PainOnline.com

Nothing is actually real until it happens to us, pain in particular. Until then it is merely a surge of power from a savage God, a false one created by simple mindedness, which informs us why the ancients were so ignorant in their conception of deities, as in the Greek and Roman gods, who were allowed the worst imaginable conceits without any cancellation of their worship or slowdown in their temple building.

The more fearsome the god, the more important to placate them with a really nice edifice of some kind. Now we learn, that those of us with central pain are sacrificial lambs, as it were, to the didactic methodology of a really terrible god. Our human pain is said to be “His Will”. Of course, that would make dilatory, indifferent, unfunded, and lazy medical research also His will, which cannot be. So, we are in a quandary, it seems. God is not in the ignorance business and ignorance is what keeps us in pain.

Forgive us for saying so, but it is tiresome to see irrationality masquerade not only as rationality, but as religion. In the zoo, one may see creatures who look like man, but a complete study of them would fail to reveal what man is like. A primatologist is not a philosopher, nor is he a priest. There are physical discomforts which bear some resemblance to central pain, but to experience them does not inform about central pain. Someone who has stepped on a nail or suffered a broken bone does not understand central pain. You can register the domain name, truth.com, but it still doesn’t mean you know what you are talking about.

Those of you about to dispense your two bits to someone with nerve injury pain, try this experiment. Get down on your knees and ask this simple question, “God, what should we do about pain?” If you do, you will realize that the answer is so obvious, you might have reserved such questioning for more imponderable matters. We should SOLVE pain.

The still small voice of prayer may not be the only approach when common sense SHOUTS out the answer. A short walk through the anesthesia department of any hospital would have sufficed. It is unfortunate that we do not have tape recordings of the surgery suites prior to the invention of ether. The sounds would have made you change your mind about any foolish notion that pain is God’s will. It is also not God’s will that you sit on your butt and do nothing about it, nor should you analyze religiously those with the worst pain state known to man, central pain, any more than you would analyze someone who was killed by a drunk driver. There but for the grace of God go you! To say that awful pain in someone is “God’s will” is to castigate them and to judge them, in one thoughtless, unsupportable comment.

It is rather common to see religion squaring off against science. However, a peculiar unity seems to appear when the topic is pain. Agnostic and ascetic alike join in a mighty consensus that pain is an expression of destiny, in what can only be described as a bizarre tradition of pain voodoo, which needs no God, but is nevertheless elevated to the plane of one.

Pain means nothing because we mean nothing, or God wills us in particular to have nerve injury pain. It is an unsettled question which benighted view “heaps the most contempt on God’s creatures”. Philosophically, one with central pain is said to be “lucky” because one could be dead, and religiously, the agony is supposedly “God’s will”. This is the same idea, of course, only seen from different vantage points. Pain in YOU is either neutral or a good thing; pain in ME is something else altogether.

This only shows how strongly riveted primitive ideas are on the human mind. Ask a class to write a paper, entitled say “A Day in the LIfe of Homo Erectus” or even “Favorite Pastimes of Australopithecus” and you will get a stylized, stereotyped composition, which is taken seriously by the authors, who of course, have no idea whatsoever of what things were really like so many millions of years ago. Similarly, ask a class to write on the “Meaning of Pain” and once again, we are back into fantasy primitive-ville and in the world of imagination.

How about the present? Do we even now know what is going on, even with tenure and some colleagues to lean on? A scientist is free to talk of all existence as “utterly meaningless” and look into the void without blinking, but the scientist is not free to insist that everyone agree with him. Similarly, no one is free to say nerve injury pain is God’s will, that it is either meaningful nor meaningless. It is a disease, and not unique from any other disease, in its theological implications.

We cannot say any disease is God’s will simply because no cure has been researched out at the present time. Is there a profession more designed to refine mankind than the charitable determination to end pain? The scientist attacks all suffering as if he takes it personally, and there can be nothing but good in this.

Pain deserves more than an imaginary frame of reference. It is embarassing when “modern man” can speak of it with no more enlightenment than the most fatalistic animist in the darkest jungle, hiding in the shadows from an angry God, unaware of the loving one. Negation of pain in another is an act of the creature, the carnal ape, not the expression of ecstasy discovered while on one’s knees, in communion with the infinite.

Negation, denigration, or disparagement of pain is equivalent to the nihilism in certain scientists which illogically “celebrates” the “majestic meaningless” of all existence. Whether it is Tyndal claiming that in our soul-less universe man is “a mere eddy in the primevel slime” or whether it is a cleric in long robes and an even longer face, pronouncing the grave and unscriptural declaration that comfort shall go no further than identifying a just suffering in us, we invite them all to take two running jumps and leap into a self congratulatory hole.

One commentator mused that “The wise men gloried in the strenth of mind and character that enabled them to look an utterly indifferent universe in the face without flinching…[condescending toward] our infantile longings for more.” What a superiority distance from pain imparts. OBVIOUSLY, it is God’s will that THEY be pain free while we PERISH in it.

This is distance disguised as compassion. It is more suited to a benighted age of superstition than an age of enlightenment. Can they not consider for a moment that the obvious response to pain is to get busy stopping it as soon as possible. How do they differ in any way from those who walked past the injured Samaritan on the other side of the road. In what way are they different from Job’s self righteous comforters. Better to just say, “Pain is an awful mystery and I am sorry you have to endure it. Because of it, I will not expect more than you can give. I hope you can avoid letting it totally define you.”

Why theologize illness? Why not instead respond robustly by curing it. Run the labs, search out botannicals in the Amazon, scour the animal and marine kingdom for the proper compounds to stop pain! Why call research to a halt by cementing it in place as God’s will. We might as well strike the word “Saint” from all hospitals, and declare instead that they are frustrating God’s purposes by assisting and ministering to their fellow men. This is a very sick philosophy and deserves no approbation, as it dispenses no compassion to afflicted mankind.

Perhaps we should close all hospitals, clinics, and first aid stations, since suffering is the gloriuos expression of an insane and savege God who rules the universe, wherein the relief of suffering diverts the warranted vengeance of God’s will. Remember that for at least a century, it was considered a capital crime to relieve a woman of pain during childbirth, for the doctor was depriving her of her salvation. Sound ridiculous? No more so than that we should take a relaxing pause whenever we encounter anyone with severe central pain and imagine we have uttered sacred truths by informing them that the pain is “God’s will”.

How does it not occur to observers than pain illness is to be cured, quickly, and that attempts to cure it are in themselves hallowed for the goodliness of the act. Giving pain “meaning” by denying that it is pain is not only insensitive, it is unreflective, bordering on stupid.

It is no different to speak of pain as the will of the earth spirit than as the will of God. It is as if man imagines they have invented a “science other than science”, which they unblushingly refer to as “God’s will”. Throughout holy writ, the divines contested AGAINST pain. From before Elisha to the present, we have associated HEALING pain with God, except when we speak to those who have it, when an inverse God is associated with HAVING pain.

In the pain world, we are back thousands of years ago in powers of observation. As one author wrote of the stickiness of old, patently nonsensical ideas about God and the universe, “…[such religious mantra] follows only from the old Alexandrian absolutism: the universe and truth and God could not be otherwise by very definition than as the doctors of the fourth century described them; any changes in the scenario would require scarpping the whole thing, including God.”

Well, it is time to scrap the highly superstitious nonsense that passes for religion when pain is spoken of. That is our intention here. Murder does not become non-murder through the device of naming it as religion and pretending to speak for God does not become God’s will under the defense that it conforms to the ideas of the majority of “religiously minded” people. Pain is not real to these people and therefore they can and do speak of it in the most unreal manner.

The world has an astonishing knowledge of the actual mind of God. They also have no hesitation whatever in presuming to be able to speak for God, and they are only too happy to let you (who appear to be the ONLY human who does NOT know the will of God) know just exactly what that will is. Unfortunately, God’s will is that you have severe, agonizing, and unbearable central pain. Or is it?

We have been unable to find anyone who suffers from severe central pain who has not been informed quickly, firmly, and authoritatively (it being so easy to acquire authority and credentials to speak for God) that they suffer because it is God’s will. God is quite an evil being it would appear. He wills wars, rumors of wars, contention, suffering, agony, and all manner of ill fortune, most of all PAIN. Looking closely at their God, we find a remarkable likeness to Torquemada and the Inquisition.

Oh, wait a minute. We made a mistake. It couldn’t be GOD who desires these things. It is instead, his enemy, the Devil. Sorry about the mistake. It is just so common for us to hear that it is God’s will that humans have central pain that we forgot the true nature of God, that he is love, rather than malignant hatred. According to the false priests of man, who do not lament the mystery, but layer on a whitish image of devoutness with solemn pronouncements which signify incomprehension rather than insight.

According to them, God does not regard the sparrow who falls to the earth, but majestically locks mankind into a tight and smothering sarcophagus of pain, showing him that the tortures of the flesh are nothing and that men should only reflect on the state of their souls. It is the intellectual equivalent of the iron maiden implement of torture from the Dark Ages, which encased living humans in “beat the devil at his own game” dungeon whereby men’s souls were saved.

If these ungodly conceptions of twisted minds actually worked to purge the carnality of man (and woman), why weren’t the clerics lining up with their all day passes to be strapped in, tortured, stretched on the wrack, etc, the better to confer clear vision of the path back to heaven.

God desires that we endure suffering well, should it come our way, but statistically there is little evidence that He desires to increase suffering and is in the business of inflicting terrible pain on any one of his children uniquely and in particular. We have already dealt with why free agency is necessary for the maintenance of free will and the identity of humans as real beings and not robots (admittedly deep doctrine), but a God up in heaven zapping people–that is just too much like the ancient Greeks and their view of the petulant Zeus, not to mention the other gods and goddesses who were really put out at mankind.

The reason for the mistake is that people forget to think statistically about the Bible and about God. We will attempt to remedy that here. You see, Job, was an exception to the rule. He actually was allowed to suffer, for reasons known to the Divine. However, in nearly all other instances in scripture, God delights in blessing his children here upon the earth. That is what makes him God, he is just so infinitely good. It is easy to forget this. That is why people respond to our central pain with the inane and blasphemous characterization of our Heavenly Father with the reminder that He has really singled us out for particularly bad pain.

We would like to give equal time to all religions, but a little reference to the New Testament will show that we are right in that scope, at least. We will refer only to the fourth chapter of Matthew, although there are many other instances which could be cited, including some impressive references to “Peace, goodwill to men” being sung by angels, etc.

“And Jesus went about in all Galilee…healing all manner of disease among the people…and they brought unto him all sick people that were taken with diverse diseases and torments…and he healed them.”
Matt 4:23-24

Hmmm. God’s will seems to be linked to healing, as does his power.

Statistically speaking, those who claim God is behind pain are wrong. It is impossible to square godly attributes of mercy and love with the atrocious misstatement that He wants us to have central pain. Now if any of you are as righteous as Job, then MAYBE you might be an exception, but we doubt any of you are anywhere near that level of testing.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but a little statistical reflection will reveal that it is the business of God to encourage us to be kind to our fellow men, following HIS example. It is not kind to tell them that it is God’s will that they suffer or that there was something particular He wanted to teach them so he gave them agonizing pain. God is more subtle than this.

It is true that the story of Job exists, but it is the exception and outweighed by an overwhelming number of instances where God has participated in healing, provided one could access divine power. In a day of no technology, the healing had to be pretty much de novo, with the only precursor being extreme faith on the part of the person healed. However, when man has the ability to do things for himself, God expects man to use whatever he has been blessed with to help himself. In this day and age of great science, most healings come from the hard work of scientists. They are doing God’s work. As Howard Field, the great pain clinician at UCSF said of treating central pain “It is God’s work.”*

And so, you can stop thinking that God would treat you that way. He would not. It is just that some of his children here on earth are so ignorant about certain matters, and so presumptive in their own knowledge of the divine, that they speak without thinking. It is God’s will that you get well from this condition. Pray for the pain scientists, as well as for yourselves, to be able to endure until the riddle of pain is solved, WITH GOD’S HELP!

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*We ought to at least have the agreement of the Catholic Church on this, since the canonization of Dominic de Guzman, leading to the Dominican Order, was based on his alleged healing of pain, including a case of CENTRAL PAIN in a young woman. See eg. Guerrero-Peral, Rev Neurol. 2007 Feb 1-15;44(3):181-3