Scourges by God?

Posted on March 14, 2004 in Compassion Morals & Ethics

It’s been more than seven months since the news that masturbation reduces the incidence of prostrate cancer and not a word has come from the mouths of apocalypse-preaching television simonists about the doom to come down on those who do not emulate the actions of Onan, described once in National Lampoon as the “patron saint of small families”. The oracles of the punitive God of the Old Testament say nothing to disparage the study or those upon whom the disease has made its visitation.

These same voices rushed to the microphone when the brilliant Christian defender of evolutionary theory Stephen Jay Gould finally succumbed to a twenty year battle with cancer*:
his Creationist detractors wasted no time dis-memorializing him, hinting that he died “without ever knowing who the true God is”. They hated this man because he quoted the Bible in his writings on evolution and leftist politics — yet they claimed that he did not know Scripture. A few went so far as to suggest that this disease that rethought the elasticity of his gut came as punishment for his speaking out in defense of Darwin, though some asked that their co-believers would refrain from snide remarks.

Art Linkletter did not hold back when Timothy Leary died of prostrate cancer, seeing it as fitting punishment for the man who promoted the drug that led his daughter to walk off a skyscraper.

Let us not forget the incessant cry from the television evangelists who have bought their slots that AIDS is a punishment from God for the of homosexuality.

But not a sound is made when it is revealed that failure to follow the example of Onan can lead to this disease. No suggestion is made that the wrath of God is visited on those who fail to pleasure themselves.

I think that this example supports a feeling that I have expressed many times here: that we cannot presume to know the hand of God in human events. The proper response, I think, is that of physician C. Everett Koop, who when fundamentalist supporters of the Reagan Administration sought to ostracize sufferers of AIDs, retorted that no Christian, no real person of Faith and Compassion could turn her or his back on a sick human being.

The idea of a being like Zeus who smites down those who displease him is out of keeping with the Christ’s message. Why do Christians tolerate it, why do they not denounce those who repeat it as heretics?

The message out of the Bible, out of the wisdom of the Buddha, and out of Science is that these things are just diseases. Let’s start from there, then remember the witness of caring for the sick.

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* The fact of his long survival of a particularly penetrating and malignant form of abdominal cancer stands as a testament to Science. One can imagine Creationists praying fervently as if he were Simon Magus, trying to bring him down. But Truth rises unhindered: Gould owed his long resistance to the theory which Darwin and Wallace first suggested and Huxley promulgated. Creationists like to mix their medicine and their religion, but only give credit for cures to their religion. Go figure.

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Further reading:

• A Christian comments on Gould’s death — why does this guy think that The Mismeasure of Man is “wrong-headed”?
  
• Stephen Jay Gould (Unofficial Website)
  
• Illness as Metaphor & AIDS and Its Metaphors by Susan Sontag