Atheism and Diabetes

I have type 1 diabetes, and my devout, catholic mom asked herself the “why my daughter” question a lot at first. In fact, it probably is what led her into depression after my diagnosis. At least being atheist, I have fewer questions to answer. She definitely feels that her religion helps her cope with it now, but I don’t think she understands how much easier it would be if she just let go of her beliefs.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but is this guy really saying “well, God screwed with your children to help you, so you should feel good about it”? I mean, why would you want to worship the kind of God who would do something like that? And what kind of person takes comfort in the idea that his child’s disease exists for his benefit?

I nearly fell through the floor when I read the title of this, lol.

I have two children with type 1 diabetes. When my daughter was diagnosed, just months after my son had been diagnosed, I spoke to my uncle, who is a Catholic priest, and he said to me (in reverent tones) “The Lord has given you a tremendous burden.” Um…thanks. Its a good thing there are no gods, since if there were I would have to tell one or more of them to go f#@$ themselves for giving a crap disease like this to innocent children _on purpose._

I personally find the “shit happens” explanation far more empowering and reassuring than the alternative. Your misery is part of an all powerful deity’s plan. How do you compete with that? You can’t. Would curing diabetes get in the way of god’s divine plan? Or would the fact that a scientist eventually found a cure be the convenient manifestation of the plan? How nice of him to cause a lot of suffering so that someone would come along and fix the fact that he made it in the first place.

The alternative: Your misery is as a result of purely natural shit that could have just as easily happened to someone else? Okay, cool. We overcome natural shit on a pretty regular basis. Let’s do this. There’s a problem, we set out to fix it. Can’t get much simpler than that.

I’ve often wondered why it comforts religious people to think that some god makes them suffer on purpose and won’t tell them why. That wouldn’t make me feel better. It would make me mad.

I developed type 2 diabetes at age 23. It was a combination of bad genes and the “typical” white middle-class American diet without exercise. Both my parents have/had type 2 diabetes. In fact, my mother died at age 44 from complications from diabetes. For a while there, after her death, it caused me to really call into question my faith at the time. Eventually I did fall away from church (also had to do with the fact that I was discovering I was bisexual and also studying witchcraft.) While most of the rest of my faithful family labors under the idea that my mother’s passing was a part of God’s plan, I just realized that she probably killed herself. Late in her life, she had taken to sniffing solvents, having lost the pleasure of her eyesight and gaining a really heightened sense of smell. It’s very likely she “overdosed” on sniffing ligher fluid, her already compromised kidneys couldn’t take the abuse, and she had heart failure.
Yep. God’s plan. F*cker.

Maybe I’m missing something here, but is this guy really saying “well, God screwed with your children to help you, so you should feel good about it”? I mean, why would you want to worship the kind of God who would do something like that? And what kind of person takes comfort in the idea that his child’s disease exists for his benefit?

But that’s exactly what the majority of Christians (if not all of them) believe – that when something bad happens to a person, or a family, or a group of people, it happened because God has a plan and this bad thing somehow furthers that plan.

Maybe it’s sending a tsunami that kills thousands (many of them Christians) in order to show his displeasure that people in other places aren’t obeying him.

Maybe it’s giving a child a fatal birth defect that causes the child to live a short, pain-filled life in order to teach the child’s parents or siblings to value the gifts he gave them…

Seriously. Some child is born with a condition that dooms them to, say, five years of pain before an agonizing death, and they have to find some way to justify God allowing it to happen. “Stuff happens” isn’t an acceptable answer when you claim that there is an omniscient, omnipotent *and benevolent* God – there has to be some reason why he allowed this to happen. So it has to be in order to teach the family something, or to punish someone for something. And as churches have become less willing to tell people that a child died in agony because the child’s parents’ sinned (that seems a little unfair to the child), it has to be that God wanted to teach others about how to endure, or how to value life, or whatever.

My son has a long list of disabilities, so most of my friends also have children with special needs. A few of them are religious and have often told me that they believe we were gifted with these children to either teach us humility (cuz we were all obviously self centered assholes who deserve to suffer) or b/c god has a special plan for my kid. That special plan must be a lifetime of being treated like shit b/c he’s different, laughed at, and having to struggle everyday to do the simple things that we do easily. It only angers me when they say these things. Do they really believe we are so wretched that our children deserve to be tormented by illness to teach us a lesson? That is just sad.

Statistics are descriptive, not prescriptive. There is no natural law demanding that 1 in 400 children must get diabetes. As such, “why him?” is a decent question.

As is usually the case, the fact that people ask the question is not the problem; the problem is the lame answer that religion provides.

I hate this constant need for religious folks to think that they are special. It leads to all sorts of absurdities. Humans evolved, we are here, and sooner than later we will be gone. We are lucky that we can live with many of the genetic mutations that exist in our population. Most of such mutations in all other animals are fatal. I really wish people would get over this “we are special” shit; it is what drives us to completely destroy this Earth with no regard for the other creatures inhabiting it and at our mercy. Maybe if we had a little less hubris, we wouldn’t be such a disaster for everything else on this Earth. Repeat after me: Just because I am alive, does not make me special; it makes me a statistical anomaly.

I feel like it would do some good to have a Christian opinion on this. Don’t worry, this is friendly Atheist, I’ll be a friendly Christian. I’ll just respond to points as I see them

God’s Plan: I think what a lot of you are forgetting that some good can come from tragedies. Every hardship that you’ve endured in life has given you some sort of experience that you may be a totally different person without. Maybe the earthquake in Haiti inspired someone to become a humanitarian. Living in poverty could teach someone to appreciate what they have. The point is, if we go though our lives without any hardships, there’s no way we’re going to grow as people. Without that diverse list of life experiences and tragedies, we would not be able to develop as highly as we could. It seems like the offensive part about this isn’t the Christian aspect, but that someone wants to look positively at a negative situation; for example, how would you react if someone said “Don’t worry, this experience is going to improve you as a person.” It’s true, but it’s just not what you want to hear. The only difference between this and Christianity is putting God in the sentence.

“We are special”: If a Christian’s child (or anyone’s child, really) was afflicted with a burdensome like diabetes, I really don’t think superiority over others is the first thing on the parent’s mind. Coping with their child’s diagnosis is. And for a Christian, asking the question “Why us?” is an expected way to cope.

Son has a long list of disabilities: I don’t see how caring for a disabled child wouldn’t teach you some sort of humility, your religious friends weren’t implying you were extremely selfish to begin with. Humility is as simple as putting others before yourself, and I’d imagine caring for a child wild a long list of disabilities would require putting him before yourself quite a bit.

Hope this helps 🙂

Jonat:

Maybe the earthquake in Haiti inspired someone to become a humanitarian.

It also left a lot of children grieving that their parents were dead. And it left a lot of parents grieving that their children were dead. You can come up with some good results for virtually anything, but are you really saying that every natural disaster has enough good effects that it’s, overall, better that we had them? It seems like you’re saying that God had a plan to kill a bunch of people in Haiti so that some other people could be inspired to he humanitarian. While I acknowledge that I’m not omniscient or omnibenevolent, to me that just seems messed up.

It started with the Keynote speaker who frequently invoked God in trying to give comfort to us. “God has a plan” he’d say. “Your child’s diabetes is God’s way of strengthening your character” he’d say.

Really? Well get me the hell away from your god, I don’t want to know what other sick and sadistic plans he has in store for me. I’ll do just fine on my own thanks.

What a crappy plan. People can build character in ways that don’t cost them their health.

Further, anyone who claims “God has a plan” is a liar. You don’t know that, you have no evidence for it.

Also, everyone who believes “God has a plan” sure as heck better not be praying for their god’s help when Auntie Jane has cancer. If god has a plan, it’s mighty presumptuous that he’d change it for you. If he did, then it couldn’t have been that good of a plan in the first place could it! Especially when that plan involved inflicting pain and suffering (and potentially death) on somebody. So don’t let me catch you praying… because everything is either going according to the (sick and twisted) plan or it’s not. You can’t have both.

@Jonat: I would react exactly the same way to that person as I would to the Christian, or to the guy who says “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I don’t want to BE any stronger. (Yes, I actually have said that to people.)

If I were to infect a kid with HIV so his/her parents could be stronger, that would make me a monster. So what would that make an omnipotent being who did the exact same thing? Benevolent? Comforting? I don’t think so.

The variation I was raised to believe was that, having free will, Satan and demons and humans can all cause horrible things to happen by sinful or evil actions (or maybe even thoughts?) but *because of God’s over-arching plan* good can be harvested from the tragedy/evil.

I don’t think this is better (or not much better) than less nuanced views – just offering some extra information on the kind of theology behind the ideas.

On one hand, I don’t blame people for coping with difficulty and tragedy in ways that help them. On the other, I can’t imagine finding the “good will come of this” or “everything happens for a reason” platitudes reassuring or comforting at all. If anything, I suppose I can take “something good can come of this” in the sense that humans can take action to cure diseases, predict natural disasters, etc. and improve chances that future generations of humans won’t have so many bad things to face.

I think that’s the humanist version of a similar idea – the big difference is that there isn’t a giant asshole with superpowers with a bunch of apologetic followers involved, claiming that he “works in mysterious ways” and has “blessed” them with what should be recognized as horrible and should spur human action to cure/help/prevent and not prayers and reassurances about making us “better people.” You know what would make us better people? Facing the harsh realities that challenge our survival and fighting tooth and nail to improve the quality of life for all people.

or you could go the Fight Club route: I think it’s time you face up to the obvious truth that God simply doesn’t like you.

God’s Plan: I think what a lot of you are forgetting that some good can come from tragedies. Every hardship that you’ve endured in life has given you some sort of experience that you may be a totally different person without. Maybe the earthquake in Haiti inspired someone to become a humanitarian.

And what of those who died? What good did they derive from the experience? Are we truly supposed to be satisfied in the belief that a benevolent all-powerful god killed thousands so that a few could rise up and become better people?

Is it truly okay to you that a child is born with a disease that causes pain throughout that child’s short life, and kills the child before he or she is five? The child wasn’t made somehow better by that pain. If “God” has a plan to make the parents better people by creating a child for the express purpose of improving others through that child’s suffering, then I don’t like the big guy.

An adult *choosing* to suffer for others can be heroic. A child created to suffer? So that others can be better people? That’s just wrong.

It continues to puzzle me that those who believe in god(s) are not enraged by them. Omnipotent beings who choose to cause pain and suffering for “mysterious” reasons? All of it is somehow OK because it fits into a divine plan?

I think people don’t get outraged by it because on some level they don’t actually believe it is true. Telling a grieving person that their suffering is “part of God’s plan” may not be said to alleviate the suffering of the grieving person but rather so that the person who said it does not have to feel responsible for helping another person. It is spoken so that the person saying it can avoid examining or experiencing a difficult emotion like fear.

More often than not it is spoken in the same way someone says “How are you doing” -fully expecting an entirely banal and surface response rather than a real human interaction that might cost something in terms of emotion or time. People don’t know what to say and they don’t know how to deal with their own uncomfortableness so they offer up a trite platitude that they don’t really believe, but that they hope *might* offer some comfort and will also get them out of the awkward situation while preserving their self image as someone “who cares”.

I was diagnosed as a type I diabetic at age 3. My mother had a nervous breakdown partly because she blamed herself for me becoming diabetic.

I find that being an atheist takes a lot of the guilt and judgement out of one’s life. As a kid I was taught in Catholic school that diseases were punishment from god. As a result of this, when I saw someone with a debilitating illness (including myself) I thought: “well, you must have done SOMETHING to deserve it”.

When I became an atheist (probably around age 8 or 9) I realized that illnesses are just the luck of the draw. As a result of this brain wave I see someone with a debilitating illness and think: “sucks to be you, wanna go for coffee?”

PS I to all my IDDM peeps on friendly atheist! I always think I’m the only one. (Hi to all my type II peeps too)

@bleatmop

One of the “life lessons” that I have learned as the mother of children with diabetes, is to never assume that what another is going through is a mere “inconvenience.” I am much more aware, now, of how much I *don’t* know.

Yes, my children are “lucky” to be attached to insulin pumps 24/7. It could certainly be worse.

Yes, they are “fortunate” to be able to expect to live with type 1 for 75-80 years. They could have been born before insulin was discovered and already be dead.

This does not mean that they do not go through real pain, physical and otherwise, as a direct result of having type 1 diabetes.

The terrible thing about faith, especially both evengelical and fundamentalist, is that it gives answers like “it’s God’s will” to satisfy people’s emotions and stop them from pursuing answers.

What if we still thought all disease was God’s will? The result would be no germ theory of disease, no vaccinations, we’d still be dying of epidemics. Sure the scientists who studied and came up with the germ theory of disease were nominal christians, but they were unwilling to accept “it’s God’s will” as an answer. Whenever I didn’t accept that all the “good” christians told me I didn’t have enough faith.

By saying it’s god’s will and not looking for answers, to me that is a “sin of ommission”, not doing something we should be doing, and people dying as a result. But it is a logical consequence of faith.

However, I am not so comfortable with the explanation “it’s just statistics”. That helps accept that something happened, but it’s not why it happened.

We NEED to ask “why did this happen” or maybe a better question “how did this happen” if we are to progress and fight against it. We can accept the fact that “this bad thing happened” but that does not mean we do not ask why or how it did.

Only recently we have the technology to maybe determine how type I diabetes is caused, and can start to work on solutions (assuming someday we’ll be able to design genes of our offspring). But we won’t do that if we don’t ask why and look for reasons.

The problem is not that christians ask ‘why’ it’s that they give a safe simple answer that does not address the question, it just makes them feel better.