God Works Through Epilepsy? –La Fort Fractures

Ellen White, prophetess and co-founder of the Seventh Day Adventist church had a large stone thrown at her when she was nine. Knocked immediately unconscious, regained consciousness for a few minutes, then slipped into coma for three weeks. From descriptions and lasting deformity appears she had a La Fort, or basilar skull fracture and permanent frontal lobe brain damage. Epilepsy is a term that had not been invented yet, but descriptions of her visions are like many seizures I have witnessed in the field. Eyes pegged upwards and trembling, falling, postictal phase, then waking up to gibberish prophesy an extension of her devoted Christian life. Modern medicine can calculate severity of injury based on duration of insult. Not so in early 19th century. HERE is an interesting read about her head injury and descriptions of her visions. After her death visions no longer blessed the church, nor with anyone since. (Since the next head injury) The rebuttal—God works in mysterious ways. Post traumatic epilepsy is a crucial link to revelation, as well as congenital epilepsy.

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Twenty Minutes

I did this analysis twenty years ago with an apologist mindset, then I went on to explain how for god this was fair. I’ll let you judge for yourself, as my hairsplitting defense of gods wisdom overshadowed sensibility.

“But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”

2 Peter‬ ‭3:8‬ ‭KJV‬‬

If a one day to the lord is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day, the average human living 70 years, has roughly 20 minutes of the lords time to decide his eternal fate here on earth. Some much less time, while others just a bit more. Hardly seems like a fair enough amount of time, considering about 7 minutes of that is spent sleeping, 7 is spent working, 5 is basic living, recreation, sex, weekends, vacations, family time, schooling, and so forth. Probably about 1-2 minutes thinking about religion and scripture. Decide quick! Take no chances. Go with the flow, and don’t forget to tithe!! Making love takes about twenty minutes on average I guess, so shouting out jesus at this time may count towards confessing. But don’t shout to early.

“If” any of this were true, how could judgement and sentencing for eternity be fair based on Bible math?

Dammit Jim

Finally they named a beer after me. They must have talked to an old station manager of mine. I used to hear this 10 times a day when I would go off script and ruin his reputation. But he and I used to have some long talks about religion before he fired me. He was an atheist and I was a (cough cough) Latter Day Saint. My favorite one liner to his comment that “you can’t know this stuff. You can believe it, but you can’t know it”. I told him, the reason you can’t know it is because you don’t believe you can. He’d say “Dammit Jim”. Then he’d go on to tell me what an idiot I was. Bob, you were right. I was an idiot. Rest In Peace old friend.

Now when I see this ridiculous circular reasoning as an outsider of the faith, I remember not so long ago how I was that way. Faith is an unreasonable guide. It commands that you believe a lot of nonsense. Just wish my beer had a better rating.