Pandemic that kills 2.9 million per year a blessing

The late psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross opined:

I’m sure that, 25 years from now, we’ll see AIDS as an incredible blessing because it forces you - it literally forces you - to take a stand and make a choice based on either love or fear.
How could a trained doctor, "who worked tirelessly with AIDS victims", characterise a such horrible disease in such positive terms?

Kubler-Ross was:

a firm believer in a god and the life hereafter
She held that there is:
no such thing as death
Her belief in heaven caused her to devalue life on earth - the only one we have - and allowed her to see a fatal disease as a blessing.

Bryan Patterson, Faithworks columnist for News Ltd, quotes Kubler-Ross approving, to prove what I'm not sure, even claiming the psychiatrist:

did much to prove the existence of an afterlife
Patterson doesn't bother with anymore detail but Kubler-Ross' proof appears to rest on anecdotes from patients who believe they saw:
a shining light and familiar faces, before being brought back from the brink. Many doctors believe these are hallucinations connected to the physical process of death and not afterlife previews.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'd be surprised if the Aids pandemic didn't at least a very small, very thin silver lining that I haven't noticed yet but to describe it as a blessing is probably taking optimism a bit far.

Jonathan Baker said...

I have no idea who Elisabeth Kubler-Ross is and don't presume to know what she meant by her comment on AIDS being an "incredible blessing." I can not see, however, how it is possible to agree with her isolated statement. Again if she claims that "there is no such thing as death" she is clearly mistaken.

Christianity takes death very seriously. Indeed at its very centre is the mystery of the death of the Son of God.

It would be wrong to conclude that Christians are flippant about suffering and death. Indeed a large proportion of AIDS clinics worldwide (sorry I do not have the stats at hand) are run by Christians, willing to do this difficult and thankless work with few resources.