You know an ex-Muslim, Ali Rizvi, who is now a podcaster and a doctor lost his faith in Islam on just these accounts that some people go to such misery that it's not their fault.
Like this story that he sometimes speaks of
The good news in all of this is that sort of leukemia is very treatable. Up to 90% of the cases. This is what scientists and physicians have achieved, not priests and praying. But that is a tiny fraction of the countless children who died from it and are still dying of other deasises while at the same time religious people are doing everything they can to stop stem cell research that could bring cure to those unfortunate children.
And also unlike today' s pediatric oncologists, God was supposedly always there, for millennia upon millennia for children who had the disease before that, these "miracles" were few and far between. They died. The only thing that changed in the meantime was the breathtaking progress humanity has made in science and medicine.
Like this story that he sometimes speaks of
Quote:I’m five years old, standing next to my dad in the large upstairs bedroom at my aunt’s house in London, England. Everyone is gathered in the room—my parents, siblings, aunts, and uncles. My cousin and playmate, Sana, is lying on the bed. She has childhood leukemia, and her battle is coming to an end. We’re all here to be with her in her last moments, to say good-bye. She is three years old.
I saw Sana go through the last few weeks—the terrifying bouts of pain, the heartbreaking way she cries for her mother when it hurts, the utter helplessness of feeling those horrible symptoms of cancer inside her tiny little body, symptoms that can reduce even grown men to tears. She is too young to understand why this is happening, and too innocent to comprehend, much less face, the inevitability of death.
One morning, all us kids are sitting at the breakfast table having Weetabix cereal and grape juice. Sana is sitting across from me. Her older brother says something funny, and everyone laughs. She adores her brother. She giggles, smiling wide, as a three-year-old does. But her gums are bright red. There’s blood running across her teeth. She doesn’t know she’s bleeding. Our smiles fade, and she notices. The blood slowly trickles down the sides of her lips. She looks down and quietly starts crying. My aunt hurries over. Sana immediately turns to her, burying her face into her mother’s shoulder, clinging to her sleeves as they walk away. Now sobbing, her face is wet with tears and blood. She is embarrassed by her cancer symptoms. Things were going well for her that morning. She was fitting in, enjoying breakfast with her cousins, being a normal kid. But something just had to go wrong again. No carefree moment can ever last, I learn that day, when you’re a kid with cancer.
Holding on to my dad’s forearm, I watch as my aunt and mother sit by Sana’s bed, crying and praying desperately as she gasps for breath. She is pale and weak. She has likely been given large amounts of sedatives and painkillers to help ease her passing, but watching her now makes it clear that there’s still some pain breaking through. Cancer doesn’t discriminate. There’s no reason she would have it any easier than anyone else. Cancer doesn’t care if you’re eighty, or three.
My mother and my aunt are reading from the Quran, their faces drenched with tears.
“What are Ammi and Khala reading?” I ask my dad. “What are they praying so hard for?”
“They don’t want Sana to go, Ali. They are praying to God, begging him to let her stay and to stop her pain.”
God doesn’t do either of those things that day. Her pain gets worse. She struggles harder and harder to breathe, her gasping becoming more and more pronounced. And then, finally, it stops. My three-year-old cousin, Sana, is dead. Everyone in the room is drained. Shaken. My aunt and uncle are inconsolable.
We don’t have even the remotest hope of winning. We never did. It’s cruel, sadistic, and obscene. Yet they’re praying to him, begging him to save Sana, but from whom? Himself? Surely they’ll realize now how rahmaan (compassionate) and raheem (merciful) he really is.
The good news in all of this is that sort of leukemia is very treatable. Up to 90% of the cases. This is what scientists and physicians have achieved, not priests and praying. But that is a tiny fraction of the countless children who died from it and are still dying of other deasises while at the same time religious people are doing everything they can to stop stem cell research that could bring cure to those unfortunate children.
And also unlike today' s pediatric oncologists, God was supposedly always there, for millennia upon millennia for children who had the disease before that, these "miracles" were few and far between. They died. The only thing that changed in the meantime was the breathtaking progress humanity has made in science and medicine.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
