California family, church prays for 2-year-old girl's resurrection

[T.G.G. Moogly]

"We're asking for prayer," Heiligenthal, a Bethel Music artist and worship leader, wrote in a post on Instagram. "We believe in a Jesus who died and conclusively defeated every grave, holding the keys to resurrection power. We need it for our little Olive Alayne..."

It seems odd at first to read about something like this, just more religious nuttery. But I suppose it's actually just a form of grieving. Who would not feel similarly had they lost a young child.

The leader said when there is breakthrough or a miracle, Jesus gets the credit, adding, "but when it doesn't work, we don't blame God. We give him the glory. We give him the praise. We celebrate his goodness, his kindness, because nothing about our experience - difficult or not - changes who he is."

An example of religiously having it both ways, I suppose.

I do not know how I would grieve but I would not pray for resurrection certainly, as it would seem that I am asking a god to change its mind.

Bethel leadership has thanked believers from around the world for joining them in prayer and for supporting them as they contend for a miracle.

Maybe a super intelligent alien is listening and watching and will take pity. That is a slightly more rational hope, but maybe it's the identical hope they are expressing. They simply have a name for their hoped-for alien and they call it "god."

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

This sounds less like they are mourning for their child and more over their faith, as such a tragedy certainly is going to push people's love in the divine.

My Dad when he got cancer, part of him thought 'There isn't anything special about him'. His sister died at the age of 4 from cancer. If she could die, he sure the heck could. This level of clarity doesn't exist in the more charismatic religious people.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alamo_Christian_Foundation

...Susan Alamo died of breast cancer in April 1982 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the City of Faith hospital. In the reported belief that she would rise from the dead,^[6] her embalmed body was kept on display for six months,^[7] before it was entombed in a heart-shaped marble mausoleum on church property.
...

I suspect this sort of weirdness happens more often than we know, it just doesn't always make headlines.

 

[Atheos]

Several years ago I experienced this over-the-top denial mixed with religion first hand. This was long after my deconversion BTW.

One of my best friends suddenly died. He seemed relatively healthy but had come down with a bad cold or flu. Whatever it was he was found dead in his kitchen. His wife was a big fan of the seed-faith pimps on christian television and had wasted countless amounts of money mailing it to billionaire preachers with private jets. She told her school-age daughters that they were going to take a "stand of faith" and that their father wasn't really gone. She refused for as long as she could to allow the morticians to embalm him, calling on all of us who were friends to join them in prayer that she could receive him back. It was bizarre and twisted and difficult to watch.

She ended up in ineffective therapy, eventually succumbing herself to the effects of refusing to take proper nourishment or care of herself. I've lost contact with their three children and only hope that each of them has managed to find acceptance and joy in life in spite of these events. There is little redemptive value to this level of delusion.

 

[ideologyhunter]

If the death of a 2-year-old child doesn't make them reassess their faith in a loving, omniscient, merciful god, then the failure of their prayer effort won't either. You can call such faith elastic or fact-resistant or persistent and unreasoning. I liken it to a dog who has wrapped its chain around a tree and keeps pulling in the wrong direction rather than analyzing its situation and reversing course. And can't you hear the rationalizations that the church elders will feel obliged to utter? Some of these are unspeakably maudlin or just plain unsavory:
1- God's ways are mysterious (i.e., they fly in the face of God's alleged compassion)
2- God just needed another angel in heaven (so he devastated the lives of people 'down below')
3- She's better off in heaven, having been accepted in her innocence into the loving embrace of God (which makes their prayer request invalid)
4- We know that God loves the little children (that's why he slaughters millions of 'em in his Word -- and has special punishments and gory deaths for the sassy ones)
5- God is with us in our grief (but somehow didn't in any way will the child to die)
How any of this can satisfy the need for coherence that even orthodox believers possess is beyond my understanding. I get it but I don't get it.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

If the death of a 2-year-old child doesn't make them reassess their faith in a loving, omniscient, merciful god, then the failure of their prayer effort won't either. You can call such faith elastic or fact-resistant or persistent and unreasoning. I liken it to a dog who has wrapped its chain around a tree and keeps pulling in the wrong direction rather than analyzing its situation and reversing course. And can't you hear the rationalizations that the church elders will feel obliged to utter? Some of these are unspeakably maudlin or just plain unsavory:
1- God's ways are mysterious (i.e., they fly in the face of God's alleged compassion)
2- God just needed another angel in heaven (so he devastated the lives of people 'down below')
3- She's better off in heaven, having been accepted in her innocence into the loving embrace of God (which makes their prayer request invalid)
4- We know that God loves the little children (that's why he slaughters millions of 'em in his Word -- and has special punishments and gory deaths for the sassy ones)
5- God is with us in our grief (but somehow didn't in any way will the child to die)
How any of this can satisfy the need for coherence that even orthodox believers possess is beyond my understanding. I get it but I don't get it.

The question is how to explain it from an evolutionary perspective, how a person comes to choose the protection of an abusive guardian over the welfare of its own offspring.

I'm fairly certain this behavior occurs in chimp societies where the dominant male or males take a young chimp from its mother, kill it and then eat it while the mother, visibly shaken, can do nothing to stop it. There's safety in the group, even if it means it may kill your child. I don't know any other way to explain the behavior.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Sometimes, people believe what they think they have to believe. The brain rewards twisting truths to fiction with dopamine after all and when in crisis or mourning, that dopamine can be very helpful.

Death sucks, especially when it is a loved one who is too young to leave us. And people can react in odd ways to obfuscate their predetermined beliefs with what they are suffering with.