Magically relieved

A recent article in one of my wife’s magazines caught my eye and I wondered  how it would sound to other people who may have a different outlook. See what you think.

A woman who is a nurse in Midland Texas finds one of her daughter’s former teachers on her list of patients that night. The teacher had tyrannized and terrified her daughter at school and, even though she is very irritated over the years that her daughter suffered at the hands of this woman, the nurse decides to be professional and put on a false front as she makes her rounds. She enters the teacher’s room and instead of the monster she had envisioned all those years, she instead sees a frail, helpless woman who is lying curled up in bed, mumbling and stumbling over the words of the Lucky Charms jingle,"….pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green…green…green…"  The nurse walks over, grabs the woman’s hands and completes ‘…green clovers’, and then both of them say the remainder of the jingle together… “Hearts, stars, and horseshoes. Clovers and blue moons. Pots of gold and rainbows. And me red balloons. That's me Lucky Charms. They're magically delicious.".  All of a sudden, the years of bitterness and anger over the maltreatment of her daughter melt away due to the shared reciting of the words, and she feels better. The nurse realizes that ‘Leprechauns took it away with a simple jingle.

Does this sound reasonable and believable?

                Yet if the jingle is changed to the lord’s prayer, and leprechauns changed to god as is the case in the actual article, people believe it wholeheartedly. The nurse did.

What do leprechauns and god have in common? Think about it.

It doesn’t seem to dawn on this nurse that, maybe due to her training (which she learned herself; an invisible, imperceptible supernatural  being didn’t implant it into her) she felt compassion toward a sickly-looking patient who was dealing with remorse of some sort, or was looking for an answer to her condition. Because she was raised in a nation where christianity is the dominant religion, the teacher attempts to remember a christian prayer. Had she been born in Islamabad, she would have been groping for an islamic prayer; or in Bangkok, a buddhist one. The nurse, who is also from that christian-dominated nation,  knows the words, and using her training to bring comfort and care to patients, says them with the woman to ease her mind. How is this evidence that god took away her years of resentment? Does she believe that, had she been born in Islamabad or Bangkok, the prayer she recited WOULDN’T have made her feel better? Why not?

If praying is so powerful, why not pray that the woman be healed, seek out the nurse’s daughter, and ask to be forgiven for her prior transgressions against her? Why not use this powerful praying to heal everyone’s burden no matter who they are or where they are? The nurse can make all the claims she wants, but the story provides no evidence that an invisible, imperceptible supernatural  being did anything. She simply wants to believe it. Is this how we should approach all challenges, make something up. tell ourselves that we'll believe it, and then that faith will be justified because we choose to believe? 

Looks like these protesters had enough faith in a chainsaw to make their beliefs become a reality.