A Short Rant on Suffering

I visited a blog by someone who was recently diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia. According to the Trigeminal Neuralgia Association website:

TN (Trigeminal Neuralgia) is a pain that is described as among the most acute known to mankind. TN produces excruciating, lightning strikes of facial pain, typically near the nose, lips, eyes or ears.

It must be a terrible pain to suffer from.

I don't usually make comments on comments made on other people's blogs but the the following comment on the blog activated my theoidiot allergy.

cat, whatever happens, just hold on to the thought that God would never give us anything that we couldn't possibly handle. And with today's medical advancements, even people with deadly diseases like AIDS live a long and normal life (ex. Magic Johnson).

This theoidiot is obviously trying to impart some wisdom here but what it is I cannot comprehend. As someone whose name I forgot once said, Nothing is more excruciating than listening to a bore who has absolutely nothing to say or words to that effect.

It also reminds me of an anecdote about Mother Teresa. Apparently, the so-called sainted Mother Teresa is a religious fanatic. She does not wish to employ pain killers nor the other implements of modern pharmaceutical science in the clinics that her order runs in the poor neighborhoods of Calcutta.

Mother Teresa is thoroughly saturated with a primitive fundamentalist religious worldview that sees pain, hardship, and suffering as ennobling experiences and a beautiful expression of affiliation with Jesus Christ and his ordeal on the cross. Hitchens reports that in a filmed interview Mother Teresa herself tells of a patient suffering unbearable pain from terminal cancer: With a smile, Mother Teresa told the camera what she told the patient: 'You are suffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you.' Apparently unaware that the response of the sufferer was a put-down, she freely related it: "Then please tell him to stop kissing me."

The excerpt above was taken from a bookreview here.

If God exists then he is a sadistic being who enjoys torturing people on the pretext that it ennobles them. Pain does not ennoble. Pain does not a saint make. We do not suffer pain gladly and the excruciating and unbearable pain of trigeminal neuralgia is entirely pointless because it confers neither evolutionary nor biological advantages to the sufferer.

Only theoidiots like Mother Teresa and the anonymous poster above would see pain as a gift from God.

Once, when Kriemh was diagnosed with an infection and was in pain, I told her not to trust god but to trust modern medicine instead. Unbeknownst to the commentor, he or she demonstrated essentially the same recommendation: Pain is a gift from God but there is modern medicine that will make the gift palatable. Aww, shucks!

If you are Cat and are reading this blog, please understand that I have nothing against you in posting this article. I once suffered great pain too and the comment simply enraged me for its blatant lie and patronizing tone. I hope you will get well soon, and at the cost of infuriating you admonish you, like Kriemh, to trust modern medicine, not God.

As for the commentor. I sincerely pray that your Lord Jesus Christ imparts the same gift to you. I also hope he kisses you while handing you his great gift.