Girl dies of stupid parents

[Mister Agenda]

If you are a Christian, don't you ask yourself what the point is?

You and I view life and death differently. I assume that you feel this life is the most important thing to anybody. I believe that this life is important also, but not as important as eternal life with God.

If you are correct, does that make this life less valuable?

We can't put ourselves in the place of the girl and her parents.

Empathy has its limits.

Obviously, they were convinced that the chemo therapy nearly killed her. She had been through it and didn't want to go through any more. She was convinced that God spoke to her. Who knows?

No one. It's unknowable.

She chose the path that gave her more peace.

She chose the path of lowest chance of survival.

She could have gone through more grueling chemo and then died anyway.

That's true. But according to the people best in a postiion to estimate her odds that we know both actually exist and actually talked to this girl, her odds of not dying if she did that were about 75%.

Who says that God isn't helping people in other countries?

If he is, for some reason he seems to do a lot more for people in developed countries.

Every day there's people there helping the needy.

Because God isn't there helping the needy.

Like I said, God doesn't usually just reach down and heal somebody.

If ever.

He helps others through us.

And if we fail, he lets those others suffer horribly.

That is the message of Jesus.

At least parts of what Jesus said were a good message. I don't know a better moral parable than that of the Good Samaritan.

I believe he helped the girl in this story, but she died.

If Jesus was actually involved, he behaved as a spirit powerless to intervene except with advice. If he had power, and chose to exercise it, he could have taken the girl's life peacefully in her sleep without dragging her parents into it, though they seem capable of rationalizing away any culpability on their part. I might do that too, it might be impossible to live with the realization you may have helped kill your daughter.

Maybe she lived and died better than if she had continued conventional treatment.

True. You can 'maybe' any unknown. Maybe the sun was covered with pink and purple checkmarks a million years ago.

But at any rate, I believe that she is much better off now.

But your reason to believe that seems to start and stop at it being what you believe.

That doesn't mean I think we should just kill all kids so they can go to heaven.

Thank goodness!

We all have a mission to fulfill here and we have no right to murder. But there is a time, when we are ill, to stop fighting and let it go. People make that decision every day.

Yes. But they should make it based on medical advice, not visions or quackery.

I guess if many were to believe in God he would have to be the kind to just make everything wonderful, but that not the way he made it. We have to struggle. We've pretty much all managed to accept that fact of life.

But most have not come to grips with the inconsistency between the world we have and the claim that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Drich has. He has concluded the God is not omnibenevolent, which does seem to be the leg of theodicy believers are most often willing to cut short.

Personally, I think an omnibenevolent God doing the best it can in an unimaginably complex universe that it made but can't quite make come out right is the nobler and more preferable option.

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This is where an Episcopelian would come in handy. I imagine he or she would say that the best thing would have been for the parents to have followed the advice of the doctors, but as an innocent the child is in heaven now, and at least we can take some comfort from that, if we believe in that sort of thing.