Yes, and evolution does make that more interesting to sort through. Are humans broken because we can’t produce vitamin C because of a gene that functions in other animals but not us? Do we have a defective sense of smell since we have far fewer working olfactory genes than dogs? If God were to fix every “broken” gene in our body, I don’t know that the result could even be called human. Diversity is baked in to the process by which we are created.
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I guess I would have to do a study on what exactly was attributed to a eunuch. It seems that whatever they were, it was something commonly accepted by the people. They come up a few times in scripture. To me it always seemed like what they were implying as a eunuch was a man lacking the physiological ability to have sex or have kids. That some men, were castrated, and so on. I’ve never read it as some sort of gender debate.
Though I can imagine ever digging deeply into this and studying it out maybe there is a book or two that breaks it down a little bit.
G2135 “ eunouchos “ seems to imply that to me and other writings by paul, such as on effeminacy, seems to move it towards that as well.
Are white people broken because we lost the ability to produce the “normal” amount of melanin?
Are people like me of Scandinavian descent who can eat milk and cheese all day long and suffer no ill-effects because we have the mutation for lactase persistence outside of God’s “design” for humans, which is that people shouldn’t be able to digest milk beyond childhood?
We could go on and on with the examples, and it becomes clear that certain genetic differences are stigmatized and others are not, and that’s because of our broken human societies, not our broken biology.
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I don’t follow… surely it can be two things? That is my very point. There are certain disorders that can be to various extents “healed”, and some that cannot be, and which we should indeed learn to accept (in ourselves or in others) as part of being human as the overall human experience… but this does not magically make them cease to be “disorders”, no?
I broke my hand and it was not functional. It needed to be and was healed. A dear friend of mine had a son who was born without a right hand whatsoever. That will not be healed to my knowledge, and he must learn to accept that as part of the overall human condition. I would fight tooth and nail against anyone who looked down on that child, attacked him, suggested in any way he was less than human, suggested that the child himself as a person was broken, disorderd, used any disparaging language or attitude toward him, or excluded him in any way whatsoever.
But it is still an “abnormality” to be born with only one hand. Can we all agree that far???
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If someone is born with a hole in their heart that keeps their heart from supplying proper blood flow, then yes, I consider that an “abnormality” even if tut is something they were born with.
And if someone is born with a hole in their eye that causes blindness, then yes, I consider that an “abnormality” even if it is something a person was born with.
Again, is this controversial?
I’m making it in the context of someone claiming that deafness is just a normal thing that we shouldn’t consider as something that requires “healing” if such were possible…
This just seems to me an exceedingly odd position for a Christian who believes that Christ “healed” the deaf, and essentially bragged about doing so, emphasizing it on his “resume” to John the Baptist.
So I am trying to understand your claim… Would Christ have only been ethically permitted to heal people of deafness if the deafness had not been congenital? Or if it had been sustained due to an injury, he could have ethically healed them, but if its origins were in “genetic diversity” he would have been ethically precluded from healing someone from deafness, as that was “how God created them”?
I don’t think this language is particularly helpful. Basically, you are describing someone who if you plot out the spectrum of the structure of the eyes of homo sapiens, you are saying that it falls outside of a particular range. And since it is not within that particular range, it is “abnormal.” This definition is entirely arbitrary and thus not really helpful. Historically, this type of loose definition can be used to marginalize or exclude certain people who are “different.” Some of the examples were done by Christians and what kind of message does that send about Jesus when we do this exclusion in the name of God?
And then we have the psychology of telling people that they are “abnormal.” I can’t fathom how we might say that’s a good thing to do. There ought to be other ways to describe such conditions without the psychological baggage of people wondering why they are different or feeling excluded being abnormal.
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The examples you are raising are not all that controversial, I don’t think. Of course we don’t want our children to have conditions that prevent them from the potential of a full, long life - nor do we wish blindness or deafness of any kind on anybody.
I think part of our communication problem here is that we’re both stuck in a kind of “whataboutism” where we think the other’s argument is nonsensical because we can show where it leads to obviously wrong things when we ourselves push the other side’s argument to some straw-man extreme.
Me: we should not relegate people to 2nd-class status because of their biology.
You: …so then everything must be okay? and there is nothing wrong with any condition?
You: Some things are disorders and not the way God designed us to be.
Me: So you only accept people that are just like you?
I don’t think either kind of reply above is trying to respect or engage with the other’s point-of-view. There is a vast middle ground for exploration and discernment here. But first we have to let go of our extreme, hypersensitivity.
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Fair enough… would you prefer I use the term “defect”?
“Disorder”?
“Malformation”?
or maybe “anomaly”?
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/congenital-anomalies
People who are born deaf, into the Deaf community, are not people who “lost” their hearing. It is genetic. For the Deaf community, deafness IS normal, and they are healthy, thriving, humans with a distinct culture, and their own fully functional signed language.
Christ is “allowed” to transform people’s lives however he chooses. But we are wrong to tell Deaf people they should want to be hearing people because hearing people are normal or “God’s design” and everyone should want to be normal and fit in “God’s design.” Sometimes when people born deaf get cochlear implants and are “healed” from their deafness, they actually hate it, because the wiring of their brains has not developed from infancy in a way to make sense of all the auditory stimuli and they actually prefer not hearing. They can make more sense of the world the way they have learned to make sense of the world using their highly attuned other senses.
The salient issue is communicating to groups of people that the way they are born is messed up because they don’t fit norms and they would be better off fitting the norms. That isn’t always true. It isn’t for you as a hearing person, with a hearing perspective to decide that hearing is best for a person who was not created hearing. They can be fully human and flourish in this world without hearing. It’s like telling an infertile woman that what is best is for her to undergo all sorts of invasive procedures to bear a child, because the norm and “God’s desgin” is for women to have babies. That her infertility is “brokeness” that needs to be healed. That’s insensitive and disrespectful. Certainly many infertile women feel this way and it causes all kinds of heartbreak and pain. But, it would be better to accept that some woman are different and it’s fine. God can use their lives in different ways than fertile women. They aren’t damaged humans. They same viewpoint applies to the Deaf.
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I am curious. On what information do you base this statement? Research is showing that gender dysphoria, to which transitioning is a legitimate mitigation as treatment, is a real condition. It is not mental but considered a physiological mix up between brain and genitals.
Societal perception often does not align with what the medical / research community understands related to DSDs and caregiving to patients who are afflicted.
Totally agree. Scripture (i.e. Genesis) speaks of day and night, light and dark - yet we acknowledge dusk and dawn and all variations therein. Why is ‘male and female’ in Scripture (also Genesis) interpreted as only two excluding the gender diverse from the image of God, removing human dignity from a subset of God’s people regardless of the ‘percentage’ identified as such.
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Do you know that can be applied to any physical or mental defects or conditions? To the one legged people, one leg is normal. To the bipolar, that is normal. Should we end treating them or creating ways to live their lives better than ‘normal’?
Are these helpful?
“Oh, you just have to live with your dyslexia.”
“Maybe you just weren’t meant to have children.”
Nope. As usual, Patrick, you aren’t paying attention to what’s already been written. Nobody [except you here] is compelling anybody about what they must or must not be satisfied with. In fact that is exactly the point. I know it’s hard for you, but you might actually consider that you should stop and listen to an individual to pay attention to what they think about their own life situations. Believe it or not, their wishes might not always match what you would dictate on their behalf.
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Could you not create layers with everything. Righteousness and unrighteous. Fruit of the spirit and fruit of flesh. One master and another master. Eternal life and destruction. Even create layers of marriages that are accepted by God. Sometimes something sounds pretty, but the comparison is just simply not there in scripture.
Their wishes may also not line up with Gods desires either. People claim often, oh it’s ok for us to be together because God made me this way, meaning they believe their presumed state, was orchestrated by God when it was not. They are simply choosing to disobey and pursue their own desires. After all that’s what all sin is.
Sure, it can apply to people who form a social community of support around their difference. Like the autistic community, or the Deaf community, or the intersex community, or the dyslexic community. If you listen to any advocacy group you will find that what people want is to be understood, to be respected, and for appropriate accommodations to be made when necessary. When a condition brings with it a disability of some kind, they may want to mitigate the limiting effects through medication or other therapies. In any case, it is for them to decide what kind of interventions or accommodations they want.
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Because there is man and woman. Some just happen to have a physical defect or mental disorder.
Standards are not defined by exceptions and abnormalities. It is the reverse.
Or in the case of children or those who cannot care for themselves, their parents or guardians.
Outsider view here but my sense is that it doesn’t come down so much to rule following. I don’t see it as a checklist so much as keeping the focus on the mote in ones own eye and being the change you want to be (presumably that reflects your take on God’s desires if you’re a Christian). We do better to do our best to understand and forgive the choices of others we wouldn’t make and reserve our critical eye for our own choices.