Jesus Wants You Sick

While I'm still an agnostic on the issue of a national healthcare plan this argument, featured in Andrew Sullivan's blog drops my jaw.

In his bracing little book on Secularization, Edward Norman, chancellor of York Minster, describes the conflict between Christianity and what he calls Secular Humanism by contrasting their attitudes toward suffering. Christianity "was founded in an act of expiatory pain, has regarded human suffering as not only inseparable from the nature of life on earth, as a matter of observable fact, but also as a necessary condition in spiritual formation." Christians seek, of course, to alleviate suffering, but God, not human suffering, is the center of the moral universe...

This is a box outside of which Senator Obama cannot think, and this is why his agenda looks so thoroughly Clintonesque. Here’s a suggestion: If he wants to transform American politics, perhaps his next fund-raising letter should say something along the lines of 'Pain may be good for you.'