Jim Bakker, a fan of the fanatical Jan Porter and her ‘heartbeat’ bill, has somehow come to the conclusion that there were two scientists who would have cured cancer, but they were aborted by evil wenches who had the unthinkable, autonomy. Naturally, Jehovah was the one who decided to “send” these two scientists, rather than doing something straightforward, like simply eliminating all cancers, which would be rather amazing, as it would require our cells to behave differently across our various lifetimes. Or Jehovah could have simply dropped a bit of super-duper brilliance on any of the current scientists researching cancer. Lots of choice there, to say the least.
Jim Bakker claimed that God has sent two scientists to earth who would have found the cure for cancer, but they were both aborted before that ever happened.
Bakker was interviewing extremist Religious Right activist Janet Porter and former Rep. Tom DeLay about their efforts to get Congress to pass Porter’s “Heartbeat Bill,” a radical piece of legislation that Porter brags will outlaw abortion “before the mother even knows she’s pregnant” and will be “the foot in the door” to eventually completely outlawing abortion. Bakker declared that Porter’s bill is “the most important thing going on in the world right now.”
Janet Porter is a dangerous fanatic, whose life desire is to stomp on women, ensure they will never have bodily autonomy, and she has no problem with women dying, she considers that suitable punishment for any women who dares to think her life is her own, and that she has the right to make her own medical decisions in privacy. If we actually had a government, rather than a regime, she might not be so worrying, but considering the regime currently in power, there’s a great deal to dread.
“This program could be an important cog to stop abortion in this country,” he added. “The thing we have done in America, we have killed our babies. We have killed the future of America. I told you the other day about a story, someone said they asked God, ‘Why haven’t we had a cure for cancer?’ And He said back, ‘I gave you two scientists that had the cure and both of them were aborted.’”
Oh FFS, the effing helicopter story. This is the stupid christian’s answer to anything and everything. I have seen and read so many fucking versions of that idiocy over the years, I’d like to cheerfully strangle the idiot who started it. Most christians think that’s just brilliant, which tells you a lot about most christians. As for a “cure for cancer”, there’s no such thing, and it’s not likely there ever will be. That’s because cancer is not one disease, it’s hundreds of diseases. Even within a category of a specific cancer, there are different types of that specific cancer. Cancers are born of cell mutations, and there have to be a number of different mutations before anything turns into cancer. Cell mutations often happen which don’t turn into cancer. Some cancers are easier to treat than others, and have a high remission rate. Research into cancer is constant, and it’s a never-ending race against time. A great deal of progress has been made, and a great many people are able to live their lives out, rather than die an untimely death.
For there to be ‘a cure’ for all cancers, that would qualify as a miracle, because no one treatment is effective against all cancers, that’s why current cancer treatments are targeted. So, Jehovah’s “two scientists” wouldn’t have been able to do shit where cancer is concerned. Once again, the sheer weakness and ineffectiveness of the christian god is what stands out. What’s the fucking point of being a god, if you go to the trouble to imbue a couple of blastocysts with miracle performance, but you couldn’t choose people who not only truly wanted a child, but had the necessary circumstances to have that child, and see that it gets a good education to boot? Or you know, wiggle a godly pinky finger and take care of the cancer business yourself?
To a christian, it doesn’t matter what the fuck happens in any given situation, their nasty, pointless god always gets the credit, especially when credit belongs to the people who make a life and death difference to someone.
As someone struggling with cancer treatment, this fucking attitude is infuriating, to say the least. A great many people over the years have helped to make brilliant leaps in treatment, and if I make it through treatment and come out clean on the other end, any gratitude I may have will belong to them, not the ugly ass god of christians. It is very christian to decide to use something like cancer to try to force the regressive oppression of women though, because cancer is still the big fucking scary, and too many christians are stupid and gullible enough to buy such awful dreck as some sort of skillful reasoning.
Why do Christians keep insisting on portraying their allegedly all-powerful god as either incredibly incompetent or omnipassive-agressive? You’d think he’d have known that those two women would have chosen to terminate their pregnancies and would have put the future doctors somewhere else, or he did know and deliberately made it so those two potentially history-making doctors were aborted. Neither of these options put their god in a good light.
No, it doesn’t, but like I said, most christians seem to think the whole helicopter business is oh so brilliant and clever, they nod their heads, completely satisfied.
Tabby, you stole my comment.
Jesus was reincarnated a few years back when Jehovah went back to his old ways and impregnated a young virgin. Unfortunately, she got an abortion after claiming that she was raped. True story.
And how the hell can people go on about the “cure for cancer” in 2018 anyway? Hodgkin’s disease was a death sentence when I was a high schooler. It isn’t now. Cancer is some mighty bad crap, yes, but it’s losing…..
I went to the doctor because of pain in my upper chest. It turned out to be chondritis, but the x-ray revealed a lump that we eventually discovered was a cancerous tumor. To this day my mother says that Jehovah gave me the chondritis so we could find the cancer. I always think he could have just prevented the cancer from forming in the first place. And the chondritis too, for that matter. It gets so damn painful sometimes.
Just think: one of those aborted babies might have solved the overpopulation problem.
Joseph
Were we or any of our family of a religious bent we might say the same about Mr Jazz. His appendix cancer was discovered because he was diagnosed with a kidney tumour (that turned out to be non-malignant) which was found because he had a bladder infection. Me, I credit this all to Zain the junior doctor who gave Mr Jazz a really thorough prodding, thought he felt a lump on the left kidney and referred Mr Jazz for a scan. This has an extra sweetness as Zain pronounces his name Zen, which as some of you may know is also the name of the computer that ran the Liberator in Blake’s Seven. So if I am giving credit to any fictional entity it is to Zen, the death of whom is the first time I remember crying about a character on TV.
I don’t know if he was the first to come up with it, but I first encountered the ‘aborted person that would save the world’ trope in CS Lewis’s ‘That Hideous Strength’ the third in his Space Trilology. It infuriated me at the time, I was a teenager with a nascent feminism which Lewis’s story completely outraged.
There were 2 scientists: Jim Bakker and Janet Porter. Satan convinced them to become harmers instead of healers.
All I take away from this story is that Jehovah is more interested in making some kind of point about abortion than in helping people with cancer.
Also, I humbly suggest that Jehovah is underestimating the problem here. Two scientists? Only two? For all cancers?
***
Tabby Lavalamp,
Heh, I like that. I’m stealing it.
Two? Only two?
So…
How many female scientists quit their career because they got pregnant, a year before they could potentially have found the cure for cancer?
I’m tempted to think god is not sending babies to cure cancer, but to prevent the cure!
Don’t forget, Jesus “healed the sick”.
He could cure leprosy with a wave of his hand, bring people back from the dead with a wiggle of his toe. He simply forgot to teach anyone else to do it.
Hmmm. I could tell you a story about some fucked-up preacher whose main goal is to force his bullshit religion onto everyone in the country, but at least my story is true.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Bakkker is full of shit.
DavidinOz,
And I’m guessing Jehovah never sent any of these super-scientists with the cure for leprosy either. Took us more than a century and countless hardworking scientists to find it. Doesn’t sound like a godsent cure to me.
The hypocrisy of these people is infuriating. Once all these ‘babies’ become real children with real needs no-one cares anymore. Children need homes, food, education, medical care and a future to hope for, but then all I hear from them is about is how lazy poor people are and what a drain they are on society. They don’t like to pay taxes and they don’t support charities that don’t have God as part of the package. As for their god, he seems pretty incompetent to me.
And of course these aborted proto geniuses would have popped fully educated from the womb and done their miracle cures without the benefit of years of collaborative hard work and study at a sound, secular scientific university.
If they were really interested in putting more talented people into medical and other scientific research, they would support increased spending on education, medical care, and general welfare at all levels in all parts of the world. That way, a career in medical research (or other types of research) would be open to far more people, and there would be many more brains working on the various problems that medicine faces (not to mention many other fields as well).
Instead, it’s obvious that they just want to use a hypothetical scenario as a club to beat people with.
There’s a T-shirt in this: “My abortion stopped Jesus coming back”
Passion of the Christ, Aggression of the Father.
I was initially wondering, why two scientists? Why not one or five or a whole medical research unit? But I guess it follows from the story formula. A woman casually prays for a cure for cancer, gets accidentally pregnant, aborts, repeat once over a few years, then on a third prayer God directly speaks to her just to be an asshole.
Oddly enough, I never interpreted the canoe, boat, and Helicopter story in the way that Christians expected me to. It always seemed to me that divine assistance isn’t really divine, because if there’s anything doing good in the world it’s always because there are humans doing good – and certainly not anything divine or supernatural. So the helicopter story always seemed to me that God was saying “look, there’s no God, so just get on with your lives and do some good yourselves: no-one else will.”