There are many ways to test faith:
1. Leap off of a 1000 foot building
2. Stand in the middle of a busy freeway
3. Eat poison
It should be obvious that God wants us to look out for ourselves, and not put ourselves in harms way. This includes taking vaccines.
Some cults shun medical procedures vital to sustain life. The fact that one dies is viewed as God's wish.
I suppose that we will all die eventually. It almost makes sense to die a fast and relatively painless death (one quick impact by a freight train and life ends). Look at the alternative, if you have cancer. Body parts amputated....continually recovering from operations.....in constant pain....a constant source of worry and expense to your family and loved ones.
I agree with Oregon's, and, more recently, California's decisions to allow suicide. Even to the extent that a medical facility could assist with the suicide (a quick painless death as long as it isn't caused by some temporary mental slump). California asserts that those with 4th stage cancer, who are not supposed to live more than a certain amount (I think 6 months or less), could have assisted suicide.
So, assisted suicide and shunning urgent medical intervention seem to be two sides of the same coin. One group fell in love with life (preventing another sane person from taking his own life), while the other group chooses what he perceives to be a natural end of life (one that he feels was chosen by God....his time to go).
Who makes the decision? Government? Does it make sense to slap handcuffs on a person thinking of suicide and drag them down to be psychologically evaluated (giving them the choice, perhaps, of checking themselves in voluntarily or being beaten to a bloody pulp by over-zealous cops then having your limp husk strapped down to a gurney in a mental ward? Does it make them feel better to have them survive that ordeal? Will they stop thinking of suicide after that?
Perhaps we all are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights (hmm....I write very well, don't I)? Okay, I'll admit that this statement was in the Declaration of Independence that gave us our freedom from England. Perhaps part of our rights (aside from life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) is the right to decide, for ourselves, to end life or have the religious freedom to decide to let life take its course.
In nature, there are at least two ways to end life. One is predation (lion eats human), and the other is starvation. Without predation, starvation is likely the only way to end life (because the population would get out of hand and all food would cease to exist).
What we observe in nature is balance. The white crane is able, with its lanky legs, to fend off the tiger (once again, I am an excellent writer, as long as I can borrow from the Shao Lin (Buddhists of China)). Some species (rabbits) survive by procreating, no matter how many of them are eaten (an interesting martial arts technique).
Our society seems to be in love with life, to the extent that it won't allow others the right to end it. This prolongs life, and puts more people on the already stressed medicare and social security roles. The solution, so far, has been to extend the age of retirement (no longer age 65). We have new machines to view inside the human body (MRI, and better imaging techniques with sonograms that can actually see fine details in unborn fetuses). These allow life to be prolonged (catch cancer early, get all of the cancer out).
Malcolm Ridgeway (father of biomedicine) once told me that such scans are too expensive, and people should just die a natural death. Try telling that to an 80 year old man who doesn't want to leave his 80 year old wife. Perhaps the decision to have scans should be left to the one who has the scans rather than the one paying his bills? Or, do bills matter?
For sure, science has prolonged life and in many ways made life possible (more food from farms). Yet, science also pollutes.
A famous heart surgeon recently wondered why people a couple of generations ago were so hale and hearty though they ate cholesterol, smoked, drank, and didn't exercise. Today, there is a gym on every major corner, yet insulin resistance is on the rise. His solution was that farms are being depleted of minerals. Vegetables are being grown almost year round, and the soil is not amended. Crop rotation and fertilization used to be mandatory. So, eating a lettuce today gives one almost no nutrients. His solution was to replace many of those missing nutrients. Men of WWII had stamina and were trim fighting machines, and these nutrients that made it all possible. Science is responsible for growing crops on depleted soil...so, in some sense, science is killing us.
While we are lucky that scientists, in very little time, came up with a vaccine, we are also struck by the almost inescapable notion that COVID was made in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (see Wikipedia article about a research paper that they wrote about making it in 2015). So, science made it and science cured it (it is hard to credit science with this if they were also the cause).
I realize that idiot experts say that the pandemic was not made in a lab (citing that they would have made it with SARS rather than making it with SARS).....their argument makes no sense. They didn't read that it was made with SARS.
Look at the Amish or Quakers. They are "back to nature" people who live wonderfully pure lives, free of many of the modern diseases that plague the rest of us. Of course, they have hard lives, but the bread that they bake themselves is fresh out of the oven, made with no artificial preservatives, and wholesome and pure. Some don't want modern medicine, or medicines that will prolong life. They live strong and die without much aid.
