The Miracle Myth

There is a 7 year old Illinois girl battling a rare form of leukemia who has posted a request for prayers on Facebook.  After modern medical science has taken its best shot at removing the disease, what do you think will happen?  I think she is going to die of her leukemia.  I think no matter how many prayer warriors and prayer lists and individuals on their knees begging God for succor, she is going to die.  Soon.

And that is very sad.  More so because she has been given hope of divine intervention in her diseased state, a hope that is not grounded in reality.  Yes, there are people who pray to be cured who are, and pray to survive who do so.  There are many more who pray for the same thing and die.  If God chooses to save some and not others, what kind of God is that?  So, it seems to me it must be random.  Some survive, some don’t.  Some claim miracles, others die.  And if God is not as trustworthy as gravity in that he works everywhere, all the time, with everyone on the planet, then how can we trust in the Lord?  When this little girl dies praying to be cured she has been subjected to one of the great myths of religion:  God hears our prayers and acts on those prayers.  If that is true, God has a lot, I mean a lot, of explaining to do regarding those prayers he has chosen to ignore.  And if it is God’s plan that this girl dies, what kind of God is that?

If this little girl were my daughter and I had infinite power I would cure her.  And we are told we are all God’s children.  But could we expect such a cure from a God who sent his son to die?  Supposedly, Jesus cured folks prior to his death.  If I could cure, I would.  Am I a better person than God?  Why didn’t Jesus cure everyone while he was here?  Why didn’t he simply eliminate cancer, especially childhood cancer?  And Alzheimer’s and ALS and MS and on and on.  Nope.  We die of various maladies begging God for help.  And then we die.  

Miracles are those events that cannot be explained by the science at our disposal.  It is no miracle that so many die of so many maladies.  We understand that.  The so called miracles are so random that they cannot be the result of prayer.  If they are, God sure needs to tell us how he decides who to listen to and who to ignore.  Otherwise he is just mean, or miracles are a myth