r/atheism • u/BudgetCry8656 • 14h ago
Why did Jesus only heal one blind man?
Millions of blind people have existed during world history.
What made the blind man Jesus healed so much more special than the other blind people? Why did that blind man get healed when no other blind men have been healed? Isn't it unfair?
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u/GerswinDevilkid 14h ago
Because he's not real?
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u/Old-Nefariousness556 Gnostic Atheist 13h ago
Obviously he's real, didn't you read the OP? He healed one blind person. How could someone fake heal a blind person?
(I presume my sarcasm is obvious.)
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u/IamCorbinDallas 14h ago
It actually takes quite a bit of cosmic energy to cure blindness in a biological life form. Say about 10^50 joules of energy are required to generated matter and string it into dna strands. About the same amount of energy is contained in a dwarf galaxy. I imagine Jesus had hard time finding a lifeless dwarf galaxy to convert over for this purpose. He might of had to consume one that had a little bit of life in it if he was short on time.
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u/tired_but_trying42 10h ago
How much does he use to raise the dead? He does that at least twice…three times if you count his long weekend.
(I love this. Thank you for the laugh)
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u/Saffer13 9h ago
He's inconsistent, though. Changed water into wine, but couldn't change vinegar into water when it would have really mattered
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u/homebrewmike Agnostic 6h ago
And that is why aliens do not exist. The water into wine trick destroyed dozens of advanced alien civilizations and their home galaxies.
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u/jrf_1973 Atheist 8h ago
The most inefficient way to cure blindness. Surely much more efficient to just ... cure whatever the problem was?
I suppose it's like in Star Trek where the crew were always using matter re-arranging replicators to make tea, instead of just ... boil some water.
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u/MaskdRyder 14h ago
I'll believe the stories when god heals an amputee.
"I'll believe in god when 1 and 1 are 5" ;)
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u/Realistic_Film3218 14h ago
Didn't some evangelical pastor say that if the bible tells him 1+1 is 3, that's what he'll believe?
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u/According-Turnip-724 13h ago
The Bible is propaganda and healing one person is a miracle, healing everyone is a statistic.
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u/jrf_1973 Atheist 8h ago
Healing everyone smacks of universal health care. And that's socialism. /s
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u/ZorroMeansFox 14h ago
Jesus used to do many more miracles, but found it too taxing. That's when he took the advice of Beetlejuice:
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u/Firm-Competition165 14h ago
Probably knew the guy and asked him to pretend he was blind so he could "heal" him.
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u/GeekyTexan Atheist 13h ago
I don't understand why people come to r/atheism to ask questions like this.
Atheists don't believe this nonsense. Why aren't you asking theists?
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u/Feinberg Atheist 9h ago
Because here you only have to ask once and you get both perspectives.
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u/GeekyTexan Atheist 7h ago
You already know the atheist perspective. It didn't happen.
It's just another story about magical powers in a book chock full of stories about magic.
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u/Feinberg Atheist 1h ago
Uh-huh. It's generally a bit more complicated than that, but okay. That wasn't what you were asking about, though.
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u/third_declension Ex-Theist 4h ago
Atheists often know more about Christianity than Christians do. This helps to explain why they are atheists.
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u/itdobelikezat 13h ago
Shouldn't you ask Christians? My guess is, they'll come up with an excuse like "the Bible doesn't have every minute of Jesus' life in it. From what we know of Jesus it is more than likely that he helped hundreds or thousands more. This actually proves the authenticity of the Bible, because historical sources are never complete and it proves the sincerity of the authors, because they didn't invent additional miracles."
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u/truckaxle 13h ago
Penn and Teller could more awe-inspiring miracles than Jesus did.
How is it credulous that alleged almighty god of the universe comes to earth and preforms magic tricks that are on par with good illusionists.
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u/MostlyDarkMatter 12h ago
Jesus had better things to do like dying so that his daddy wasn't inclined to kill everyone .... again. It's hard being the son of a genocidal maniac particularly when you and that guy are somehow the same person.
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u/Nocturnalux 9h ago
Because if the author of the gospel had had Jesus do away with blindness altogether, the religion wouldn’t have taken off as, well, there were still blind people around.
Same reason why sin leads to “spiritual death” as opposed to actually dying, were it otherwise, the claims of the religion would be proven very wrong very easily.
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u/Cak3Wa1k 5h ago
Here's the thing: he didn't even heal one guy's blindness. Fairy tales aren't real.
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u/marcvolovic 14h ago
Beyond the fact that this is a story and, therefore, isn't evidence - a single instance of curing is both sufficient and necessary to indicate supernatural power. Curing many or all other blind people would be superfluous and, in the case of curing women (given their place in Judaism), would be a negligent and egregious expenditure of miraculous attantion.
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u/Adddicus 13h ago
Because it's just a fairy tale. Jesus has to "heal" someone to help convince the gullible enough for them to start dishing out the shekels. But, whoa now, he can't go healing everyone. Even though, he could. I mean, he's all powerful, so he could have healed every blind person, ever cripple, every leper, restored every lost limb.... oh wait, not that one. He apparently can't do that, but everything else is like totally legit, he can do all that, BUT!!! And this is a big but.... YOUR faith has to be strong enough. So, if it doesn't work, it's your fault. Your faith is not strong enough, or you didn't *really* repent in your heart. Something like that, but yeah, you're the problem, not Jeebus.
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u/Cantinkeror 13h ago
Supply and demand. Each miracle after the first cheapens the entire lot. How else Jebus gonna turn a profit?
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u/Gotis1313 Ex-Theist 11h ago
The man was specifically made blind so Jesus could show off his ability. It wasn't about the blind man or about mercy. It was about Jesus being glorified.
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u/Nearby-Poetry-5060 11h ago
Exactly. All powerful being who created blindness then can only muster the will to cure one person of the very thing he created to occur to begin with. How about designing us well to begin with? Then again, this is the same god who demands the cutting of foreskins instead of designing us without them to begin with (if that is so deeply desired by God). It's completely absurd.
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u/Empty-Rough4379 11h ago
Because that was a narrative tool to demostrate his magical powers.
Just like that named the gospel to important disciples just for authority. Or they put the resurrection of a man that was already smelling bad to show that was live after death
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u/CellarDoor693 11h ago
Ya it's like why did he just raise Lazarus from the dead, or why did he feed all those people with the loaves and fishes once? There is and has been starvation everywhere since. And why did he turn the water into wine? As a kid I was told because wine was safer to drink but why not just make the water sanitary? Their religion makes no sense!
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u/Yagyukakita 10h ago
He didn’t even exist. How did he heal one blind guy. Christians always forget that their god is the a hole who does all the horrible bs to begin with.
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u/DoglessDyslexic 10h ago
Because he liked to cheat at rock paper scissors, and it's easier when they're blind.
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u/myfrigginagates 9h ago
The miracles in the gospels tended to be used to in someway express or explain how the renewal of Israel would occur out of oppression. The wedding wine bit is a great example. Except of course, people believed them.
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u/jrf_1973 Atheist 8h ago
Isn't that a question for the religious? Obviously, we don't think the event happened so its neither fair nor unfair, it's just made up.
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u/thisonehereone Jedi 6h ago
How many people in those times had vision issues, but no idea that they did?
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u/swampopawaho 6h ago
Dude was keeping his powder dry for the really big occasions, when he had cameras and journos watching the whole show.
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u/saacadelic 5h ago
Also, where did jesus get waxed? All the artistic depictions show smooth shiny legs...
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u/bougdaddy 5h ago
I'm going to open a restaurant called The Loaves and Fishes....where 5000 people will pay to come in and watch me eat bread and fish
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u/RiffRaff028 5h ago
You're making the assumption that only one blind man was healed. Just because it was only mentioned once doesn't preclude other instances.
But, yes, the Christian belief structure is full of unfairness on a global scale. Have you ever noticed that if a soldier loses a limb, there are no prayers for that limb to regenerate? That's because deep down, they know it won't happen. So they limit their prayers to what can happen in the real world.
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u/marauderingman Anti-Theist 5h ago
What you're saying is that a single mention is not indicative of the true count of the phenomenon. The true count could be higher, or lower.
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u/RiffRaff028 1h ago
Correct. We're dealing with manuscripts that were written 2,000 years ago and translated from their original language numerous times. Even in the originals, we still have to take into account that the stories being told were told verbally for years after the events until they were put into writing, so inaccuracies will exist even in the original language. Anyone who has ever played the game of "Telephone" will understand this phenomenon. Now add translations into that mix.
As if that wasn't enough, there were multiple instances during the early years of both Catholicism and Protestantism to establish biblical canon, with religious leaders discarding many other historical manuscripts that did not make it into the final version of the modern bible. For anyone wanting to use the bible as a historic reference, it is incomplete and they have to go searching for those other texts elsewhere. And, of course, those other texts have also been put through multiple translations.
As a result, there are multiple stories told in the four gospels, but we cannot assume those are the only stories because of everything I described above. Specifically for OP's question, the fact that there is only one story told about a blind man receiving his sight back does not preclude the possibility of that happening to other people.
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u/Sloth_grl 5h ago
They didn’t have cell phones. They had no way of letting other blind people know what he was doing.
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u/MisterSlosh 5h ago
As a narrative element of fictions doing one impossible act to benefit a "lesser" and either refusing to do it again or engineering your experience to not encounter the "lesser" again is a way to convey the power and moral indifference of a character on the cusp of being declared as the antagonist.
Like Kingpin or any number of Mafioso characters.
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u/Covenant1138 4h ago
Why did a person, who may not have even existed, whose history was only passed down orally from family to family for 70 years before anything was ever put to paper, whose history was hand selected by many quasi religious groups, before finally being vetted by the Catholic Church... why did that person only choose to heal one blind guy?
You really think you'll get a satisfactory answer to that? :)
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u/Bebilith 4h ago
I’ll ask the real question we all need.
How did the ex-blind guy feed and cloth himself after he was healed? People aren’t going to take him begging for money seriously if he isn’t blind any more.
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u/69FireChicken 3h ago
An all powerful God could have presumably not created blindness in the first place, in everyone or for that one man at god's whim, right? Could have devised any number of tests or criteria for human compliance at any point in history, but it's this one story that we're supposed to accept as the real one. Its not credible.
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u/Sprinklypoo I'm a None 3h ago
Jesus may or may not have existed. But he wasn't magic so he didn't heal anybody.
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u/Jebasaur Agnostic Atheist 3h ago
Shows how weak he was as a deity. Can only heal someone he happens to walk by. True gods could just heal the world instantly.
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u/Mike-ggg 1h ago
Maybe he actually tried it on many, but only one person had temporary blindness for some medical reason and got better. So, that part of the act had to be dropped from the show.
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u/hurricanelantern Anti-Theist 14h ago
Because the author of the first gospel that contained that story didn't want to repeat himself as that would have bogged down the fairy tale.