HIV

So there has recently been a baby child who was cured of HIV mere hours after being born with the life-shortening disease. Medical researchers administered an antiretroviral agent to the child before substantial quantities of dormant virus could build up inside of living cells. In light of this occurrence, thousands of minimally-informed people are praising God via media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter, thanking their lord and savior for bringing humanity this long-awaited miracle.

It sickens me that on the eve of such a triumph for science and for modern medicine, thousands of people are praising God for curing this child of HIV. Even if God does exist, he is not responsible for curing this child. The men and women who treated the child are responsible. Not God. This "miracle" was caused by something which can be explained by science. There was no supernatural intervention. Absolutely none.

Please, men and women and citizens of the world. Do not waste your time and energy praising a being who does not exist. Please praise instead modern medicine. Next time you think of tithing your local church, think instead of donating that money to a medical charity, or towards therapeutic research. It will do so much more for humanity there.

If you believe that God works through modern medicine for the betterment of humanity, then the least you could do is acknowledge that your money would be better spent helping the people who work to make a better tomorrow for all of humanity (yes, no matter what faith they hold). Isn't that immensely better than spending your money filling the pockets of those who tell you when, where, and how to worship a being that, if indeed all-powerful, shouldn't need worshiping?

Citizens of the world, I beseech you. Focus your energies on humanity's biggest problem: itself. Imaginary cures can only soothe imaginary maladies, and even at that they are insufficient. And they absolutely cannot affect real ones. We must inexorably pursue much-needed solutions for the problems which we face, and we have limited human resources. The time we have on this Earth as finite creatures limits the actions we can take before we vanish from the face of this planet. And we are also limited in our abilities as individuals. But if we bond together we can accomplish more than we ever could as individuals. If we pool our resources, then we can move out of the golden age of human inadequacy, and if we truly start caring for each other instead of caring for that which feeds our imagination and comforts us, then we can exceed even the current limits of our own imagination. But we can only do that by letting go of our oldest, most primitive, and most irrationally persistent beliefs.

As Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote.......... "There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.