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CHURCH SPEAKS TO AN AIDS VICTIM

THE SUBTLE VINDICTIVENESS OF THEISM

If you don’t believe that God can protect you no matter how bad things get then there is no point in believing in him or worshipping him. But the corollary of this belief is that God must not and should not protect anybody who is sinful. Belief in God is based on spite and smugness. Believers suffer just as unbelievers do. The only difference is that the believer still keeps believing that God knows what he is doing. Belief is an act of the believer. Witches believing in their magic also claim that no matter what life throws at them they will be okay in the end or even after the end! So the enemies are not really hurting them at all. In that case, how can the enemies be doing wrong? The harm isn’t really harm for God is letting it happen and God never gets it wrong or lets his people down. Any pain is for some good.

A chapter of the book, Sex and Marriage – a Catholic Perspective, is totally and utterly offensive to the sick and shows how terrible it is to serve or care about God.

A gay man writes that he has AIDS and is dying and asks what God is doing to him and is scared that God’s judgement has fallen on him.

The priest tells him that he is correct that God is doing this to him. The priest admits that God said in the Bible that he takes final responsibility for everything that happens. And since God is so powerful he must have wanted the man to get AIDS. The priest strangely rejects the idea that the man is being punished and says that God just sent AIDS to stop the man destroying himself and losing his soul for all eternity through the sin of homosexuality. He then says that AIDS had to be allowed and sent to keep the world in check for if sin is allowed to thrive the crazier things get. He tells the man that God sent AIDS to him because he loves him and cannot bear to lose him for he is his son. He argues that Jesus ruled out the idea of sickness being necessarily punishment in John 9.

There is real vindictiveness in condoning the ways of Almighty God to this man. This man’s life and his pain are more real to him than God whose existence is less certain. God then cannot expect us to approve of what he sends. And if he cannot expect that then the love he asks for himself from us is immoral and so he should not have made us to suffer and die. It is offensive as well because it is better to believe in a God who is sometimes bad and who does not expect all this love and devotion than in one who is perfect or even in one who wants to cure the man but cannot for his power is limited. This has to be done because what is evil to our eyes should not be condoned. And it is easy for the priest to say that God who he believes is always right did this to the man when he is not suffering himself. There is a great vulgarity in him telling the man that God did this to him to check his sin. And it is vile to say that it is better to send AIDS than let a man practice homosexuality. How could God or the priest love the man and say that? What about the more promiscuous men who use condoms? There we have men who compound their so-called sin by using condoms forbidden by the Church! How could the priest love the man and say that when sin is down to motive meaning that the worst and most common sins are the sins we have in the dark recesses of our hearts? The priest is condoning the AIDS because the man physically sinned but is this right when the worst sins are in the heart and are not acted out? And if sin leads to complete chaos and needs checking whose fault is it? Who put us in a world where such chaos would be possible? God did though he could have put the man on a planet with only a thousand people on it so that not much damage would be done and AIDS would be necessary.

It seems that if God allowed the AIDS as a stepping stone to some distant good that we will never know it still does not mean that God is using the AIDS to check the sin. Christians may say when he hurts the man he will want the suffering to correct him for it may as well. But what if God needs the suffering in some scheme to reduce the sinning in other people and then he won’t want the man to correct because of that? But sin is in the heart and so is virtue so God could correct him and still have his plan work as long as he watches the man’s actions. There is no avoiding the notion that suffering is meant to be correction if you believe in God.

And the world has not got any better since that man took AIDS and died. How dare the Catholic Church suggest it has!

Also, what if the man believed naively that promiscuity or practicing serial monogamy was morally right? The priest dares to judge him as immoral or needing AIDS to restrain him when he tells him God is saving him from his sin not caring what the man believed? It could not be punishment if the man did not agree with the Church that gay sex is immoral even if he started to believe when he was on his deathbed.

What about the people who get AIDS through one mistake? What about the rampant homosexuals who use safe sex and never get AIDS? To say a person who commits harmless homosexual acts and who gets AIDS just through pure bad luck and most harmless activities can lead to accidental harm should have it for sin has to have bad consequences like sickness is inhuman and unforgivable and fanatical. It insults everybody who has got any STD be it syphilis or whatever.

The priest is saying the man deserved to get AIDS because if AIDS were worse than sin and the man would not stop sinning then he could not disapprove of God inflicting AIDS on him. If you say the man deserves AIDS is that really any better than saying AIDS is a punishment? Of course not!

And if the man deserved it as the priest says it has to be punishment. Why? Because it is worse to hurt somebody innocent for a good reason than it is to hurt somebody and make it punishment for the same good reason. This priest is a true Catholic and that makes him a persecutor of homosexuals with his sickly sweet tongue. The priest cannot have sympathy for the man for that is criticising God for punishing him and God expects approval for all his actions. It would be blasphemy to say the man did not deserve it for if the Christian idea of divine justice is right the most the Christian can say is that it may be punishment or it may not be. This is still very offensive. It is saying, “There’s half a chance that he deserves it so I can only give him half my sympathy”. This bad attitude wouldn’t be possible without belief in an almighty and all-good God. It is actually better if you believe in God to say the person deserved it if there is a God because you don’t want to just accuse God of hurting an innocent person even for a good plan. Even if it is not punishment, we must assume that it is and that the person is not suffering to be disciplined but being punished to be disciplined. People who do necessary evils do not like what they did exaggerated. The priest will say that we all have faults and all of us bring punishments on ourselves when we tell him he is sanctimonious. But the proof of his sanctimonious nature is that he may be older and have lived a happier life than that man and does not have AIDS and he is approving of God letting the man get it.

If the man had not believed in God but just believed in an afterlife of bliss he would not have had the worry about being punished. To hell with God even if the man had misunderstood for if he had not been manipulated to believe in God he would not have had this pain. He had a painful misunderstanding over an unnecessary and repulsive belief! And Jesus did not say that sickness was not a punishment. He only said that the blind man in John 9 was blind because of God’s plan for a miracle and not for punishment. It could have been punishment before but not then. And when everybody else who is sick is not sick for the sake of a miracle it could well be that they are being punished. The blind man was an exception and under unusual circumstances.

The man was being discriminated against. If he had not believed in Hell or mortal sin the Church would still be saying he brought AIDS on himself as punishment or correction (which is still saying the man is being punished for God can only correct those who bring his correction on themselves and so the deserves it) for his sexual relations with men which would be totally unfair.

Many in the Church believe that God does not punish but we punish ourselves by doing evil so if we have too many sexual partners we will be punished by pulling AIDS on ourselves (Handbook of Christian Apologetics, page 293; The Kindness of God, page 66). In other words, God does not punish but sets the stage for punishment to follow our sins which amounts to the same thing as punishing us so the God does not punish stuff is not very palatable. God should have made it possible for us to love others without jealousy and practice free love with some mechanism for those who wish to have children to conceive them at will. If a gossip ends up with no friends it is not a punishment of any kind because the gossip is not suffering for gossiping but for not being careful and crafty enough. These considerations show how ugly and vindictive the doctrine of the Church is. God is just like a parent who severely punishes his child and then says that the child punished itself by doing wrong. Many project their own hypocrisy unto their God.

Death proves that God does punish us and we do more than punish ourselves for God made death and made it inevitable.