Prayer

I'm usually pretty lax about who I allow to be my friend on Facebook, and usually I'll just hide someone if their posts annoy me. Today I learned that it is possible to push me far enough to remove a "friend".

My sister-in-law, Anna, just got out of bible study. You know how I can tell? I just got a flood of messages on Facebook from people I barely know. Ordinarily I'm pretty good at putting up with religious folk; I know that religion is important to the rest of my family, so I try not to complain too much. One person in particular, who shall remain nameless, I've known for several years, from back when I tried to go to my brothers' church to try to understand their perspective better. Tonight she sent me a message on Facebook about something called "Gerson Therapy", an alternative to modern medicine in the fight against cancer. That pushed me over the edge, and I deleted all of these people who only I barely know and who obviously don't know me at all.

It's one thing to believe in God. I understand that. The existence of God can't be proven or disproven, and I can see how the thought of a better life after this one would be comforting to many people. On the other hand, I consider logic to be irrefutable, and I think the only way that you can truly believe in anything resembling the Christian God is to just totally throw all notion of logic out the window; you must be willing to accept contradictions if you believe in such a God. That is the root of the problem, and that is what really bothers me. When you reject logic, you're free to reject sound scientific reason, such as the theory of evolution or in this unnamed person's case, modern medicine.

I know that right about now, I am incredibly thankful for modern medicine, and am ecstatic that people devote their lives to developing new and better drugs. If I had met Carmichael ten years ago, I would probably be dead by now, because Gleevec is such a new discovery. When you think of things that way, the speed with which scientific discoveries are made is literally a life and death issue for some people. This person's rejection of science is the ultimate insult to me.

That being said, I can tolerate most religious people, but they do tend to annoy me. I can't tell you how many people told me that they were praying for me while I was in the hospital, but I can assure you that I found the number to be far too high. Prayer is absolutely meaningless to me, and these people know that I'm an atheist, so why do they say such things? I know it makes them feel better, but shouldn't I be the one that they comfort? Oh well. I guess I can handle the aggravation if it helps them feel better.

The biggest issue here was that I knew my family would want me to reconsider my beliefs in my new situation. Oddly enough, I expected it more from my brothers and sister-in-law, but they haven't said anything. It was my Mom and Dad who each tried to persuade me, independently. My Mom tried to apply Pascal's Wager; believing in God had to be better than not believing in God. After trying very hard to convince her of the flaws in that argument --- 1) that you could apply the same argument for other gods, 2) that ascribing infinite value to an afterlife and finite value to our earthly existence is an incorrect valuation for many people, and 3) that believing in God in such a selfish way is unlikely to work even in the event that everything people believe of heaven is real --- she was eventually satisfied when I finally convinced her that the notion of death being final and absolute was actually comforting to me because it makes sense. Apparently, she was more concerned that I was depressed than she was for my soul.

I think it's difficult for religious people to grasp that atheists aren't really afraid of death, and I'm not sure why. It's not like we believe that there's the possibility for an eternity of torture after we die. Death is inevitable; it's really just a matter of when it comes for you and what legacy you can leave behind.