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Diabetic atheist on God and suffering, part 1
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Religion: Not my thing (AP Photo/Srdjan Ilic)
Disclaimer: At the very real risk of alienating myself from friends, family, readers, I have chosen to end my silence and write openly about atheism, only as it pertains to my disease in this instance, for now. After all, I am the Diabetes Examiner, not the Atheism Examiner. I'll let the initial shock set in, and if you choose to keep reading, I won't presume many of you will agree with my opinions. But perhaps, if nothing else, with an open mind you will have a greater understanding of how we atheists function daily without spontaneously combusting into an eternal ball of hellfire and sin. Let's get right to it then.
Like many things in life, there are two sides: there is the mental or emotional, and then there is the physical. Sports, for instance, or relationships, or diabetes, as it were in this writer's case, are tangible examples to which most of you can relate these two sides. My limited experience in each of these contexts by no means makes me an expert. I wouldn’t dare purport to be one. Consider this merely a personal analysis and opinion, far from a scientific one, though science is a major influence here, as you will soon see.
This is a column about diabetes. It is not (directly) about science, or religion, or celebrity gossip, or anything else (but yes, Nick Jonas does have type 1 diabetes). My disease grabs hold of virtually every aspect of my life. So when I consider my religious beliefs (or literal lack thereof), I'm forced to consider them through the eyes of a person who is fraught with the daily encumbrances of chronic illness.
The two sides of diabetes, the mental and the physical, are at constant odds with one another. We diabetics must balance the physical symptoms of hypoglycemia (low blood sugar level) with the mental ability to compensate for the cause and avoid the same situation in the future, while at the same time treating the low that brought us there. We must balance an avoidance of hyperglycemia (high blood sugar) with the desire to eat the foods we want. It is an interplay of the emotional (frustration, control, patience) and the physical (tuning into one’s body, its needs and alarms), a sort of constant diabetic duality. These are the daily battles, anecdotes that piece together the quilt of a diabetic life. But probably the largest piece of that quilt is on the emotional side of the coin, and that is the philosophical reckoning of the diseased, the justification of suffering.
That I suffer from diabetes is one of the primary reasons I consider myself an atheist. At 13, I was diagnosed, which also happens to be when I realized that Roman Catholicism, the religion of my youth, was not the only religion in the world, quite an awakening, if I may use a typically religious term. But at 13, I could only handle one major life event at a time. The cosmological battle for my soul, for lack of a better word, could wait. I was only recently a teenager and needed to figure out this diabetes thing first. The philosophies behind it would develop with time and experience. And as we all do at pivotal moments in life, I asked the proverbial question, "Why?" Why was I chosen to battle this and not someone else?
I soon realized someone else was chosen. In fact, it wasn't just someone, but some-many. There are millions and millions of people in the world with type 1 diabetes, not all of which were reared in a Christian upbringing where it is easily chalked up to part of god's big plan. What a cheap excuse that is, a scapegoat for the weak to give meaning to their suffering. "I can't think of any other reason I would be chosen for this. I mean, God is love and has big plans for me. That must be why I'm now stricken with an incurable disease, right? God has a plan for me, right?" says the believer.
Can't we suffer just because suffering is and always has been a part of nature, part of biology and our physiological environment, including a genetic predisposition? I think so. And realizing how many people suffer in the world, not just from diabetes, but from starvation, cancer, cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis, blindness, downs syndrome and others, gave me reason and understanding for my misfortune – chance, a simple bout with chance from which I escaped on the losing side.
Like all the good people who suffer from the terrible list I just named, what sufficient reason is there for such conditions? To teach us a cosmic lesson in reverence? Did the 8-year-old cancer patient wrong someone so greatly that he now has to become a player in death's pageant as recourse? What was it the 5-year-old girl did that she is now so deserving of painful insulin injections and finger pricks everyday, for the rest of her life? It's a ridiculous assumption that these things "all happen for good reason, god's reason, and it can't be questioned." The philosophical inquiry is famously posed as "Why do bad things happen to good people?"
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