My daughter has a disability. I dont want Jesus to fix her.

[rug]

The author, Heather Kirn Lanier, and her daughter

Heather Kirn Lanier
March 07, 2017
MAY 15, 2017 ISSUE

I am a skeptic who goes to church on Sundays. Over the past year, I started reading chunks of the Bible every day, and I was surprised by the man I met. I did not encounter the Jesus of my Baptist upbringing, that shampoo-commercial brunette who smiled beside children and lambs. I encountered a Jesus who pushes against the rules of religious and cultural authority. He says, I know your laws. I’m healing on the Sabbath. He says, Scratch your tribal divides, I’m drinking water with a Samaritan woman.

But on the subject of disability, I found a Jesus that is, frankly, disappointing. He usually does precisely what disability advocates rail against. He reinforces the idea that the disabled body is broken, damaged. He treats the disabled body as something to fix.

“Take up your mat,” he tells people who could not walk, and suddenly, they walk. He spits into his hand, touches a deaf man and the man can hear. The sick and lame touch the “fringes of Jesus’ cloak,” and, like that, they are “fixed,” transformed into the likenesses of their able-bodied brethren.

“I’ve got a bone to pick with Jesus,” I said to my husband, an Episcopal priest. “Why does his primary miracle have to be un-disabling the disabled?”

http://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2017/03/07/my-daughter-has-disability-i-dont-want-jesus-fix-her

[thecrow]

1. Words well said, Kim Lanier

Very thought provoking.

[BigmanPigman]

2. You are very tolerant for continuing to attend church despite how you feel/think.

Why do you still go?

[rug]

3. Who are you asking?

[AtheistCrusader]

4. Because it's an easy trick/illusion.

"“I’ve got a bone to pick with Jesus,” I said to my husband, an Episcopal priest. “Why does his primary miracle have to be un-disabling the disabled?”"

That's all he had. Easy 'miracles' to perform in the time period in which he lived. Making the lame, walk 'again', is the easiest snake oil trick in the book. Same for deafness.

It's doubly cruel to the actual people who actually have the disability, because not only does the charlatan profit from the theatrical act of 'miraculous healing', but it also fabricates a seed of hope that will never be watered, for people who actually have the disability.


One notes, Jesus never re-grew a missing limb. Not then, not now.


Technology can. Not only can we do it, but we can preserve the agency of the individual with the disability, to choose or not choose the therapy or replacement. OR to perhaps even augment beyond 'non-disabled'.

[Still Blue in PDX]

5. He healed my momma's lung cancer by taking her to heaven. He better leave my epileptic son alone!

I'm not a fan.

I'm not an atheist per se, but after a couple of reads through the Bible in its entirety I have more of a pantheistic view of things.