from an scientific standpoint, HIV is just a virus, not a punishment - there's no reason to encourage its spread.
There's no reason to encourage it from a theological standpoint either. People who try to make other people miserable and add to their suffering, even for the most pious motives, are not doing the work of God, plain and simple. Christ spent much of His time on earth touching the untouchables, healing those who were deemed "sinners" and written off by the religious establishment. There is nothing unChristian about working with people suffering from HIV -- *whatever* the cause -- or trying to provide them with the best possible medicines and treatments to alleviate their symptoms.
There are, of course, natural consequences for wrong things that we do to ourselves and others -- i.e. a person who abuses drugs contracting hepatitis -- but I can see no justification anywhere in the Bible for human beings artificially forcing negative consequences onto other human beings (i.e. the kind of scenario Haden Elgin describes with the nuns), as though making them suffer will somehow in itself be good for their souls. The apostle Paul spoke of disciplining his own body and making it his slave -- in other words, not allowing his physical wants to take precedence over spiritual considerations -- but that's a far cry from encouraging Christians (or anyone else) to come barging into other people's lives and making them suffer unwillingly and unnecessarily.
There's nothing virtuous about suffering in itself: in fact the idea that we suffer at all is (as you know) attributed to sin and the Fall right at the beginning of Genesis. Suffering can be valuable when God overrules to bring good out of it -- but that's between God and the individual, not something that other human beings have any right getting involved with.
no subject
There's no reason to encourage it from a theological standpoint either. People who try to make other people miserable and add to their suffering, even for the most pious motives, are not doing the work of God, plain and simple. Christ spent much of His time on earth touching the untouchables, healing those who were deemed "sinners" and written off by the religious establishment. There is nothing unChristian about working with people suffering from HIV -- *whatever* the cause -- or trying to provide them with the best possible medicines and treatments to alleviate their symptoms.
There are, of course, natural consequences for wrong things that we do to ourselves and others -- i.e. a person who abuses drugs contracting hepatitis -- but I can see no justification anywhere in the Bible for human beings artificially forcing negative consequences onto other human beings (i.e. the kind of scenario Haden Elgin describes with the nuns), as though making them suffer will somehow in itself be good for their souls. The apostle Paul spoke of disciplining his own body and making it his slave -- in other words, not allowing his physical wants to take precedence over spiritual considerations -- but that's a far cry from encouraging Christians (or anyone else) to come barging into other people's lives and making them suffer unwillingly and unnecessarily.
There's nothing virtuous about suffering in itself: in fact the idea that we suffer at all is (as you know) attributed to sin and the Fall right at the beginning of Genesis. Suffering can be valuable when God overrules to bring good out of it -- but that's between God and the individual, not something that other human beings have any right getting involved with.