Ironically, we studied the book in Literature class in college but I don't remember any of this being discussed, but back then I was too busy studying Biochemistry and my pre med science stuff to pay attention to the superficial cliches discussed in our various humanities classes that we had to take.
But when I was in medical school, one of our Cardiologists, in the midst of a lecture about heart disease, related a case of a person who lived who should have died, and then commented: That is why most doctors are not religious, but they do believe in God: Because we see people who should have lived yet die, and we see people like this person who should have died (according to strict scientific data) but nevertheless lived. So we figure there must be a reason for the suffering we see, and why someone lives or someone dies despite our actions, because if we didn't have faith in this, we would go crazy.
David Warren's essay on suffering and why his mother was an atheist: because of the suffering she saw as a nurse.
My late mother was an atheist. Of course she believed in God. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t have argued with Him, for seventy years. She would have just “forgotten about the Guy.”...
She would even spite Him. She decided this on a walk: that she would be a good person, without His help. She would show Him up. She would drop all these pointless prayers, and prove to Him, once and for all, that He wasn’t needed. For seven decades she kept this up, in the Gaelic manner, through thick and thin.
yup. that sounds about right.
and it makes you wonder who are the "real" atheists: The angry agnostics (including Job, who really really was angry and told off God in so many words, to the horror of his "pious" friend) or the wishy washy polite Christians.
And the cross is no easy answer, except to warn folks that standing up to the truth, curing the unimportant people, and telling off the corrupt (e.g, the Temple merchants and priests who were involved in kickbacks) will likely get you killed. A lesson that the Catholic bishops in the USA seem to have learned.
The German bishops who drafted defiant statements against the Nazis, re-drafted to tone them down. Like Dolan of New York, (who declined to condemn the good Catholic governor who pushed the latest Full Birth abortion law) they would criticize those who went “over the top,” thereby courting trouble.
Why would Father Delp (who was later killed by the Nazis) himself feel the need, to make a big issue, from the pulpit in Munich, of the Nazi policy of euthanasia? After all, it was “humanitarian” — designed to put suffering people out of their misery.
The idea that suffering could be of any value is lost on most. Why should we trust God on this? That God, who sent his only-begotten Son into this world, to suffer on the Cross.italics are my comments to clarify the story.
it is ironic that in Job, there is no easy answer except God says: Trust me. I know more than you do.
and the real meaning of the cross means: Been there, done that, so I understand...
No comments:
Post a Comment