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There is a scene from a series called Joan of Arcadia (a truly undervalued series from the early 2000s) where Joan asks teen boy God to show her a miracle, and he points to a tree. She says "that's just a tree" and he replies "Lets see you make one"
Do you believe in magic?
By this logic cancer is a miracle. God can be anything, as long as we're willing to torture and twist the meaning of the word to desperately grasp at a fake divine in a real world.
Oh yeah, I entirely follow that logic.
People "thank god" when a plane plummeting to the earth is "miraculously saved" from disaster, but they don't question why the plane started to plummet to earth in the first place. They don't ask why the god they are thanking caused the plane to plummet before saving it from exploding.
There's a character in "Studio 60 on The Sunset Strip" called Harriet Hayes who has a quote :-
My mother got cancer when I was fifteen. And I said, "Mom, how come you never say 'why me?’” and she said "I never ask God ‘Why me’ when the good things happened, so I shouldn’t ask now.”
Just so as you understand, I am from the group that would follow the second half of the title ("and we find magic everywhere"). I don't have a god -- Christian or otherwise -- however I am one for random philosophising, and for listening to the opinions of others when they are purely academic and not being forced on me :)
Also I cannot overstate how good a series "Joan of Arcadia" was for this.
Why wouldn't cancer be divine too?
Why would it be? If cancer, trees, and my ass are all divine, does the word "divine" mean anything at that point?
You are starting to see the beginnings of wisdom.
What is the definition of divine if the entire material universe is divine? And if everything is divine, how is that any sort of evidence or argument for the existence of a god?
Seeing the numinous in the material universe is no reason to jump all the way to deism or pantheism, if you ask me.
Yeah, that was kind of where I was going
Or, to put it another way.......
Then why bother to use the emotionally and theologically loaded term "divine?"
I wasn't the first one to use it.
And, as I said (a few posts up) in a more philosophical than antagonistic discussion (at least I hope it is that) then I am inclined to reply using the terms of those to whom I am replying.
I started off with a post about a tree being a miracle, at least from a certain point of view. I didn't mention divine until someone else brought it up :)
Ok, then replace "divine" in my last comment with "miracle". It's still a theologically and emotionally loaded term
That was kind of my point -- people associate "miracle" with good. With an act of God (whoever their God might be) but they don't see an unexplained act of badness the same way.
That was the debate that started all this :)
Very much so. To take the example of your ass, if you are still using toilet paper and no water you should consider using water to wash up too.
In more general terms, acknowledging the material world to be devine, demands more respect and gratitude towards it. Western capitalist societies are terribly lacking of that, which both shows in the careless destruction of creation as well as the unhappyness from a lack of appreciation of what creation gives us.
In regards to things we perceive as negative, there exists a deeper meaning behind the hardships we face too. Note that this is very different from what some evangelicalists claim, that everything that happens to a person would be a reflection of what that person "deserves", e.g. that the poor deserve to be poor and the rich deserve to be rich. That is directly contradictorary to all abrahamic scriptures.
Sure, Cancer can be a miracle if you think about it a certain way. Henrietta Lacks had cancer that helped science because her cells wouldn't stop growing.
Henrietta Lacks didn't "help science." Scientists stole her genetic and biological material without her consent and built entire careers on it because she was a poor Black woman who had no one to advocate for her or advise her.
Using Henrietta Lacks as an example of "cancer can be a miracle" without acknowledging this fact is truly tone-deaf, IMHO. Sure, you can argue that this "helped science," but by that logic, so did the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
Uh she most definitely did help. Yes, it was without her consent but it most definitely saved many lives. More than most doctors. And her cells measurably improved the lives of billions more. Saying that doesn't diminish what happened to her.
The cells they took from Henrietta did not harm her and would have been destroyed otherwise. The main problem was a lack of consent. You can't sell parts of your body for money anyway, so compensation would most likely have been zero.
The Syphilis study, by contrast, did nothing, produced no results, and harmed its patients:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study
You say that like the lack of consent was some trifling detail
She didn't have a say in it, so how did she personally help? I'm not trying to diminish the good that the research has done, but saying Henrietta Lacks helped science implies she made a conscious decision.
If I was sleeping and my wife took a glass of water from my bedside table and extinguished a fire, did I help put out the fire?
You are diminishing her help, whether you want to or not. People do things all the time without making a conscious decision, especially when it comes to bodily functions. Are you consciously breathing right now? Are you consciously converting food into energy and waste?
How would someone "consciously" donate valuable cells anyway? How would you know that your cells were some amazing breakthrough? All tissue donation is done unconsciously, usually while the patient is unconscious (or dead).
The consent issue is "trifling" compared to the amount of good it did. Her cells have literally helped billions of people and she wasn't hurt by the donation at all. It's an important ethical issue for armchair philosophers who can ignore the deaths that would have happened without this tool.
What's "trifling" is your comparison with the Tuskegee experiment, which was just cruelty in action that helped nobody.
The POS, who used to abuse me (and every other kid who he considered worthy of abuse), grew up, remained a POS, then got brain cancer and died.
I don't know how many prayers it took for that to happen, but I'm sure there were thousands.
His cancer made the world a little bit better.
This is why I'm agnostic, it's just a good excuse to get myself out of semantic disputes over the meaning of the word god.
Is the trees god? Sure Johnny, the trees can be god, but I have to go now.