Believing Doctors should refrain from indicating You have 6 Months to Live, the Body may function for only 6 more months. Why don’t The Believing Doctors show We have Eternal Life?
- Doctors aren’t trying to “decide” when someone will die. When they say something like “6 months,” they’re making their best guess based on what usually happens with that illness. Sometimes people live shorter, sometimes longer. Also, doctors and faith talk about different things.
- Doctors focus on the body–what’s happening physically and what treatments can or can’t do. Believing in eternal life is about faith, not something doctors can measure or prove with tests. So even if a doctor personally believes in God, their job is still to be honest about what’s happening in the body.
- It’s okay to believe in eternal life and still be honest about death. Those ideas don’t cancel each other out, they’re just answering different questions.
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I was pointing out they indicate Finallality, as if it will be over. This may cause some to do crazy behavior.
Like getting their affairs in order?
It’s interesting that realization of our mortality seems to be such a prominent scriptural theme too. And it only accelerates when we get to the new testament. We must be dying daily… and unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, there is no new life.
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Yes, absolutely. Actually one of the most popular prayers in the early Church was “a subitanea morte libera nos, Domine”, which means “Lord, deliver us from sudden death”, as sudden and unexpected death was considered to be a disgrace.
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My point is not the timeline but the indication of death being final and no afterlife by Believing Doctors. 6 Months to live and it’s over and no Everlasting life.
Within their professional realm they’re absolutely right: biology shows no indication of anything beyond death.
Where statements/declarations of faith belong is in the waiting room decor. I don’t go to a doctor to hear about Jesus, I go for medical information; the same should be true of anyone else.
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LikeHim, there are two different kinds of obligations in play here, and confusing them is what’s driving the conclusion you’re drawing. When a doctor says “you have six months to live,” that statement is not just a casual opinion. It is shaped by professional and legal requirements. Physicians are obligated to:
- give truthful prognoses based on the best available medical evidence
- avoid making claims that go beyond their field of competence
- refrain from presenting religious or metaphysical assertions as medical facts
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In other words, a doctor is required—both ethically and legally—to speak only about biological life. They cannot say, in a clinical capacity, “you will live forever,” even if they personally believe it, because that claim is not medically verifiable. So when a doctor says: "You have six months to live” what they are legally and professionally constrained to mean is: “Your biological organism is likely to cease functioning within that timeframe.” Nothing more.
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Now compare that with the normative obligations within Christianity. Christianity imposes a very different kind of requirement:
- to affirm that death is real (“it is appointed unto man once to die”)
- and also to affirm that death is not the final state (“everlasting life”)
- So Christians are, in a sense, required to hold both:
- the medical reality of death, and
- the theological claim that death is not ultimate.
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These are not contradictory because they are answering different questions under different authorities.
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This means We are two separate beings sometimes We are Professional and sometimes We follow what Believers should be. There used to be a ad Sometimes I feel like a Nut, Sometimes I don’t, Almond Joy has Nuts, Mounds don’t. This presents acceptable Two Faced Personalities, as bad examples, especially to children.
PS. Then the Believing Doctor should say, "The body YOU(As a Person/Spirit) live in might expire in 6 Months.
I totally understand what you mean, but the point is that we live in secular states that have chosen to operate etsi Deus non daretur (“as if God did not exist”). This means that Christians are, in effect, compelled to keep their beliefs within the private sphere and to employ methodological naturalism in their work. And trust me; it will get worse. * If one believes in the Bible and in the perennial teachings of the Church, in the end times the whole world will follow the Beast (the man of lawlessness that even Paul talked about) and Christians will become a minority so tiny that Jesus Himself said “but when the Son of Man returns, how many will he find on the earth who have faith?” (Luke 18:8)
We should thank Him that we don’t live in those times.
*Before the second Coming I mean. I’m not necessarily speaking about the historical horizon of our earthly lives.
Greetings! I’m confused. Can you tell us more about the background?
I’m a believing doc (family medicine).
The only time we talk about “6 months” is when they are considering Hospice. In Hospice, the offer help for comfort, but because of resources, I think, they can only come if the situation is more likely than not to be fatal in the next 6 months. Everyone realizes that it’s often more than 6 months, and that can be a good thing. Some eventually come off Hospice if they do well.
I don’t think we ever tell patients that death is the end of all things. Some of my patients invite me to pray with them, and I’m happy to do that, if they wish.
Ethically, we are not allowed to proselytize patients. We need to be respectful of their beliefs. I don’t think any doc I have ever met would tell their patients that they don’t go to Heaven.
On the other hand, as physicians of the material, we really can’t make a pronouncement of what part of our patients might continue to live beyond death. It would be proselytism for me to preach to a patient, to tell them that they need to take care of their souls. They know their own concerns, and they know I do not affect their faith.
Do you know of anyone who has told their patients that they stop existing beyond death? That would be inappropriate, for sure.
I am sorry it sounds like you have had a bad experience.
Thank you!
Randy
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False dichotomy.
Yes.
That is also true for many other positions in the society, like teachers or representatives of organizations that want to stay ‘neutral’. When you work in a role where you are representing an organization or company, you are supposed to act according to the policy of the employer. Otherwise, you lose your job.
The basic rule is often that you are allowed to answer if someone asks about your faith but you are not allowed to ‘sell’ or ‘push’ your beliefs to the ‘customers’. The category ‘customers’ includes also patients, pupils and students.
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It’s not only a question of organizations and companies; even institutions such as public schools are far from neutral. For example, the history taught in public schools in Western Europe is about as far from “neutral” as one could possibly imagine. The problem is that it is disguised as neutral, and as a result people absorb all kinds of deeply warped ( and often completely false) ideas while they are still adolescents, after which those ideas become entrenched.
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It depends much on the teachers. Even if the teachers are not allowed to ‘push’ their beliefs, the attitudes and selection of words may have some influence - teachers are a model to the children and even older students, even if they would not realize it.
I do not know what you mean by ‘deeply warped’ history, so what I wrote is a general comment about the teaching, not a comment about the content of history in the schools.
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- Just to make the conversation even more interesting, IMO, my oldest brother and his wife, are grandparents to a grandson, whose parents divorced when the kid was about 8 years old. The kid’s father and mother remarried. The father now has a female wife and two kids. The mother now has a wife who has two children by a previous marriage. Interesting? Not yet. The story doesn’t get interesting until I say that my grand-nephew’s step-mother was born in a male body, served as a helicopter pilot until he was discharged, and has transitioned into a chemically-transformed body and changed her name from Michael to Megan. I’ve met her, and personally, I like her more than her wife: my grand-nephew’s mother.
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And what should an intersex feel?
You think pointing out that you cited an article about the wrong country is nitpicking???
This means in society We are to not evangelize, just hide in secret. Jesus asks to be Fishers of Men not some Professional Who’s afraid of losing Their Job.