5/23/2008

I still like Elizabeth Edwards

Filed under: — Aprille @ 2:32 pm

Good old Elizabeth Edwards.  She’s so smart and dignified.

I was listening to NPR in the car yesterday (I don’t know which show, since I tuned in while it was already in progress), and the topic was illness.  One caller was talking about how she beat cancer and she just knows it was due to prayer.

Elizabeth Edwards, who was a guest on the show, articulated well how silly that is.  She said it in a very non-jerky way, as is her style, but the point she made is that prayer and positive thinking certainly aren’t going to hurt anything, but it’s important to remember that there are a whole lot of very strong, positive people who can’t beat cancer.  The whole attitude of crediting prayer and positive thinking for medical success 1) denigrates the lifework of medical professionals and researchers who have made great strides in cancer treatment, and 2) implies that those who die of cancer are somehow to blame for it, because they weren’t positive enough or didn’t pray hard enough.

My dad, who spends a lot more time around athletes than I do, gets annoyed for similar reasons when winners thank god for their success.  Nobody ever blames a deity for failures, though it only takes like six grams of thought to come to that conclusion.

AND ANOTHER THING!  There’s a billboard around here somewhere (on I-380, maybe?) that says “God Is Pro-Life.”  Do people seriously only think about these things until 50% of the way through the process, then quit?  If you believe that god creates life, how hard is it to come to the realization that he also creates death?  A billboard saying “God Is Pro-Death” would make just as much sense.

My personal belief system is irrelevant here.  I’m just talking internal consistency.

Also, Elizabeth Edwards is smart and dignified.

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