The Cheerful Oncologist discovers the miracle of life while contemplating the sadness of death.
The miracle of life is not that like the lucky patient we can sometimes avoid death for as long as possible – it is that we were given life in the first place.
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Miracles? The overuse of this term is bile inducing. How odd that humans clothe their ignorance of the functioning of the physical world with terms such as “miracles” and “bad outcomes.”
Josh,
The unforeseen outcomes of yesterday are the banal events of today. As knowledge of the physical world progresses both in terms of our ability to understand complex physical systems and to manipulate such systems to achieve a desired outcome, the “stochastic” nature of such systems become far more deterministic. Furthermore, we tend to adopt a dualistic descriptive terminology in regards to the outcomes; miracles for “desired outcomes” and bad outcomes for “undesired outcomes.” In either case, our lack of knowledge (i.e. abject ignorance) of the system under consideration remains the same. The term “miracle” is, in my humble opinion, a sugarcoat for ignorance of the functioning of a particular system in which intervention (or lack thereof) still results in a favorable outcome.
Turn to Islam for the truth…read the Quran.
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