"Male and female He created them" .. and sometimes intersex

Faith & Science Conversation
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I seem to recall some Christians, including Jesus, seemed to think otherwise…

And they were astonished beyond measure, saying, “He has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.”

…the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear…

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There are various causes of hearing loss and blindness and some forms can be “healed” by God or modern medicine. Some are congenital and cannot. I knew a family that had a daughter who was born with Downs and I can tell you it was deeply offensive to them when someone suggested they pray for their daughter’s “healing” so she could be “normal.” She was created with Downs. Some people are created Deaf. Some people are created with sexual ambiguities.

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Egads!!! Where do you live and how old are you?

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44 and I live in Mexico. What does this have to do with the topic?

I’m a linguist, and as part of my sociolinguistics courses we studied the very strong feelings of the Deaf community around cochlear implants. Their position is people born deaf into Deaf families are different, not messed up.

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I tend to think there is something about us which leads us to want to understand and claim what we are rather than settle for a descriptor which emphasizes what we lack. I think that tendency is commendable.

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I continue to be amazed that Christians feel threatened by people who do not fit norms. As if acknowledging their existence and validating their experience is a destructive force. That’s sad, people.

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I was going to say I don’t really think that is it – but more about their own identity. But recalling the other thread about aliens, it is hard to see what this could have to do with their own identity. So I guess it is both and perhaps even hard to separate the two.

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So… God can only heal certain forms of blindness and deafness?

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Neat!!! Right up my alley! … for a change.
(Warning! The following is not “a sob-story”.)

  • I’m 72. I lived in Oklahoma City OK until just before my 12th birthday; and in Hawthorne NV until I turned 15, and intermittently thereafter until I turned 18, while attending a Lutheran boarding school in Oakland, CA. I joined the Navy in May of 1967, spent a year in Vietnam and a year+ in Greece. After I got out I traveled through Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, before returning to the States.
    My biological parents were married, but not to each other. I am my bio-father’s only known son and third and youngest of my bio-mother’s three sons by different men.
  • After about 3 months of a failed attempt to care for me immediately after my birth in Oklahoma City OK in 1948, my bio-mother took me to my bio-father’s home, announced that she was unable to care for me, and left.
  • That was the first time that my father’s wife, 10 years his senior, met me, … and discovered her husband’s infidelity.
  • My bio-parents and stepparents were Deaf (from infancy).
  • My stepmother was a devout believer in Christ’; after prayerful reflection she felt led to accept me into her home and life, and raised me as her own son, starting when she was about 62 years old. American Sign Language was my first language.
  • I began life with two half-brothers (by my bio-mother) and one stepbrother by my stepmother.
  • Along about 1958, OK Social Services discussed and explored the wisdom of removing me from my stepmother’s home, reasoning that a young Hearing child would benefit more from placement in home where English was spoken than in a one-child home with an elderly Deaf woman where Sign Language was used.
  • Initially, when I was born, my stepmother was Southern Baptist: her 45 year old son was a Hearing, Southern Baptist missionary to the Deaf in Arkansas, and later in Texas.
  • Briefly, in the mid 1950s, mom was unchurched and I attended Sunday School with this or that neighbor, working my way through the Nazarenes, the Pentecostal Holiness, the Assembly of God, and back to the Southern Baptists long enough to get baptized.
  • By 1958, a young Missouri Synod Lutheran missionary to the Deaf attracted my stepmother’s attention and we began attending church with him and his family. He and his wife had five children: 3 sons and 2 daughters. I became friends with his two oldest sons.
  • With the Social Services increasing interest in my “welfare”, my stepmother became concerned that I would be removed from her care, and she did something extraordinary: she approached her Lutheran pastor and told him that she wanted him to take me into his home and ensure that I could be placed in a Christ-believing home: his.
  • After discussion and prayer with his wife, the preacher agreed. In May 1960, three months before I turned 12, the preacher came to the house and I was presented with the following information and choice in the presence of and with the consent of my stepmother: the preacher had received “a call” to a Hearing church in Nevada, and the family would be moving from Oklahoma in June. If I wanted to, I could join them. And I was told that I could return if and when I wanted.
  • In June, I moved to Nevada with the Sampsons.
  • My father by adoption was Hearing. His wife, my mother by adoption, was Hearing, until meningitis diminished her auditory nerve to the extent of making her profoundly deaf at about the age of 15, after which “the bird couldn’t sing the same” and she had to learn how to read lips, becoming a Hearing person in a deaf body. Her deafness led her husband to learn sign language and go into the Ministry to the Deaf.
  • I’ve got Deaf cousins by my stepmother who are militant, Anti-cochlear-implants and deem, literally, all such technology as “fixing” Deaf.
  • My mother-by-adoption, on the other hand, eagerly underwent cochlear implant surgery on both ears in her late 60s.

Bottom line: Some folks are dying to be fixed; other folks will kick your butt if you try.
Meanwhile: the world is filled with people wanting to fix somebody.

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God can do whatever God wants. But you don’t hear many miracle stories of God changing people’s DNA and “healing” a mutation. I have never heard of one.

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True. But I think we need to respect the idea that not everyone who isn’t “normal” thinks they need to be made “normal.” It is important to respect individual choices and differences in life experience instead of mandating “right” choices for everyone or mandating invasive medical procedures for children when they might make different choices when they are older. Some people born with intersex conditions have been subjected to unnecessary surgeries (as far as their health and functioning is concerned) as infants or children to make them “fit” more neatly into a gender category.

Social services certainly made some ignorant moves back in the day. Same idea as taking Native American children out of their homes because they were learning “deficient” languages. As long as you have linguistic input from competent caregivers, it doesn’t matter what language you are learning, spoken or signed.

I work for Wycliffe, and signed languages of the world are a big emphasis of new Bible translation programs, because the Deaf often constitute an unreached people with their own subculture within their larger national culture.

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Hang on to your life-jacket. I suspect there are plenty of surprises ahead.
Splicing and Dicing DNA

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BioLogos’ founder Francis Collins was involved in the CRISPR cure for sickle cell disease: sickle cell disease – NIH Director's Blog

Sure that’s a medical and technological “miracle” and an answer to prayer for some, I’m sure. Not exactly what I was referring to though.

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I know, right? Though presumably, healing those dead for multiple days probably entailed repairing numerous strands of DNA along with all sorts of other biological systems… but what do I know?

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Right! You were referring to “magic tricks” by God. IMO, He doesn’t do “magic tricks”; never has and never will.

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I know, right? Like the way Jesus was so offended at that Bartimeus when he asked to be healed of his blindness, and the way Jesus refused to heal the man born blind because, as he explained to his disciples, that was “how God made them.”

And my sinful nature, for that matter, is “how God made me.”

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Really?! That’s all you (and others here) have gotten from this? God will do what God does for his purposes, of course. Jesus was quick to point out what real blindness looks like - and he wasn’t gesturing at Bartimeus as he did so … he was pointing at the Pharisees, and all their (then and now) soul-mates busy “purity-policing” their perimeters.

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LOL! :+1: That’s quote-worthy.

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Are you seriously trying to say that there is something wrong with my various inborn inclinations that some Christians feel the need to refer to as to as lust, greed, and hatred? This is how God made me, I will remind you.

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Are you implying it is sinful to be born with Downs or an intersex condition?

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