The Cost of Contradicting Nature

The Cost of Contradicting Nature

1985 4 April 18-19 The Cost of Contradicting Nature (518) Among the commandments given to the Jews in Biblical times was that they should keep holy the Sabbath day. Like every other activity, fishing was also prohibited on that day. When fish started to come up to the surface of the water on the Sabbath, some people could not resist the urge to catch them. It was a small minority of people who actually broke the law of God in this way, but a greater number of people committed another crime: they tacitly condoned the action of the minority by remaining silent, and not discouraging them from their defiance of God’s law. These people were also made to share in the punishment meted out to those who had actually fished on the Sabbath day (Qur’an 7: 163-166).

Thus God showed that it is not only those who contradict His law who suffer as a result. Those who permit contradiction of His law by their silence are also made to share in the dire consequences.

The permissive society which has developed, especially in western countries, in recent times, allows blatant contradiction of the law of God and nature to go unchecked. Individual freedom is put above all other considerations. The priority given to the right of every person to fulfill his or her desires – wherever they may lie – has led to many unnatural and immoral acts becoming acceptable in the permissive society. In many places, for instance, homosexuality has been legalized and prostitution decriminalized.

But man has had to pay a heavy price for the total freedom he has allocated to himself. The emergence – over the last four years – of a new epidemic called AIDS (Acquired Immunity Deficiency Syndrome) has provided a fresh and cruel reminder of the fact that man may be master of his own will, but he is not master of nature. Nature reaps vengeance on those who use their own personal freewill to contradict its laws.

As its name implies, AIDS involves a breakdown of the body’s resistance to disease. Lymph cancer, an unusual skin tumour called Kaposi’s sarcoma, and a particularly lethal form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, are among the illnesses that ensue. Death usually occurs within a few months of the disease becoming apparent.

When AIDS first reared its head four years ago, it was confined to male homosexuals and female prostitutes. The alarming rate at which the disease has spread in 1984, however, shows that it is now affecting others as well. A January 1985 report by the Royal College of Medicine, London, pointed out that nurses who attend to AIDS patients are particularly susceptible to the disease. At present there are thought to be 7000 victims of AIDS in the United States alone and 8000 worldwide. If the present rate of increase is maintained, the Royal College report stated, then by the year 1990 1 million people in the United Kingdom will have contracted the disease.

The AIDS epidemic is another example of unnatural behaviour by a small section of mankind having dire consequences, not only for those who are guilty of such behaviour, but for the whole society which condones it.