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From: era@ncar.ucar.edu (Ed Arnold)
Newsgroups: misc.handicap
Subject: Re: MY PHILOSOPHY
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Date: 8 Aug 90 19:51:54 GMT
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Index Number: 9602

In article <13061@bunker.UUCP> Kraig.Cummings@f34.n129.z1.fidonet.org writes:
>Index Number: 9435
>
>In the hopes (perhaps naive) of inspiring others, I would like to
>relate my story to you since I have successfully battled back
>from the initially devastating effects of a traumatic brain
>injury, 2nd and 3rd degree burns over 42% of my body and grand
>mal seizures resultant from the head injury.  At the time of my
>injury I was a USAF fighter pilot during the Vietnam war.  I was
>a trained killer.  I was a hard headed, wilful person with no
>particular religious belief.
>
>However, I was a very bitter, brash, angry at the world, person
>(ever been there before?).  There was constant turmoil in me.  My
>wife left taking the kids and there I was!
>
>I started looking back at my life, doing a lot of introspection
>and self analysis trying to answer unanswerable questions.  It
>finally came down to this.  God had other plans for me.  Being
>rather hard headed he had to take drastic steps to get my
>attention and cut me down to size so that I was humbled before
>the Lord.
>
>God was now ready to mold me to his, as opposed to my, purposes.

>I don't know the "whys" but I do know that God helps those that
>help themselves.  Helping yourself, in my case, often involved
>swallowing my pride and asking for help not only from the Lord
>but also from friends.  It is easier to shut oneself out at a
>time like this rather than put forth the effort to "get on with
>one's life.

OK, I'll bite on this one; am feeling surly today.  :-)

Kraig, it was an interesting story.  However, you should think
a little harder about what you said.  You said, "... [God] had to take
drastic steps to get my attention and cut me down to size."  What you
have said here, is that God does nasty things to people to "get their
attention."

Each year, there are thousands of children born who have spina bifida,
or CP, or Tay-Sachs, or dozens of other developmental disabilities.
I think you would agree that these children are perfectly innocent.
Then, is God doing this to them?  Should we buy into this theory of
"I was a bad person, so God punished me" for them too?  Remember, it's
being done to the child, not the parents or anyone else.  (In fact,
sociologists tell us that something like 70% of the fathers of severely
handicapped children don't stick around very long, so it's no skin
off their rears.)  To presume that God would do these things to innocent
children to teach someone *else* a lesson, stretches the argument so thin
that it no longer works, and esp. not in the face of medical knowledge
that explains why these things happen and how they can be prevented.

Therein lies the fallacy of your argument.  There are many people
who consider themselves every bit as Christian as yourself, who don't
buy into the "God did it to teach me a lesson" theory, because the
facts don't fit into the theory.  Your argument becomes what I like
to label the "insurance company mentality."

Without spending too much time on this, you also need to consider that this
sort of religious philosophy can result in political consequences which
have nothing to do with the compassion that Christians are supposed to
have learned from Jesus.  This kind of religious philosophy can be
distorted into the sort of logic embodied in a statement made by Eileen
Marie Gardner, who was a special assistant to Secretary of Education
William Bennett during the Reagan era.  I've posted this comment before
on the Usenet side of this conference, and will repeat it again for your
benefit:

Eileen Marie Gardner wrote of persons with disabilities, "They falsely
assume that the lottery of life has penalized them at random.  This is
not so.  Nothing comes to an individual that he has not, at some point
in his development, summoned.  Each of us is responsible for his life
situation ... There is no injustice in the universe.  As unfair as it
may seem, a person's external circumstances do fit his level of inner
spiritual development ... Those of the handicapped constituency who seek
to have others bear their burdens and eliminate their challenges are
seeking to avoid the central issue of their lives."

The practical consequences of this sort of thinking, which prevailed
during the Reagan era, were circumstances such as the "Reagan Broke
My Wheelchair" article which I posted a while back.

As a pilot in time of war, you deliberately (or perhaps not, if you
were drafted, but that would be unusual for a pilot) put yourself at
*extreme* risk, caused by the *free-will* of other persons.  Your plane
being shot down (or whatever happened) was due to the deliberate action
of another person.  Claiming that God did this to cut you down to size,
when 58,000 other men lost everything in that war, and many were even
more seriously injured than you (some of whom were undoubtedly much
better persons than either you or I), trivializes those 58,000 deaths.
--
Ed Arnold * NCAR * POB 3000, Boulder, CO 80307-3000 * 303-497-1253(voice)
303-497-1137(fax) * era@ncar.ucar.edu [128.117.64.4] * era@ncario.BITNET
era@ncar.UUCP * Edward.Arnold@f809.n104.z1.FIDONET.ORG