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kimberlysteeleAt any rate, after only three years of religious practices of daily discursive meditation, prayer, the Druid Sphere of Protection, and divination, I consider myself as religious as they come. What an odd state for a former atheist! Being raised in a materialist Christian household of the type that is quite common in the middle and upper-middle classes, I feel obliged to try to answer the question "Why won't God heal amputees?"
Why won't God heal amputees?
1. Because Meat World sucks. HARD. What's Meat World? Meat World, my friend, is the material plane. It is absolutely awful here. Yes, it can be a place of stunning beauty and kindness, but most of the time, it's harsh and brutal. For instance, there once was a mallard duck who was raped to death by a gang of male mallards, after which she was pulled apart by raccoons and hawks, feasted upon, and finally done away with by maggots and ants. Did she deserve it?
No. Did the amputee deserve it? I'm going to say what any rational person would say -- I have no flipping idea, and if he did, it's not my place to make that judgement!
Let's look at how a Christian would answer this question... "The Lord works in mysterious ways." To that, I say NOT GOOD ENOUGH. The problem with a Christian excusing their God's capricious cruelty is that many of them presume their dogmas contain everything one needs to know about the world. I am not making excuses for God's cruelty if that is what is really going on here. What I am saying is I don't know.
Now let's take a look at how atheists answer the Did He Deserve It? question. They are going to say absolutely not, the event was random and chaotic as goes the world we live in. With this equally thoughtstopping answer, any further curiosity as to the forces working in the amputee's life are summarily dismissed.
Instead of looking at the amputee's plight as a binary -- it's either A or B -- maybe we can try looking at a third possibility. As horrific as it is to have a limb amputated, there just might be lessons to be learned not only for the amputee who has no choice but to live without his limb/limbs but for the people around him who have the choice either to act as harmers or helpers. It's almost as if the world sucks because it is a school or testing ground.
A matrix, if you will. Speaking of matrices, remember that part of The Matrix when Neo and Agent Smith have a chat about the state of the world? Agent Smith said that a perfect Matrix where nothing bad ever happened had been tried and that the experiment utterly failed.
The reason we have amputees, guinea worms, and pedophiles is because we are all being tested at every moment of material existence. Those of us who are lucky to have no encounters with amputation, guinea worms, or pedos have a duty to help those who have been harmed by the aforementioned terrible things as well as all of the other afflictions of the material. What we are not to do is gloat about how sweet we have it in comparison or the opposite, to pretend that nobody has it worse than we do.
We humans begin to fail the tests of the material plane the moment we hoard a bunch of goodies for ourselves and refuse to share what we have, whether that is in a small way such as getting mad that a family member wants a bite of our food or a large way such as holing up in an environmentally-devastating, fully gentrified McMansion while virtue signaling to all of the rich neighbors with a shirt that claims Black Lives Matter.
Every moment of our material life represents an opportunity to make the best of what we are given, and that's true for McMansion dwellers and guinea worm victims alike. Is it fair? No, or at least's it isn't fair on any level we can possibly understand. The atheist rejects such an explanation because atheist thought always has to run one way or the other towards the ends of a binary: If God exists, and the world is a testing ground, then God is cruel and I've already failed! Might as well do whatever I want! If God doesn't exist, then it explains everything, because everything gets to be chaotic and random and I can do whatever I want because I'll never be judged by my actions by a superior being!
Yes, some gods are cruel. Some are dying out, like the Christian one (my opinion, anyway), and other gods and demons have often sprung up in their place to grasp the consciousness of would-be Christians. The unseen world is an ecosystem, just like the visible one is an ecosystem. The ecosystem self-regulates and balances in a way that we do not yet understand. Humans don't understand ecosystems. We are easily terrified by nothingburger viruses, dumb enough to use RoundUp in our lawns, and have yet to create a working biodome. Though our scientists like to think they understand how nature works, the proof is in the pudding that they don't. We know even less about the unseen world than we do about the material one. Our scientists are so arrogant and dimwitted, they can't be bothered to study occult phenomena that practically smack you in the face, such as the etheric value of food in relation to the way it is prepared. If we take the arrogant attitude of knowing it all, for instance by trying to micromanage the weather via nanotechnology, we see disastrous results. Dumb humans attempt to force an ecosystem they don't understand into a proscribed mold. The unseen ecosystem also cannot be understood by trying to force it into a proscribed mold, and one of the proscribed molds it is shoved into is the atheist's "it's all chaos and coincidence" theory. The other is the monotheist's "it all works the way God says it does in my religion's holy book."
2. Because God isn't what you think it is.
There are many atheists who are natural mages/witches of exceptional natural talent. I was that atheist. Some of them have figured out that they are naturals and have proceeded to become bad karma grenades, flinging around their bad intentions with glee and never putting two and two together when blowback hits them with a rare cancer, severe depression, or a bully-terrorized child.
I am a natural witch, and it's not just the hair or the black cat that makes me that way. When the gods took me on a few years ago, they had plenty of raw material to work with, but they also had to school me repeatedly on why it's a bad idea to do hostile magic. Every time you wish someone would suffer and/or die (including when you do it subconsciously), you are flinging around hostile magic. It is only when you wake up and say "I don't do that anymore" that you have a chance at a worthwhile deity working with you. If you enjoy flinging around hostile magic (including subconscious hostile magic) and have no plans to stop, you can still work with non-embodied entities, but you're more likely to get the attention of demons, and at that point, the joke is on you, Dr. Faust. If you fool yourself into thinking the entity granting you favors is a god, by all means, go right ahead. Some people can only learn the hard way and if you're that person, I wish for you to be blessed because you'll need it. The sad part is that if you are naturally talented as I was/am, if you go the cacomagic route, you'll miss out on forms of happiness that are deeper that anything that could be granted via material prosperity or ego gratification. If you can put your pride and your preconceived notions of what God is supposed to be aside, you are suddenly in the position to listen to what God has to say to you.
I believe in many gods. I have had the honor of talking to them. I talked to one today. It was my day off. I stole the opportunity to take a long, solitary walk down to one of my town's many forest preserves. While I was on my walk, I talked to one of the Greek gods. We had a brief conversation about the folk tunes I have written to accompany the Orphic Hymns. I also talked to three different dryads or tree spirits. It's not a big deal and I'm not special. Anyone can do this. This is my normal now. I'm far less crazy than when I was atheist, calmer, and more easygoing.
If you've ever had a close relationship with a pet, you're already aware that it is not difficult to communicate with a non-human entity. The difference is that we cannot physically see gods, goddesses, and dryads, or at least I cannot see them. I'm occasionally clairaudient, meaning I can hear birds chirping in the middle of the night that aren't technically there or a voice will make itself heard randomly -- this happened when I was fifteen when I heard a ghost exclaim "Oh my lambs!" in a retail store I was working in at the time -- but I'm no clairvoyant. I can feel the presence of non-corporeal beings though, and because of my Druid practices, I can discern the array of feelings in order to identify what is going on around me. Occultists call the unseen world the subtle planes for a reason. I don't want to freak you out, but you are surrounded by an array of ghosts, spirits, elementals, manatus, gods, and potentially demons right now. If I was in the room with you, it's likely I could communicate with one or two of the beings around you. If you're sensitive, you can sense them wherever you are, like on the train or in your apartment. Most of these creatures are harmless. Just as we tend to see more squirrels, sparrows, and raccoons out here in the suburbs and people in the city encounter rats, cockroaches, and pigeons, certain non-embodied entities go with certain territories. Some of the entities are parasitic and riding you and/or someone you know. You're more likely to have a direct experience with a fairy or an elf in the hinterlands, the more remote the better. You can absolutely attract "good" entities to your domicile. Cultivating a garden, whether outdoors or indoors, is an excellent way of doing this.
Or you can be like the atheist and the Christian, clapping your ears and screaming LA LA LA when someone mentions the inhabitants of the non-physical planes. The Christian believes in a boring universe that in my opinion does not reflect reality. This boring universe is divided into three parts: Meat World, minus the unseen ecosystem, Heaven where all the good repenters go after they die, and Hell, where the majority of the unsaved will burn, including those who lived upright and charitable lives while believing in the wrong gods. The atheist believes only in the humanity-dominated Meat World and an endless gaping void afterwards.
I reject both of these outlooks. I think the reason so many people throughout history have believed in gods and spirits is because gods and spirits are present and accounted for, we just lack the ability to see them. Atheists especially like to think humans are the smartest creatures on the planet. I used to share this belief. We're not the smartest beings on Earth and we never will be. Atheists also think that if a creature is hyper-intelligent, then it must be physical and from outer space. The atheist lacks the creativity to entertain the notion that perhaps some beings are far smarter than humans while also being body-less and from Planet Earth.
The Christian dismisses the idea of non-embodied intelligences so she can return to the comforts of her usual submission programming. God is what the Bible says. There aren't potentials beyond what the Bible describes and the condition of being saved is that you squelch any disagreement with Christian dogma. Furthermore, your job in life is to go out and recruit others to believe in your God exclusively because the Bible instructs you to do so. You are to remain unconcerned about the ethics of forcing conversion to your faith because you must convince yourself they are damned without it. I have only met a handful of Christians who didn't have these sleazy sentiments lurking within them. I would like to be proven wrong about Christians. Actions speak louder than words. By their fruits I shall know them. I hope that in the future, Christians devote more of their energy to emulating Christ than to their current routine of being confused in all things except the drive to gain more converts to their confused cause.
I don't believe in an omnipotent God, or at least if there is an omnipotent God, I highly doubt there would be a book that could inform my tiny human brain about things he said. I vastly prefer to strike up relationships with gods who never claimed omnipotence if they will have me. I believe in Jesus Christ, but I also believe in Allah, the Buddha, the entire Greek pantheon, and too many more to mention. I think people who are like my former atheist self find themselves unable to talk to gods because they are a combination of too arrogant, too preconditioned, and to blind to know what to look for.
When I was an atheist, I remember the desperation I sensed in the faithful, including that of Occidental exotic fetishists who obsessed over various gurus or fawned over the Dalai Lama. Their supposed inner peace proved only that religion truly was the opiate of the masses. To be atheist is to declare oneself an island separate from "all that nonsense" which starts looking like mumbo jumbo if you achieve the goal of lumping it all together in one steaming pile of woo. Never mind the series of odd synchronicities in the lead up to Trump's election. Never mind the kid in Dr. Ian Stevenson's patient archive who remembered every detail of being a fighter pilot in his past life to the point of knowing his old Air Force buddy's names. Nothing to see here, folks...
3. Because of Reincarnation and That Old Chestnut, "I Could Be Wrong"
The gods I believe in don't seem to be spontaneously healing amputees, though I think that many people who are amputees now will not be amputees in their future lives. I believe I was an amputee in one of my former human lives, though I'm not sure why I was an amputee in a previous life. John Michael Greer says that in his ecosystem-centric view of the Universe, one shared by many occultists like him, people who are human in this incarnation have been through billions of years of incarnations as gradually evolving animal forms on Earth. We became human at a literally glacial pace, and every human soul has spent quality time going through various animal incarnations, all the way from single-celled parameciums to fuzzy mammals. Becoming human represents a jump in intelligence along with specific challenges in order to proof us for the next phase, which is the non-embodied state Druids call Gwnfydd, "the luminous life". After that, there are more complex states we all have the possibility of achieving.
I haven't the remotest idea what they specifically entail because I am not a god. Supposedly I can also screw up and end up going through my animal lives again -- this is the karmic equivalent of having to repeat kindergarten. If I make an absolute mess of my lives, I have a shot at being stripped down to my basest non-physical elements and being swept away by a passing comet, never to return to this solar system again. For me, this seems like a decent incentive not to go down the Chairman Mao or Jeffrey Dahmer route and to attempt to continually refine my compassionate and thoughtful parts instead.
But I could be wrong. Who am I to say how the Matrix works? I know at this point you were waiting for me to take some cheap shots at Eastern religions, and here goes: Buddhism and Hinduism were both extremely wrong when they created caste systems around their beliefs in reincarnation. I've never understood how two religions that fully acknowledge karma can invent a giant civilizational bad karma generator in the form of a caste system. Just... dumb. Institutionalized snobbery does not belong to god, that's strictly the domain of the other team. I know a very smart vegan guy who once said of children who die of horrific cancers that they "probably raped a thousand women in a former life" to me while I was an atheist. This didn't sit well with me. I suppose there wasn't time for him to communicate the short novel I've gone into above, but the problem with his statement was the missing idea that he could have been wrong. I'll never know because I walked out of the conversation that day, condemning him as a fool. I don't think he is a fool anymore; I do suppose he had a point but I wasn't ready to hear any part of it.
I can only speak for myself, but I think the moral of the story is that I should strive to be the most balanced, kindest, and thoughtful person I can be every day whether I am faithful, faithless, or somewhere in between. That's not the easiest prescription when in Meat World, especially when times get tough. Nevertheless, I am going to try and I hope you will too.
