If God changed his mind

[Esquilax]

Can I make a suggestion?

I'm not saying that I agree with praying for someone to get cancer in any scenario. I think doing so is wrong, even if it ends up being for the greater good.

Now I'm going to repeat those lines because I'm sure someone will accuse me of it anyway:

I'm not saying that I agree with praying for someone to get cancer in any scenario. I think doing so is wrong, even if it ends up being for the greater good.

With that being said, if you are truly trying to understand where Drich is coming from, you have to look at it through his lenses. What's worse... battling cancer for a limited amount of time, or eternity in torment? He believes that people who do not believe in God go to Hell (a sentiment I also don't share, mind you).  

Drich also said it took him getting cancer to find God.

So, since he believes the worst possible thing that can happen to someone is to be in eternal torment, and since he believes that not believing in God will get you there, and since he personally didn't find God until he got cancer, can you at least understand where he is coming from when he says that he would rather someone go through absolutely anything, regardless of how bad it is, if it would mean avoiding the worst thing of all?

I get what you're saying, I just don't think that the internal consistency of vile views makes the actual views any better. From Drich's perspective, yeah, I guess he is trying to do something good, but as always the way a person goes about fulfilling their intentions says a lot about them, and in this case there's absolutely no need for him to wish bad things on anybody. There's no need for bad things to be on the table period.

Drich believes in a god that has it in his power to convince me that he exists without giving me cancer, or beating me up, or anything like that. I'm on record, as are many people here, as saying that a god who unambiguously exists wouldn't need to do all this proxy convincing, he would just be unambiguous, and that'd be that. But Drich's god won't just show up, and one of the few ways that Drich can conceive of to get us to believe as he does is coercion through force, to have us abused until we submit out of desperation. Whatever his intentions, that's a peek into his psyche, and what it shows is a bunch of nasty little revenge fantasies about how much we have to hurt before we believe him, simmering in there.

To be clear, I've had people pray for me before. I'm sure you pray for people yourself, CL. The cancer stuff, the AIDs stuff, doesn't ever come up, with other people. The only person I've ever known who specifically made a point of telling us that his prayers also encompass a lot of bad stuff that could happen to us to force us to submit, is Drich, a man who routinely acts as smugly and condescendingly and so unlike his Christ as anyone I've ever seen.

It's nice that you think the best for Drich, and it's good having a decent christian around who does think positively, but I just can't get there myself. I've seen how he conducts himself for too long, and in the end, that doesn't even matter, because in the pursuit of a good aim he's gone to a dark, dark place. Road to hell, good intentions, and all that.