Godless

I recently received a forwarded email from a loved and respected friend. It was a pass-this-on email: "Please Pray to God to Cure Cancer." I am happy to say I couldn't think of anyone in my life right now to whom I would forward such an email. The sender's flirtation with Catholicism and mysticism is known and accepted as his way of looking at life.

I am a cancer survivor. My cancer and its treatments, not provided by God but by an urban medical center, almost killed me. So, I am not at all glib about the horrors of cancer. But, I strongly believe the concept of simply praying for a cure is ludicrous and scientifically naive. As a professional nurse and humanist, I see this as a clear line between my humanism and religion. I will explain how boldly that line is drawn in my mind.

Before I retired from nursing, I worked in a residential AIDS hospice in Boston. It was at the peak of deaths from AIDS in the 1990s. In my time at the hospice, 5 years and 6 months, over 2,000 men and women died of AIDS in our 18-bed facility. It was a busy place. There was a death on most days. Often two. Each bed filled shortly after it was vacated. We knew the first names of most of the morticians in the Boston area.

Our facility was staffed by an amazing group of nurses and nursing aides. We had nurses and aides from Ireland and Congo through an agency we used to supplement our regular staff, who were relentlessly dedicated to our work. We worked scientifically. We studied our methods closely. We developed techniques for maximum pain control, nutrition and skin health maintenance for the bed-ridden. I can proudly say our standards of care were outstanding. In fact, we discharged several patients, who did so well in our scientifically-based care that they were restored to years more of functional living.

God did nothing at that hospice but get in the way. We were constantly assailed by religious professionals who wanted to be in the limelight of AIDS care, which was becoming trendy in the media at that time. Elizabeth Taylor visited our hospice with great fanfare during my tenure there. Many who came in the guise of religious comforters were homophobic. Their narcissism did not even allow the idea that being homophobic at an AIDS hospice was neither compassionate nor comforting. I did not tolerate that kind of behavior then, and I do not intend to ever tolerate it.

God did nothing for AIDS. Science has saved many of us from premature death. And, even science has provided a mixed blessing of life in exchange for grotesque side effects for many. Science has been corrupted by the greed of the pharmaceutical corporate model, but science cannot be blamed for causing AIDS, unlike an omnipotent, all-creating God, if you are going to believe in such nonsense.

My humanism is not branded with the broadly anti-religious ire of some modern atheists. One of the most wonderfully intelligent influences on my childhood was a great-aunt who was a Catholic nun and librarian. She was perhaps a Catholic humanist.  I do have certain lines, boundaries, which I will not cross for the sake of inter-faith fellowship. Praying to God to cure anything is one of those lines. Allowing religious people to interfere with medical treatment and medical science is another.Allowing religious people to undermine sexual education and sexual health is yet another.

As a humanist in community, I would encourage those who engage in inter-faith fellowship with religious believers to keep in mind that there may be social values which will not be reconcilable between humanism and religion. These conflicts need not negate the value of inter-faith cooperation in certain social causes. However, there will most likely come a time when humanists must say "No!" in the face of a religious choice of ignorance over education and science. Progress does not come without activism in some form. It is my sincere hope that future humanists choose activism for the greater good over just getting along when they find themselves in conflict with their God-fearing friends.