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You say 'forced to have' multiple times. There's nothing 'forced' here. It's the opposite - it's just a simple acceptance of reality. It's entirely unforced in fact.
I feel like this thread is dealing with very sensitive subject matter all round. We've all been affected by cancer. So I think we have to tread very carefully and try not to be insensitive to what people are going through and have gone through.
I'm sure there's nothing I can say to you that you probably haven't already thought about.
So I'm going to speak in general about 'God's plan'.
If we want to believe that cancer is part of gods plan for us, we can't pick and choose who we think is okay to get it just because of an age / time factor. Very young kids get cancer too, live no real quality of life, in pain, and die at a young age. I have no idea how a belief in god in these cases is 'comforting'. There's more clarity in the assumption that cancer has nothing to do with god, it's just biology and cells gone wrong.
Okay maybe not 'comforting' in the sense that you mean it. But there's no grappling with the inevitable questions of why does someone get a raw deal and someone else gets a better deal?. There's no why us? Why them? There is no why. It just is. It puts everyone on a level playing field in my view.
I am so sorry to hear your wife is unwell. I'm wishing you the best possible outcome.
Unsolicited advice: Things will be hard on everyone for several months. While the focus will be on your wife, I urge you to not forget a bit of self care. This includes the kids. Take people up on their offers to help. Most will say 'if there is anything I can do' suggest something small. Can you mow the yard or shovel the driveway on saturday? Would you mind watching the kids while I do a bit of shopping? Or can you take the kids to the movie and you have a nap, hit the gym, take a walk. The chores have gotten away from you - would you mind running the vacuum while I dust or run laundry? Timmy has a dentist appointment, can you take him because I need to stay here?
No, O'Darby wasn't "shelved," assuming the poster who suggested this means "banned." The problem with access to my email and password is not with C-D. It is with the Real World. For reasons too complicated to attempt to explain, I do not have access to O'Darby in the Real World. I am unable to log in and simply change the email and password. If some enterprising moderator wants to merge O'Darby into O'Darbo that's fine, although I don't really care one way or the other.
It was Mordant who introduced into his post about his wife's illness the benefits of the atheist perspective as he sees them. I believed a discussion of the differences in the atheist and theistic perspectives in these circumstances thus was appropriate since this seems to me a very fundamental issue of Religion & Spirituality. I specifically chose an atheist straw man so my post would not seem insensitive in regard to Mordant. As stated, from my own experience I am very sensitive to all that Mordant and his wife and their loved ones are now experiencing. Their perspective on this situation is entirely different from that of me and my late wife, but what they are experiencing is in no sense a "lesser" tragedy than what we experienced. It is a situation we all must deal with on our own terms.
When I said that an atheist materialist (my straw man) is "forced" to adopt this perspective, I simply meant that this perspective is the inevitable consequence of sincere and strongly held atheistic convictions. It's what an atheist materialist must believe if he is to remain intellectually consistent. To jet off to Lourdes in search of a miracle cure would be entirely inconsistent with those convictions and would call into question, surely even in his own mind, just how sincere those convictions had been. Hence the old wartime saying about there being no atheists in foxholes. We see the phenomenon in reverse when a Bible-thumper loses all faith in the face of a tragedy such as this; the inescapable conclusion is that his ostensible Christian convictions were shallow at best. This is why one of my consistent themes, on every forum on which I have ever posted, is the importance of spending the time and effort to develop a strong set of convictions, be they religious or irreligious, before the inevitable tragedies of adulthood strike. Mindless theism and mindless atheism are equally unhelpful in the face of such tragedies, and trying to construct a belief system on the fly in these circumstances is nearly impossible.
My point was not that anyone "should" hold theistic convictions to help deal with tragedy, My point was that it's very difficult for me to see how even the strongest and most sincere atheistic convictions are of any genuine help or comfort in a situation such as this. "Sh*t happens" hardly seems to me much of a philosophy. So, yes, I do believe the theistic perspective is vastly more helpful and comforting in those circumstances - but only to those who hold strong and sincere theistic convictions before the tragedy strikes. At the very beginning of my quest decades ago, I consciously said "I want a set of beliefs I really believe, not ones I pretend to believe that collapse like a house of cards in the face of tragedy and death."
One of my last O'Darby posts was in response to a snide atheist who described humans as "water filled, gas processing, food cooking meat bags." (I asked if this perspective on his former wife might perhaps explain their divorce!) I believed my late wife was a precious child of God who had been brought into my life in direct (and quite uncanny) answer to prayer; that our marriage was a God-blessed union in fulfillment of God's plan for our lives; that her illness and death served a divine purpose in our marriage and in each of our lives; and that we would meet again in eternity. Since her death, I have seen the beneficial ripples in my own life and in the lives of those who knew her. I never believed I was losing, or had lost, a "water filled, gas processing, food cooking meat bag." See the difference? This doesn't mean I'm correct by any means - it simply means that my strongly held theistic convictions gave me a far different and, I believe, more beneficial perspective on the tragedy of her death than my atheist straw man's convictions could ever give him.
Someone suggested that the loss of a young child would challenge my theism. No, it absolutely would not. Yes, it would be a great tragedy from the human perspective, but it would be no more inconsistent with my Christian beliefs than was the death of my wife at age 54. I have seen the death of a small child have tremendously beneficial ripples, and I believe a death at age two or three is inconsequential in the context of eternity if it furthers God's plan. To suggest it should challenge my theism is what I described as a parochial perspective - an inability to view the situation as anything other than "a child who might have lived to be 100 died of a terrible illness at age two" and "the parents are now devastated." That's an understandable perspective, but it's an entirely finite human one. In the context of an eternal divine plan, the benefits may far outweigh the immediate tragedy. No, I don't pretend to be able to neatly connect the dots or read the mind of God, but human suffering and death are not defeaters (a philosophical term) for my theism.
I merely skimmed the responses to my post, but they are in the main entirely predictable. They have little or nothing to do with what I actually said but are the expected knee-jerk responses to a Christian such as myself and to pretty much any post reflecting a theistic perspective. As is typically the case, they say more about the respondents than about me or my beliefs. In the months since I last posted here, I visited a handful of times and was struck once again by how dull and inconsequential the "discussions" are. A relative handful of regulars say the same mostly non-substantive things over and over and over, ad nauseam. It's like being a fly on the wall at the Cocktail Party From Hell. Until Mordant's post, I saw absolutely nothing worth my time. I don't expect to see anything else for months to come. Admit it, no one here is seriously interested in meaningful discussion of Religion & Spirituality. Indeed, I have to question how many are capable of such discussion.
Anyway, I truly wish Mordant and his wife the best. I have a non-religious but non-atheistic best friend whose beloved wife was just diagnosed with Alzheimer's. (Interestingly, they have started going to Catholic mass to my astonishment.) All I pray for them - and I do pray for them every night - is that God will give them His peace passing all understanding in these difficult circumstances and the strength and wisdom to cope with the inevitable challenges. I pray the same for Mordant and his wife, even if they think I'm wasting my time praying to the wall. I pray also that God will bring some good out of this situation, as I believe He will, and that they and their loved ones will one day see the good even if it doesn't alter their atheistic convictions..
I am so sorry to hear your wife is unwell. I'm wishing you the best possible outcome.
Unsolicited advice: Things will be hard on everyone for several months. While the focus will be on your wife, I urge you to not forget a bit of self care. This includes the kids. Take people up on their offers to help. Most will say 'if there is anything I can do' suggest something small. Can you mow the yard or shovel the driveway on saturday? Would you mind watching the kids while I do a bit of shopping? Or can you take the kids to the movie and you have a nap, hit the gym, take a walk. The chores have gotten away from you - would you mind running the vacuum while I dust or run laundry? Timmy has a dentist appointment, can you take him because I need to stay here?
Mordant and his wife are seniors. Your advice is sound and kind, but there are no "kids" who need watching or entertaining in this real-life situation.
2-3 weeks? Wow I'm so sorry your wife has to wait so long. Can't to be honest understand why they're not jumping on it sooner. Can you try another hospital or consultant or something?
They have an advocate who will be in touch with her and if her condition deteriorates they can bump someone else.
There is no place local with the necessary facilities. We could in theory go further afield but then we would have to just about do medical tourism to places like NYC, Buffalo, Rochester or Cleveland. Also, everything is complicated by a bleeding condition which has to be managed with an infusion before and after surgery. This requires coordination with a hematologist. Nothing's ever simple :-\ We are guessing that with all those moving parts plus the stress of hauling her to various places for consults, we would probably not come out ahead.
Trust me, she's eager to get it out and we have made that plain. She's able to advocate for herself but knows when to stop short of being an ass.
It seems like every part of the system lit a fire under each step until we get to the place that actually has to wield the knife ... and I think that is simple resource constraints.
This is going to have to be an old-fashioned open-abdomen procedure BTW, not laparoscopy, the tumor is too big and they have to probe around looking for spread, taking biopsies, etc.
Mordant and his wife are seniors. Your advice is sound and kind, but there are no "kids" who need watching or entertaining in this real-life situation.
Just FYI.
Thanks MQ. Although my wife IS busy keeping journals to bequeath to / planning possible activities with her adult kids. While we don't have to keep them entertained like with young ones, there is still some degree of attention involved, and we're on that. Her kids are the only family members who know about what's brewing just yet.
I am grateful that my wife and I are very similar in how we process things like this ... we both very much need to go with statistical probabilities, "prepare for the worst and hope for the best within reason" sorts of people. So we are educating ourselves about treatment and end of life options ... if it somehow turns out to be not immediately needed info, all the better, but preparedness is important to us.
My wife is completely fearless, but processing sadness about the very real possibility of leaving her loved ones early. She has always possessed a strong will to live (in the various senses of that phrase) and what is sad for me is seeing that light dim somewhat for the first time since I've known her. She has always punched through and "risen to the occasion"; now increasingly I must do that for her.
No O'd, people like Mordant don't operate under any Just World Fallacies.
Alas, yet another fallacious use of the term "fallacy," which appears to be something of a disease among supposedly critical-thinking atheists. The so-called Just World Fallacy is the cognitive bias that the world is just and fair and people get what they deserve. Those who die riddled with cancer somehow deserved it. I have never actually met anyone who thinks this way on any grand scale.
O'Darbo and Christianity commit no such fallacy. Christianity posits that, far from being just and fair, the world is in fact fallen and ruled by the Prince of Evil. Hideously bad things happen to wonderful people, even wonderful Christians. You cannot find the slightest suggestion in either of my posts that my late wife or Mordant's wife "deserved" their cancer. But you predictably resort to your silly one-line "fallacy" fallacy because this is the level of your thinking and you are not interested in substantive discussion.
The Christian position is simply that this world, with all of its injustice, unfairness, tragedy, suffering and evil - much of it due to humans' misuse of their free will - is consistent with an omnibenevolent God's eternal plan and purpose. Christianity does not posit His purpose as being "to make as many people as possible as happy as possible as much of the time as possible" - which is what I have described as the parochial and frankly silly perspective of many nonbelievers who insist God conform to their wishes of what He ought to be like.
My Christian beliefs may be partly or wholly wrong. The straw man atheist's beliefs likewise may be partly or wholly wrong. All we can do is exercise diligence to arrive at strong convictions and then live with the consequences, including having to deal with a loved one's death with whatever our convictions tell us about it. I simply say I would rather face a loved one's death with the convictions of a Christian than those of an atheist.
There are many lightweight "believers" and "nonbelievers" whose supposed "beliefs" are really little more than landing spots driven by cultural, social and economic considerations. They are not convictions at all. I daresay 80% of "Christians" and "atheists" alike are in this category (just my observation, but surely not far off). My point is that in times of tragedy convictions do matter, and developing strong and well-informed ones is worth the considerable effort.
There, I have given your silliness far more attention than it deserved.
Mordant, I am sorry to hear about your wife's cancer. I understand your atheism is preferable to the religion you were in (primarily because of the expectations and inferences attendant with an intervening Omnimax God). My wife and I have no such expectations or inferences so dealing with her treatable but not curable Stage 4 colon cancer is devoid of the issues you had with your religion. Additionally, we are both octogenarians and have had a wonderful full life with each other for over 60 years. In actuality, there is no guarantee that either one of us will survive the other but we are ready for whatever eventually ensues. You and your wife will be in our prayers and well wishes (as well as our prayer warriors) as you endure this additional hardship.
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