http://healthimpactnews.com/2013/wha...your-sickness/
I'm offering this for discussion.
Excellent article!
I believe that the power of prayer is the best medicine in the world. I have seen it with my own eyes, and it made my faith in God that much stronger.
“The spirits of darkness are now among us. We have to be on guard so that we may realize what is happening when we encounter them and gain a real idea of where they are to be found. The most dangerous thing you can do in the immediate future will be to give yourself up unconsciously to the influences which are definitely present.” ~ Rudolf Steiner
http://created4health.org/devotional...s_sickness.htm
Another great article from the same author, on his website.
A lot can be said for the infinite mercies of God, but the smarts of a good pharmacist, when you get down to it, is worth more.
--PHILIP K. DICK
Not too bad. FWIW, Elliot Hulse has long said that things like sudden onset of illness, loss of limbs, and various other tragedies we can't control serve to make us stronger. He speaks from a secular perspective, but the message can be adapted to a sacred one well.
BUMP
“The spirits of darkness are now among us. We have to be on guard so that we may realize what is happening when we encounter them and gain a real idea of where they are to be found. The most dangerous thing you can do in the immediate future will be to give yourself up unconsciously to the influences which are definitely present.” ~ Rudolf Steiner
Sickness is often a way that God is judging us to try and get our attention; to get us to repent and start moving in a different direction.When you think about babies/children that are born with terminal and excruciatingly painful diseases, this doesn't put God in a very good light. Only the biggest simpletons who have never been around sick/dying people believe that we can control all illness.I realize that the idea of our sickness being a result of our sins is not a popular message today, because our humanistic culture is built upon the foundation of Darwinian evolution, and it has taught us to believe that all sickness is a result of natural causes that we can control in our environment.
So what's the message to someone with Alzheimer's? Hey $#@!, you shouldn't have had that cheeseburger in 1953? God's punishing you...
Yes... it allows us to see the things we previously took for granted. Of course, some people come to this realization without negative life events.
Indianensis Universitatis Alumnus
oh now now Amy! It says only SOME of our diseases are a loving God's punishments meant to nudge us in the right direction (by, you know, making us overwhelmingly ill so that we can't figure out what we did to deserve it).Originally Posted by amy31416
When someone gets ill, regardless of age, they should first decide whether or not it's because they sinned. This being the case, I would expect a huge number of people who've come to this conclusion documenting their spontaneous and miraculous recovery through the power of prayer and born-again-ness. I would not expect a loving God who inflicted this malady upon the person in question to continue it after the lesson was learned, after all....
This is just not my understanding of God. "Hey! Sinner! BAM!!! Here's some cancer! Nah your family aren't sinners; they just get to watch you waste away, deal with the emotional and financial problems left in the wake of a massive and long term illness, and worry that --- in case this isn't a sin-caused illness --- their own bodies or those of their children will begin to waste and decay in a similarly painful fashion before long! MWAHAHAHAHA!" No. I'm not sure who the hell even comes up with this $#@!. But it isn't God.
Genuine, willful, aggressive ignorance is the one sure way to tick me off. I wish I could say you were trolling. I know better, and it's just sad.
I Always believed that if you you had a lot of garbage in a past life you are judged whether to come back to clean in up' and go through the suffering
For the Christian, we have Romans 8:28: And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.
We get ill because of things in this world. Like germs
But the suffering we go through is expiation for our sins because God is merciful and forgives our sins when we go through pain on earth. The notion that god punishes us with illness for sins, and heals for obedience I think is a flawed concept. I believe it CAN happen in specific circumstances, like what happened to prophet Job (even though his illness was to prove his determination), but these are special circumstances.
“I'm real, Ron, I'm real!” — Rick Santorum
“Congratulations.” — Ron Paul¹
You're a sick person for even contemplating this.
Tell that to the faith healing church that brought the measles back to the US earlier this year.
Let's see how well your "faith-healing" works when your friend gets cancer or is in a serious accident. Internal bleeding? LMAO, those doctors with years and years of experience can't help him. But letting him die while praying will
Someone didn't read the OP. :PLet's see how well your "faith-healing" works when your friend gets cancer or is in a serious accident. Internal bleeding? LMAO, those doctors with years and years of experience can't help him. But letting him die while praying will
I was talking about donnay.
I can't fathom how anyone is dumb enough to believe that prayer works better than medicine.
Donnay, if you think faith healing works so great, take an entire bottle of painkillers. Pray to God. Post the results (or have your widow post the results). Better yet, take a (literal) leap of faith. Jump off of a building and God will be your cushion. No need to fear, you will be fine
Quit being silly. You do realize a lot of the efficacy of medicine is psychological, yes? Google "placebo effect".I was talking about donnay.
I can't fathom how anyone is dumb enough to believe that prayer works better than medicine.
Donnay, if you think faith healing works so great, take an entire bottle of painkillers. Pray to God. Post the results (or have your widow post the results). Better yet, take a (literal) leap of faith. Jump off of a building and God will be your cushion. No need to fear, you will be fine
Yes, I understand what a placebo is. But placebos don't work for everything. Placebos won't work for cancer or heart disease. They work for things like building muscle.
You seriously act like a class-A imbecile. That is not what I said. I do not believe in faith healers, I believe in the power of prayer.I was talking about donnay.
I can't fathom how anyone is dumb enough to believe that prayer works better than medicine.
Donnay, if you think faith healing works so great, take an entire bottle of painkillers. Pray to God. Post the results (or have your widow post the results). Better yet, take a (literal) leap of faith. Jump off of a building and God will be your cushion. No need to fear, you will be fine
*SIGH*
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.
~ Reinhold Niebuhr
“The spirits of darkness are now among us. We have to be on guard so that we may realize what is happening when we encounter them and gain a real idea of where they are to be found. The most dangerous thing you can do in the immediate future will be to give yourself up unconsciously to the influences which are definitely present.” ~ Rudolf Steiner
Placebo is not the only psychological tool physicians use. I brought it up because it is well-known and a good starting point for you to google around and learn more.
I know ALLLLL about placebos. I bodybuild, so I've consumed my fair share of placebos (and, $#@!, if they work and give you the desired effects, who cares if they're placebos?). But placebos don't work for disease. Even implying that something like prayer can be used to heal is laughable.
Reducing stress on the body is a helpful thing. I'm not really surprised that's what this thread has wound up focused on, though. The original claim is that:
when we are ill, harkening back to the ooga booga days when gods made your crops fail if you did not appease them.we should first examine ourselves and see if there is a spiritual cause
Genuine, willful, aggressive ignorance is the one sure way to tick me off. I wish I could say you were trolling. I know better, and it's just sad.
As Hippocrates once wrote, "The natural healing force within each one of us is the greatest force in getting well."
Spirituality: Researchers have been studying how spiritual beliefs, attitudes, and practices affect health. In a recent study on people with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), for example, those who had faith in God, compassion toward others, a sense of inner peace, and were religious had a better chance of surviving for a long time with acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) than those who did not have such faith or practices. Research suggests that qualities like faith, hope, and forgiveness, and using prayer and social support, have a noticeable effect on health and healing.
Source: Mind-body medicine | University of Maryland Medical Center http://umm.edu/health/medical/altmed...#ixzz2oupg0EpC
“The spirits of darkness are now among us. We have to be on guard so that we may realize what is happening when we encounter them and gain a real idea of where they are to be found. The most dangerous thing you can do in the immediate future will be to give yourself up unconsciously to the influences which are definitely present.” ~ Rudolf Steiner
Placebos sometimes work for disease.
But no, I don't think that sickness is a message from God. I think that God loves His children, and that sickness and disease are the work of evil.
There is no possible way to attribute healing to one's spiritual beliefs.
Just one of the dozens of articles on the subject below (some scientific, some science aimed at laypersons). You're a bodybuilder and don't understand the mind-body connections? You're likely a not so great bodybuilder or just trolling this thread. Just about any pro trainer will teach you the importance of controlling your mind WRT sport/exercise. (I've trained with strength coaches and a number of senseis, so I'm speaking from an experienced POV)
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/1998/0323/6106136a.html
Prayer as medicine
FOR MOST OF THE PAST two centuries science and divinity have operated in separate realms, with little to say to each other. Will this separation last forever? Perhaps not. Experimenters are testing the idea that science and religion do overlap in the discipline of medicine. Their thesis is based on two plausible propositions: that your health is affected by your state of mind, and that your state of mind is affected by your religious beliefs.
Can you test such a thesis? Apparently. Last October Dr. Harold Koenig of the Duke University Medical Center reported that old people who regularly attend religious services have lower blood levels of interleukin-6 than old people who watch TV or play golf Sunday mornings.
High levels of that protein are linked to many diseases of the immune system, including multiple myeloma, B-cell lymphoma and such autoimmune diseases as rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease.
Another study came out of Dartmouth Medical School in 1995. It found that patients with an active social life and strong religious faith were far less likely to die in the six months following heart surgery than similar patients who weren’t as religious and didn’t get out much.
There could be a connection between cancer survival and religious belief. A 1978 study from the UCLA School of Public Health found that devout Mormon men had lower rates of cancer than less devout ones.
(Mormons, of course, get an anticancer benefit from avoiding tobacco;the study attempted to eliminate this effect from consideration by including control groups of nonsmokers.)
Yet another mind/body relationship was suggested in a survey of 400 patients in Georgia in 1989: Those folks who believed religion was very important had lower diastolic blood pressure readings than those who did not. Last year an American Journal of Public Health study concluded that frequent churchgoers were more likely to live longer than people who went to church less frequently.
Does all this prove the ancient idea of the soul and its influence on the body? John Templeton, the retired mutual fund manager, is a firm believer. “The separation of science and religion is artificial,” he declares, and he is spending a lot of money to mend the breach.
Templeton, 85, cashed in his business in a sale to Franklin Resources in 1992. Since then he has devoted his fortune and most of his waking hours to new perspectives on religion. Templeton preaches that if science and religion can learn to work together, the benefits will be enormous.
Through the John Templeton Foundation (assets, $250 million), he is promoting, among other things, scientific research designed to measure the medical benefits of a spiritual lifestyle. Presiding over the Radnor, Pa.-based foundation is Dr. John Templeton Jr., 58, his son, who is a retired pediatric surgeon. A lot of the Templeton grant money gets funneled through the National Institute for Healthcare Research, a Rockville, Md.-based outfit with an annual budget of $3.5 million. This institute funds religiously flavored medical research that its multibillion-dollar taxpayer-funded Maryland neighbor, the National Institutes of Health, is loath to touch.
We’re not talking miracle cures here — the lame throwing away crutches, the blind seeing again. This is more a question of wellness, an offshoot of the well-accepted notion that mental health can be conducive to physical health (see box). Consider the work of Dr. Herbert Benson, of Harvard Medical School and founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Two decades ago he discovered that meditation promotes health, popularizing this theory in the book The Relaxation Response. Inner peace, the book argues, lowers blood pressure and can trigger other healing power within the body via the immune system.
Dr. Benson now believes that for many people prayer is another avenue to the same relaxation benefit. His Mind/Body Medical Institute offers affiliations for hospitals that are setting up centers for mind/body medicine. So far such centers exist at ten U.S. hospitals, including Houston’s Memorial Hermann Healthcare System and St. Peter’s Medical Center in New Brunswick, N.J. Dr. Benson is also behind the Spirituality & Healing in Medicine Conference, which drew 1,000 doctors and nurses to its fourth incarnation at Harvard Medical School in December.
This kind of thinking has its critics. Dr. Albert Ellis, a cognitive psychologist in New York City, questions whether surveys that collect data on churchgoing habits are trustworthy. “If you ask deeply religious people if they are happier, have better marriages and so forth, of course they’re going to say they do,” says Dr. Ellis. “They just lie.”
In response, Dr. Templeton points to the body of data collected by the National Institute for Healthcare Research as growing scientific evidence of religion’s role in health and healing.
There’s also the risk that a correlation between religion and health might not reflect cause and effect. Take that study by Duke’s Dr. Koenig of religion and interleukin-6. Could it be that the old people who are in the best health are also the ones most likely to have the energy to get out to religious services regularly? Dr. Koenig says that his study statistically controlled for chronic illness and physical functioning.
As they say in scientific journals, more research needs to be done.
But something important is going on here: The old scientific skepticism about matters spiritual is breaking down a bit. “Five years ago you couldn’t take a course on spirituality in medical school if you wanted to,” says Dr. Templeton. “Now these courses are required in many schools.”
From the article:
In 1989, for example, a clinical study by David Spiegel, M.D. at Stanford University School of Medicine demonstrated the power of the mind to heal. Of 86 women with late stage breast cancer, half received standard medical care while the other half received standard care plus weekly support sessions. In these sessions, the women were able to share both their grief and their triumphs. Spiegel discovered that the women who participated in the social support group lived twice as long as the women who did not. A similar clinical study in 1999 showed that in breast cancer patients, helplessness and hopelessness are associated with lesser chance of survival.
I'll just add a personal story here.
I have a friend who is very liberty minded and full of faith.
She lost her seven year old to cancer this year. He fought a long (18mo+) battle and they did do chemo, transplants etc. I took their family a meal three days after they buried him. As I sat at that table, that woman witnessed the glory of God in a way I've never seen before or since. For one, I expected this to be difficult and prayed for the right words on the way there. Instead, she did most of the talking.
She understood that it was God's will to take her son. I mean, heck, they had tried the gamut of medicinal options. THREE separate times the doctors said he was cured/in remission and then it'd be right back. She would ask him "do you want to go to Heaven?" And he would always say yes.
Finally on the day he died she knew it was coming. She asked him again about Heaven and he said he thought he'd like to stay with her for just a little bit longer. He was really struggling and she knew the time was short. She prayed, "God, please. If today is the day you take him, please just let it be glorious." He slept and they waited in that hospital room. Later that afternoon, he sat up in his bed excited and said "mommy! The children! Oh mommy! There's Jesus! I want to go to Heaven now." And with that the machines all started beeping.
When I took her that meal, I was the one being refined. She was God's vessel.
Now, was his cancer because of some sin? Only God knows.
3 Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+9
Few men have virtue enough to withstand the highest bidder. ~GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter, Aug. 17, 1779
Quit yer b*tching and whining and GET INVOLVED!!
See below. I never once doubted the mind-body connection. And I've trained with strength coaches as well and have a lot of experience lifting and playing sports. I am also speaking from experience.
Correlation is not causation. With that being said, I never denied the power of the mind. I denied the power of faith healing.
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