible for things to go our way, that hope is not irrational.
Magenta, thanks for sharing your story and I’m glad my article was helpful to you. I wonder if you might find the videos of Evid3nc3 helpful too… he has documented his journey from Christian to atheist in a series of short films which are very thoughtfully (and quite beautifully) made. You can find them on his YouTube channel here: http://www.youtube.com/user/Evid3nc3#p/c/A0C3C1D163BE880A/0/mSy1-Q_BEtQ
I just wanted to add as well, in response to Eric, that yes thank you, I do have “moments of joy and insight, love and good fellowship” (very nicely put btw) in my life. What’s more my lack of belief in god has led me to appreciate these all the more.
i’d also just like to say that i find this post extremely inspiring and should be required reading for anyone that wonders why G!D would Punish them. religion is treated as a comfort blanket by too many people, but it is an infantile concept of religion that leads us to think “oh, why is G!D doing this to me?” or to thank G!D for arranging the universe so as to benefit me. this sort of cosmic pavlovianism is not for grown-ups. a grown-up G!D would presumably expect us to have adult responses, like “don’t expect a giant beard to appear and make you better”. if prayer helps, great! if it doesn’t, then don’t bother. there is a famous Talmudic story (menahoth 44b) which illustrates that we need to accept that the universe just has to be this way, but that does not preclude us from nonetheless trying to do the right thing. i don’t think this is the most clearly argued comment i’ve ever made, but i thought i should say something nonetheless.
b’shalom
bananabrain
Amy, thanks for writing a clearly argued piece. It chimes with my own experience, having been diagnosed with MS some years back (and had only the other month to politely bat away the attentions of my father’s wife who has discovered ‘faith healing’ in her retirement).
A year or so back I was on holiday with a religious friend who had just gone through a fairly unpleasant divorce and who remarked to me “I’m just glad I know that there is a purpose to it all, that it was meant to happen, that it’s part of the plan”. Whereas I find a certain reassurance in being pretty damned certain that my illness is just plain old bad luck. Not the game of some interfering god, not some test I’m meant to pass. It’s no one’s fault, nobody did this to me, It’s just accident of biology and nothing more.
Thanks for a really well-written comment on the futility of religion and how people insist on trusting it despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
But theists have long engaged in deceit and lies to justify their delusions. So none of this should surprise rational thinkers. No matter what happens, it’s never god’s fault. But instead, praise god it wasn’t worse!
How anyone can think that a god would intervene in their personal problems when 27,000 children around the world are dying of starvation and malnutrition at every moment is another great mystery. Is it arrogance, stupidity, or a combination of the two?
i am a doctor. i suffered from asthma as a child. One moment i am are wheezing, gasping for breath, thinking i am going to die. (No amount of prayer or alternative medicine which my parents tried for a long time ever helped me an iota.) Then one day i get an adrenalin injection and the next moment i am are breathing freely. i decided to become a doctor then.
Modern medicine and science have increased our life expectancy from about 28 yrs to 78 yrs in the last few 100 yrs. it has alleviated pain and suffering to a very great extend, but there is no way we can eradicate all disease and suffering. There are societies with 100% believers where modern medicine hasn’t yet reached, places where the life expectancy is still <30%. We cant even imagine the misery of life in these places.
i despise the doctors who call themselves believers.
The real misery most of us undergo is due to a lack of friends and social support. Even the most painfully debilitated of my patients want to continue living if they have a loving family or friends and i have seen socially isolated healthy people killing themselves because they lost an argument.
That is what religions exploit. That is why the Mother Theresas of the world are popular. They make you feel like part of a group, and we are ready to lie, deceive, kill, rape, plunder, suffer or die in order to belong to that group.
As long as we cant have stable socially supportive societies based on reason, religions will rule.
Ashok, you’re absolutely right about social support. It’s a very good point. The times when I’ve found it hardest to cope with my illness have been the times when I’ve had fewer supportive people around me (or no supportive people, at some points).
I agree that religions exploit this, with another of their insidious ideas – that they are the only (or the best) source of compassion, friendliness and support in society. Not true, of course. The vast majority of supportive people in my life are other atheists.
I’d add as well that one of the reasons why chronically ill people often find themselves socially isolated is partly because of myths about illness that abound in society, such as illness is weakness, only happens to ‘negative’ people (this ties in to the first comment and Barbara Ehrenreich’s book), sick people just aren’t ‘trying’ hard enough, or are malingerers or scroungers, etc. These kinds of irrational beliefs can and do cause chronically ill people to be rejected by friends and family.
i am glad to have this conversation with you Amy, thank you. Haha, i admire your courage to seek comfort from within your convictions. A million thoughts come to my mind.
The sad truth is that we are all selfish. We wouldn’t waste our time on anyone who is not of any benefit to us. Unfortunately most of us see benefit only in terms of material things and sick people are of little benefit to friends and society materially, except for those who want to exploit them. The religions, the charlatans, and sadly many doctors benefit materially. i wouldn’t miss the people who avoid me because of the myths they believe in. Their beliefs are their excuse.
Having said that, what more can i say? The responsibility to get what we want lies within each of us. We have to seek out like minded friends and the means to have our simple pleasures. However, illness severely curtails our ability and the will to seek both. (Ha, that sounds even worse.) But wait, we are not dead yet.
i have a few rare friends. Friends i share my thoughts and pleasures with and for whom I make an effort. I have learned that as long as my brain is functioning i can find joy. The joy comes from being alive and is multiplied by the possibility of sharing. Nothing else matters and nothing will, especially when i am dead.
I wish you Amy, friends with whom you can share your thoughts and pleasures. Cheers!
P.S. Being incurably ill is not the end of the world, being dead is.
I met a middle eastern dude online on this game I play who’s a muslim, and a diabetic. I asked him why he would worship a god that made him diabetic.
After years of intense pain, I have a lot of questions about this belief that God doesn’t give us more suffering than we can bear.
But, there is one question I really, really want somebody who believes that to answer. What exactly do you think being unable to bear something entails?
Do you just die? Does your body just say, “No, no, no. This is entirely too much pain. I’m out.”
Do you go insane and become so completely divorced from reality that you no longer even perceive it as pain. You think it’s a puppy licking your ear or something?
Do you think people actually pass out from pain like in movies? I wish. I really wish.
To me, pain is this thing that I don’t have the luxury to be unable to bear. I have to bear it, however much of it there is. It seems to me that the reason people are so convinced that God never gives us more pain than we can bear is that there is no such thing as more pain than you can bear.
Calling pain unbearable is poetic. It’s hyperbolic. It’s an epithet. It doesn’t reflect some reality in which there is bearable pain and unbearable pain. All pain is bearable and that is the most terrifying thing about pain.
Gwen, I’m going to completely ignore the atheism aspect for this post, and answer you as best as I can from my own perspective. I don’t know yours, I don’t even know my partner’s.
Pain being unbearable is not poetic. As I said, I don’t know how bad your pain is. When mine is really bad, I can’t sleep, at least I can still go to the toilet but it can take 10 minutes of agony, but above all, yes, when pain is unbearable, and you haven’t been able to sleep for days and nights, eventually you do pass out after a long period of hallucination (with puppies licking your ear).
I’m lucky. 95% of the time I just ache. My partner cannot function as a normal human being for 90% of the time, we’ve both been like that for that for the last 10 years (plus in her case), and we are both only just turned 40.
You and I have learned to deal with chronic pain, my partner has not, sadly. But none of us has experience pain so bad that we’ve died from it. My grandfather survived the war in a Japanese concentration camp. His brother (as fit as he could be eating mostly glue-starch for 4 years) died months before liberation, having heard that his wife and children had died (they hadn’t). The “will to live” is a powerful thing, and there is nothing mystical about it.
As much as I would love to rant about “Mother” Teresa and her clinics, in the civilized west (Europe) it is not the responsibility of the church to deal with pain. There are plenty of doctors who don’t understand pain, and although chronic illness need not imply pain at all, it is by far the most common “seriously bad” side-effect. I’d prefer pain to blindness (although even that is not always permanent/chronic now!)
Anyway, Gwen, this is not “at” you. I stumbled here, and you were the last poster. Interesting thread and I’ll revisit it, and explore this site too.
Thank you for posting this. I’m not chronically ill, but I have wondered from time to time why people often insist on god when they are. It’s always seemed odd to me. I always felt like if I were in their shoes I would have the same thoughts that you do. I would think about it the same way. I would feel better knowing that the illness was not some punishment for something I did. I’ve never thought god would be much of a comfort.
As for the whole thing about god not giving us more than we can handle, if that were the case, no one would ever commit suicide. Just saying, for those people, if they believe in god, they sure seem like they couldn’t handle what he gave them. To me that’s proof that that whole way of thinking is crap.
Aren’t we missing the forest for the trees? What most of us are concerned about is how falsehood permeates every aspect of our lives. It is not just god and pain.
From how to manage our pain, how to make this world a better place to live in, how to spend the taxpayers money to our morals and sexuality, we practice blatant hypocrisy. Why do we allow it and waste the short lives we have?
When we are brain washed from birth to believe in utter falsehoods as absolute truth on the basis of faith, we lose the capacity to reason. Truth will have no value anymore. Try reasoning with a believer.
As long as we are a bunch of self deceptive believers, a meaningful life based on truth will be impossible. A few scattered individuals trying to live a rational life in such a society….ha! you know what i mean. Tell you what i am going to do. I’ll get a bunch of my pals (i am sure at least two will respond) in the weekends make a barbecue, sing, dance and do what we please. F@#$ god!
Here is a link to a sample guideline for management of chronic pain. Make sure you find a doctor who is familiar with it. Open the link and download the PDF files there to read.
http://www.icsi.org/guidelines_and_more/gl_os_prot/musculo-skeletal/pain__chronic__assessment_and_management_of_14399/pain__chronic__assessment_and_management_of_14400.html
Rod,
Would you please, please, please not do that. If you want to talk about your pain, go right ahead. I know how that feels. Find some support or just relate your experience without using my post as an excuse to do it.
I would welcome an honest response to my comment. But I have to require you to make some honest attempt to understand what it is I’m saying. You did not do that. The following paragraph is just one example of the evidence I found for this.
I didn’t claim that unbearable pain was poetic. I said calling it unbearable is poetic. I didn’t just use the word poetic. I also used the words hyperbole and epithet. Then I said that those words don’t reflect reality. So, I wasn’t talking about the pain itself. I wrote about the words we use to describe it. And I did it redundantly. Yet you still managed to completely misconstrue my words. You chose the one word I used that you could equivocate with and ignored the others. It almost seems wilful.
It is definitely inconsiderate, unfair, indolent and dismissive.
My point was that pain is not literally unbearable. If you disagree, perhaps you could answer the one question I said I really wanted answered. What quality makes it unbearable? What is the one thing that changes bearable pain into unbearable pain? I want to know where you think that line is.
If calling pain unbearable is not poetic, if it is an accurate description, please to clarify.
Pain itself will not cause you to pass out, hallucinate or die. Sleep deprivation will do all of those things. My understanding is that it can kill you faster than water deprivation. Because of that, sleep deprivation is literally unbearable. We are literally incapable of enduring sleep deprivation. It seems to me that your position is that pain is unbearable when it causes something that is unbearable despite the fact that the pain itself is not the thing that can not be born. I don’t find that very convincing but it’s fair enough.
Gwen,
We are both fortunate that we can bear our pain, and that we deal with it without thanking something other than random luck. My point is that not everybody has that fortune.
Chronic illness can be fatal, and it can be painful, but it need not be either. But in the case where it is both, such as (possibly!) incurable cancer, sufferers fight to live if they have the will, but may not do so if the pain is too bad and they have little to live for.
To re-rail: there are people who have been brought up religiously who will use their imaginary friend in such cases. It probably doesn’t work quite as well (in terms of staying alive) when you consider that they think they go and sit on clouds and play harps if they don’t manage, but if it makes them happy, then let them.
Just don’t let them indoctrinate children with that before the kids are able to think rationally.
‘I am lucky enough to receive the help and support of excellent trained medical professionals’ Indicates you are thankful and like Gordan was expressing, who is this gratitude directed towards.
What is reality? You were nothing, you did not exist and you were brought into existence, given life and you will die; stop wasting your time trying to figure out why people believe in God or not its not your problem and does not affect your death in any way; why would you hope for the betterment of others what compels you to pull others away from the belief of GOD?
If you are unable to comprehend something you believe in it. Science is limited in what it can provide us in assumptions of the beginning of creation but you choose to believe in it? I wasn’t there to see it happen neither was any scientist or you but all believe in something.
Just because we have an idea how we are formed and the processes involved does not necessitate in disbelieving in God.
One thing I love is atheists kinda acknowledge an external force like ‘Mother Nature’ but can’t believe in God and they spend more time thinking about God then believers do!!
Reality, something I love about theists is how they are able to ignore reality despite overwhelming evidence that is in their faces every day. They would rather believe lies and fantasies because it makes them feel good or because they were brainwashed into it at an early age.
Because you do not understand something doesn’t mean it is supernatural. It means that, at present, you do not have the knowledge to understand it. If the ancient Egyptians saw someone flying in a sailplane, they would have thought it was the “gods”. They had no knowledge of the laws of aerodynamics even though those laws were as much in effect then as they are now.
What compels me to “pull away from the belief of god?” My ability to think for myself, reject the brainwashing of my youth, and the plain evidence of my senses.
I’m sorry for you and anyone else that is unable to do these simple things, too.
BTW, the “Mother Nature” is only an expression to cover well-understood natural events such as rain, clouds, earthquakes, and tress growing. How like a theist to try to use a simple common expression with no real connotations of the supernatural as a logical argument. But, if you have no facts or rational arguments, lies and deception are all you have left.
A lucid, chilling, frightening comment, Gwen.
make a real friend….please…everybody
If “god” never gave people struggles they could not handle, suicides in the form of an attempt to escape that which seems unbearable would not exist.
I too am an atheist with a chronic disorder (gastrointestinal) and found this post very uplifting to read as I share similar if not exact views with you on this particular subject. Though when I was a lot younger and suffered, I did mostly believe in a god, and it was extremely confusing trying to rationalize the reasons for my suffering, as you say.
But now, in considering some four billion years of evolution and some three hundred trillion cells obeying local rules to orchestrate a body that functions and a mind that thinks, things make much more sense, and it is quite amazing more things don’t go wrong genetically. Existentially, things are much simpler as an atheist.
Thank you for your interesting post.
I have leukemia. I also practice medicine, serving all ages and many cultures in a low cost practice for those without health insurance.
Hopefully, I embody the kind, ethical atheist that religious folks refuse to believe exists. I treat my patients with warmth, kindness, respect, and 20 years of experience.
Dealing with my illness through truth and science far exceeds any comfort that believing in an invisible friend might offer me.
When I die, I might be remembered as someone who cared, and who laughed, and helped. I also believe that the way I’ll feel after I die will be very much like the way I felt before I was born.
You are the voice of reason. I am a fence sitter though – I like to think there is “something” out there looking after us but if there’s not, then I also know that I can turn to my fellow humanbeings for help and comfort during times of struggle and change. I found this posting of yours very refreshing and the accompanying comments really interesting. Thanks.
Thank you, Amy.
Thank you so much for this post. I stumbled on it at just the right time. I have had a chronic illness since birth, and over the last year or two, I have started to decline even further. I find solace and support in my internet groups and with my friends who know what Im going through, but for many of them, religion is their focus. Atheism is in the minority to begin with, but enter the chronic/ serious illness world? The number drops even more substantially. Again, thank you for writing this. It always feels good to know someone is thinking in the same way.
Thank you for this post. I really needed to read something like this. I was recently diagnosed with the autoimmune disease Myasthenia gravis, I am also an atheist and I feel very uncomfortable around religion. I have joined a lot of support groups online and god is mentioned so often, as is prayer. It makes me feel even more alone because I feel like I would be judged if I stated my view. I don’t want people praying for me and telling me this is gods plan. All I can think to that is “fuck god” because if “he” is the one that is responsible for this awfulness than I’m more pissed off than if this is just a freak thing.
I believe in science and the universe. All I was is support for what I’m going through without encountering god along the way.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Your post has meant so much and has put into words all the thoughts and feelings I have had over the past 5 years.
Again, thank you.
If there is a “god” it is preventing me from posting
properly. Regardless, I appreciate your views and want to say thanks. See. It only let’s me write in italic. Strange.
That last post wasn’t meant to be funny. I am very frustrated because my phone wont let me type my full opinion. Anyways, it’s not acting up right now, so I suffer from an illness of not my own fault, and am sharing my frustration. Thanks for keeping me away from my suicidal thoughts.