(November 24, 2017 at 1:00 pm)Khemikal Wrote: As an occupational therapist, do you ever suggest to your patients that the thing to do when their limbs turn on them just -might- be to hack them off?
That's not within our scope of practice, and also not referring to a medical condition that I know of. So no.
Okay, I know what you're referring to, and to be completely fair, there are many Christians who have an issue understanding what Jesus is saying when He says, "If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off". First, it's pretty obvious Jesus isn't being literal, because Jesus spoke in figurative language a good amount. If you're curious how you can know when someone is being figurative or literal, it's a matter of reading enough of what they say - when you read a narrative, you can tell the literal events from the descriptions.
Now, second, contextually, Jesus was giving the sermon on the mount at a time when people weren't taking sin seriously (which Jesus later calls the Pharisees, the religious leaders at the time, out for), so it makes best sense that Jesus is saying that you really can't bear sin in your life. Third, if Jesus was being literal, it would be obvious, because there are very commands regarding physical things we have to do as Christians in the New Testament. Baptism is to be literal, for instance, and you have people clearly being literally baptized in the book of Acts. There are no recorded instances of people sinning in the NT and then cutting off the hand that caused them to sin.
Hope that helps!
