Not So Polite Dinner Conversation – Giving credit where credit is due?

Allow me to indulge in a bit of dead-horse beating…

The most recent nonsense from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Ministries is about how God simply must be given the credit when anything succeeds.  Now, it’s not said quite so broad as that, being presented as how anyone getting better after a successful surgery better thank this god of the Christians for it.  Of course it simply couldn’t be any other god or no god at all, simply human intelligence and hard work.

In the initial question, Mrs. T.L. says that her cousin has dared not to give all the credit to Mrs. T.L.’s god when she has enjoyed a successful surgery.  Horrors, she gave all of the credit to the doctors who did the surgery!  Mrs. T.L. is aghast that her god’s “help and the prayers of others” were not even mentioned by her cousin.

It’s great to see Mrs. T.L. desperate for congratulations on how important and powerful her prayers were and how wonderful she is for worshipping the “right” god.   Billy’s mouthpiece says that it is only with his god’s help that this cousin had a good outcome.  Indeed, without this god, this cousin had no hope.

He goes on to say that his god was the only one who gave the surgeons their ability and their wisdom.  This indicates that this god has then intentionally withheld any help to humanity that dared to be born before he deigned to give out the information on surgery, anesthesia, antibiotics, and simple handwashing.  It’s also too bad if you were born to cultures that didn’t get modern medicine until recently.

He claims that his god “worked in response to the prayers of others” so that this cousin had a good result.  Evidently, this god needs to be prodded into doing something.   But this idea that god must be told what to do when certainly goes against the usual claim of Christians (and Jews and Muslims) that their god knows everything already and controls everything, the usual prating being “It must be God’s plan.”  when something awful happens.  I wonder, if it’s this god’s plan, do Mrs. T.L. and “Billy” believe that this will should go unopposed?  Then why does Billy go to the hospital again and again?  Ah yes, it’s because this god gave the knowledge and the wisdom, that knowledge and wisdom again that is conveniently available to Billy and Mrs. T.L. now but to few in the centuries before their ever-so “blessed” existence.   There is no accepting of this god’s will, only excuses on why it can be ignored as long as the TrueChristian finds it beneficial.

“Billy” claims that this god made our bodies and “designed them so they could heal in response to the right medicines.”   That’s quite a lie right there.  We have people who simply can’t heal in response to the “right medicines” and in fact the “right medicines” can severely harm them in the instance of penicillin and in the case of my best friend from high school’s sister who died from a bad reaction to anesthesia, among many others.  We had no speeches from on high saying “stop” when someone was about to die because their bodies were not built to handle something by this god.  They hurt and died until humans figured things out.   It seems that this claim that this god created modern medicine is again an excuse, since one does wonder, if this god can do this, why not make humans not need to “heal” at all?  It would certainly eliminate one rather pointless, and painful, step.

Poor “Billy”, he insists that we must be grateful for to his god and his god alone.  “Billy” must repeat lies and offer excuses to counter his fellow TrueChristians to create this need for gratitude to a god that has evidently refused to aid people, has to be harangued and has not created such a perfect body (again going against his fellow TrueChristians who insist that everything was corrupted in the “fall”).  We see that again the magic decoder ring comes out again and again, showing the usual ignorance and hypocrisy of so many theists, who can’t even agree within one religion.

“Billy” ends with a command that Mrs. T.L. prays for this wayward cousin so she can see how “good” this god has been and that this cousin becomes the “right” kind of Christian.   We also get the usual threat, that everyone dies and will be judged by “Billy’s” bogeyman.  If this god is indeed as described by “Billy”, judgment by such a being is only scary since it would be judgment by something less humane than most people are.