How would you ease their pain?
I'm tired of you, you so-called 'religious'. You prate your pious nothings, endlessly quoting scripture you don't comprehend and expounding dogmas you have no understanding of. As I've said many times, your gods are delusions and your faith no more than over-anxious self-deceit.
So now I'm come to challenge you with a question. Christians may answer it. Muslims may answer it. Jews may answer it. Those who adhere to sects which are subsidiary branches of those three great streams of faith may answer it. Agnostics and unbelievers may answer it also, if they can. But primarily this question is directed toward Christians, Muslims and Jews - because those are the three peoples of the Book.
What real comfort has your faith to offer those who suffer innocently?
Let me tell you a story about my friend Susan, who died long before I ever left England and whom I loved dearly. Susan was a highly intelligent, thoughtful, able young woman. She had a keen mind and a quick understanding. At age 17 she was diagnosed with malignant tumours of the brain, that would certainly have killed her if not treated very aggressively. She was told that the surgery she was to undergo would save her life - which it did. She was not told that it would leave her deaf as a stone. She was not told that it would leave her with most of her face paralyzed and frozen into a drooling leer.
She died fifteen years later, her life (in one sense) a blighted wasteland of opportunites denied her and possibilities unrealized, having suffered continual pain throughout what remained of her time here.
There's endless sadness in the world, endless pain and misey, cruelty and suffering. Except for the fortunate few (among whom I count myself when compared to, say, a Darfurian, or a street-kid in Bogota, or some poor dumb brute tormented so that the eyes of women won't be irritated by their cosmetics), the unfortunate majority suffer endlessly in countless ways. How would you comfort them?
The Jesus of the New Testament didn't preach to the sick, he healed them. He didn't preach to the sinner, or tell the sinful man that his misery was his own fault and entirely to be expected - even when that was true. He forgave the sin. He didn't tell the harlot that her stoning was justified, or God's wrath; he defended her, rebuked those who would have killed her, and changed her life through the example of a love that actually did something other than talk.
Which is why I still like and respect the man, even if I no longer believe in the Divinity.
I left the Church because I grew weary of sermons that were no more than condemnation "uttered in love". I left because I was weary of people only too willing to follow the latest 'teaching' but not at all willing to do what their faith required of them - while knowing and saying all the right things and behaving exactly as if they were devout followers of their 'Lord'. Perfect replicas, with less life and faith in them than a rock or a tree.
So I don't want to hear what the Bible says. I already know what the Bible says, in infinitely greater depth and infinitely greater understanding than any of you will ever attain to. Not because I'm smarter than you or more holy than you or wiser than you. But because I read Scripture with my eyes open and you read it with your eyes shut. Because I read it wanting to comprehend what it says to me, while you read it the other way around - telling it what it says in order to confirm your base prejudice and low opinions as a faith worthy of the name. Whited sepulchres, all of you, full of filth you call praise and abominations you call worship.
I want to know what resources there are in your faith, your beliefs, with which you would comfort my friend Susan; or the man who loses everything through no fault of his own; or that man I knew at work last year, whose only daughter died in a car crash, just before Christmas, while driving the car he had given her as a gift for her sixteenth birthday. It sounds like a bad joke. But it happened.
By all means, use Scripture to illuminate your argument. But don't substitute Scripture in place of an argument. I don't expect any of the so-called 'teachers' I've encountered in JU to be remotely capable of satisfying these requirements and answering my question. But if you can I'll acknowledge and respect it. But I'm not such a fool as to think that, when I have conclusively demonstrated that all of you know nothing, understand nothing, and can do nothing, I'll receive similar courtesy from you.
C'est la vie, c'est la guerre.
I shall post my thoughts on this matter tomorrow (probably) as a response here. Why don't you do likewise?