Eunice Sanborn of Jacksonville, Texas, passed away today. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, she was born on July 20, 1896, making her 114 years and 195 days old. (Her family claims she was really 115.) That means she was 7 years old when the first airplane flew, and 18 years old at the beginning of World War I.
According to Wikipedia:
Sanborn credited her longevity and good health to her belief in Jesus Christ and her salvation.
Praise Him!
I can think of few other things to credit:
– Sanitation procedures
– Modern health care
– Food safety standards
– Not being born male and effectively skipping service in WWI
That Sky Fairy sure does work in mysterious ways, delaying all those social and scientific breakthroughs long enough so she had the chance to reach 114 and meanwhile ensuring billions of others suffered enormously for the last 3000 years. What a swell chap, that one.
Perhaps God just didn’t want her – I’ll bet she never thought of that!
If there were a God, he should have given her better colourcoördination.
Do you, by any chance, write for the New Yorker?
Aw, let’s not be lookist, here. I found her picture delightful. (OK, we can be lookist but only with the Thumper caveat…)
Is Eunice’s countenance joyful bliss or is it the pain of a divine stick up her ass to keep her upright?
Is it actually possible for the oldest person to die, since there is always an oldest person?
The king is dead, long live the king.
And for what reason did my friend, the best man at my wedding, who also believed devoutly in Jesus Christ and his salvation, and zealously witnessed of his faith, die of cancer in his early 30’s, leaving behind a widow and three young children?
As usual, God gets all the credit and none of the blame — for courses of events that are indistinguishable from just plain happenstance.
or for that matter a good friend of mine who died an Eagle Scout at age 15 of leukemia? He worked his butt off to help others through community service, but no, gawd doesn’t want him around.
But wait. Perhaps its gawds infinite wisdom that kills a kid with decades of future potential…
My sister is a born again,spiritfilled christian and it has helped her no end. She had inoperable cancer of the lung and was cured by her faith. She also had seven sessions of chemo,but gave god all the glory. It gets better. Her husband died while loading the luggage one morning while they were on a vacation. She said god was so good that he prevented him having a heart attack while he was driving. But they were a thousand kilometres form their home. Why didn’t god let him get home? Her son died of AIDS.
The God Delusion is nothing if not persistent. Heartbreaking in so many ways.
Let it be known that Jeebus loved Eunice Sanborn more than he loved anyone else in the world, until he decided to kill her anyway.
Seriously, though, she’s just a couple of years older than my great-grandmother would have been. My nanny also loved Jeebus, but it took her 5 years of solid asking before he decided to “bring her home”. She didn’t think outliving so many loved ones, not to mention losing sight & hearing, was all that fun after a point. Jeebus has a funny way of showing his love for folks.
Belief is a powerful tool. That is why the placebo effect is so powerful:
“Give me something, so at least I can feel good about taking action!”
And a positive frame of mind is an effective medicine.
All this reminds me of the story of Friedrich Nietzsche and his abandonment of a belief in a god. He came home from theology school (his late father, and all his matrilineal male antecedents had been Lutheran ministers back to the 16th century!) at Easter and announced not only would he not be going to Easter services, he no longer “believed” at all. Gone. There was much wailing, anguish, and gnashing of teeth in the Nietzsche household, but in the course of time Frau Nietzsche applied logic and concluded, that since god controlled the actions everything and everyone on the Earth, god was causing this abandonment of faith, so it was OK because after all, who were we to protest god’s will, god’s work? So she became serene and agreeable once more.
“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.” Friedrich Nietzsche
On the other hand, Bessie Cooper (Eunice Sanborn’s successor as the world’s oldest living person) credits her longevity to “minding her own business and not eating junk food.”
See wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Besse_Cooper
that’s frickin awesome!
I was born in Jacksonville, Texas, and I can assure you that down there they credit Jesus with every positive thing that happens.
The Wikipedia article says that she was part-founder of the Love’s Lookout area. When I was a little kid, that place had the only actual swimming pool (not just a swimming hole) in the area. We had to drive 20 miles to get to it, and it was quite a treat. That would have been in the mid to late 1960s.
If my mind is still working, and I can still drink beer and watch my soaps and still get laid, yes, I think I’d like to live until I’m 114. Or forever, for that matter. When I can’t still think about physics and drink beer, I’m outta here. Sunscreen and a good diet, yo.
I hope you do. It would be terrific to see you attribute your longevity to beer, TV and sex.
The beer and TV are working so far. There has been a sharp drop off in the sex, but perhaps that is too much information.
Thank you for your kind, good thoughts.
New caption:
Jeanne Calment, the oldest (well-documented) person to have lived so far, reaching the age of 122 and a half, attributed her longevity to olive oil (rubbed in as well as ingested), port wine and chocolate.
Olive oil, port wine and chocolate? Well I can get behind that program!
Until the run-of-the-mill xians understand and deal with the concept of theodicy, we will continue to hear this chatter from old people, athletes, politicians, tv preachers, war-mongers, etc.
Oh boy.
How about young victims of drug violence in Mexico? Over 15,000 people died in that country as a result of drug related violence in the last year alone. I am positive that many of them were as strong in their faith as this lady was.
Well, she started off well. She gave blame to her faith in Jesus. And, who knows, maybe her fervent, stubborn belief kept her clinging to this mortal coil.
But her salvation? That’s when it went downhill.
I owe my salivation to a steady diet of hotdogs with cheese and salsa.
How come there’s no “like” button when you need one?
For some reason, I am picturing her dancing in puddles in Heaven…
And what a great place to go to. You can dance in puddles there–FOREVER!!!
Mwahahahaha!
I can see that….(faintly satirical grin…)
Unfortunately for me, thanks to that bastard Jesus and his daddy (hey, Jesus really is a bastard – even if he never existed – because Mary wasn’t married to god, was she), I have a number of deficiencies which those Darwinists attribute to evolution and am not likely to live anywhere near that long. But Jesus and his daddy have been even more cruel to many others: Cystic Fibrosis, Huntington’s Chorea, Down’s Syndrome – the list is very long indeed.