^{On being told this bad news, many religious people and their friends and family will immediately begin to pray in the belief, or the hope, that God will hear their prayers and cure them of their disease. But if God is as powerful as religious people tell us, and He wants them to be healthy, why did He permit them to be afflicted in the first place?}

^{“Ah” say some religious people, “God isn't constantly monitoring every detail of what’s going on inside our bodies… by praying we make Him aware of the problem and ask Him to use His awesome power to help cure us!”}

^{If this is true SMART society has some questions...}

^{Regarding God’s knowledge and awareness of what is going on inside our bodies, if your religion is bible based, how do you explain: 1 John 3:20 which states that God “knoweth all things”. Please note the scripture says “all” things, and not, “all things except when people get sick.” Psalm 147:5 states that God’s understanding is “infinite”. If your understanding is infinite, how could you not know the state of someone’s health?}

^{These same religious people seem to have no problem in believing that God is constantly monitoring their thoughts and actions so that when they die He knows whether to send them to heaven or hell. So are we to believe that God can read thoughts going through our brains, but to detect brain tumours he needs to be informed by prayer?! Difficult questions for religious people to answer… but SMART society can help!}

^{First of all what must be overcome is religious people’s skewed and grossly inflated sense of their own importance. Once you have a realistic perspective of just how minuscule and insignificant you are in this universe you can deal with bad news from a doctor in a SMART way... in a way no religion will allow you.}

^{Through processes that we don’t yet understand we human beings have (hopefully) a few years of life before we return to the star dust from which we came. But rarely do we know exactly how much life we’ll get. A doctor may tell you, you have only 6 months to live but in that time your disease may go into remission and that same healthy doctor may be run over by a bus and killed.}

^{Regarding our individual lives the only thing we can be sure of is that we have this present moment in time, not last week, and certainly not next year! So, once the shock of receiving the bad news from the doctor has worn off, we can choose how we are going to spend our present moments. If we are religious we can immediately start wasting that precious time by talking to an imaginary super-power friend in the sky – a friend who will inevitably let us down. Or, even if we are terminally ill, we can retain our dignity as adults by keeping foremost in our minds how incredibly lucky we are to have ANY time alive to experience the wonderful world we live in. Within the limitations imposed by our illness we can try to do something, however small, to help make this world a better place for future generations! We can let our enthusiasm and appreciation for life be an inspiration for those delusional religious people who waste their guilt-ridden lives following the rules and regulations of their particular religion all in the hope that that will gain them a heavenly after-life!}

^{This principle also applies to the friends and relatives of sick people. If a doctor has told your loved one that he or she will soon die what are you going to do? Yes, you can choose to surrender your dignity as an adult and start talking to imaginary friends, but how does that really help your loved one?}

^{Any remission in a disease like cancer will be caused by advances made in medical science or through processes in the body that we don’t yet fully understand. To raise the hopes of a loved one that if they pray hard enough the alleged creator of our 28 billion light-year diameter universe will rescue them is at best childish and silly, and at worst, mental cruelty.}

^{See also Associated Press news release March 30, 2006, “Prayer Power Lacking, researchers find”}