The document outlines the agenda for an elementary and junior class on free will and the law of cause and effect. It discusses a story about a doctor named Dr. Marlin who used to believe in euthanasia for disabled people but changed his view after years of practice. The story describes how he once delivered a baby with one shorter leg but reluctantly helped the baby survive. Years later, he realizes that the doctor who successfully treated his granddaughter's disability was that same baby, who went on to become Dr. Thaddeus Miller. The lesson is that all actions have consequences and people's views can change with experience and maturity.

1. Class 18 – Free Will
Elementary + Junior’s Class 7-12yrs
February 7th, 2016

2. Agenda
• Feb 7th – Free Will – Law of Cause and Effect - CN
• Feb 14th – Spiritual Evolution – Plurality of Worlds - RS
• Feb 21st – Self-knowledge and self acceptance - RS
• Feb 28th – SSS BM Family Day Celebration III
• Mar 6th – The Good Spiritist - RS
• Mar 13th – The Meaning of Family Ties - CN
• Mar 20th – Freedom and Limits - CN
• Mar 27th – Easter in the Park

3. Opening Prayer
Dear God!
Thank you for this marvelous day!
Where we can pray together.
Forgive our tardiness.
And protect us when we are on our
way here
Amen

4. Despite the Limits
• When Dr Marlin was a young medical student, he had pretty
strong convictions in the stupidity of cluttering up the world
with people who are hopelessly ill and handicapped. He was
a strong advocate of euthanasia. He used to argue about it
with other students in his class.
• What is euthanasia?
• It refers to the practice of ending a life of someone who has
an incurable disease and is suffering in the terminal stage.
• What did he think about people who were disabled and had
no cure?
• He thought they don’t deserve to live.

5. Despite the Limits (cont)
• His colleagues replied to him:
•
• “But that’s what we’re for,” they protested, “to take
care of the lame, the deaf, and the blind.”
•
• “Doctors are here to make sick people well,” Marlin
always countered, “and if nothing can make them well,
they’re better off dead.”

6. Despite the Limits (cont)
• What is disabled person?
• Disabilities are an umbrella term, covering impairments, activity
limitations, and participation restrictions. Impairment is a
problem in body function or structure; an activity limitation is a
difficulty encountered by an individual in executing a task or
action; while a participation restriction is a problem experienced
by an individual in involvement in life situations.
•
• What do you think about the opinion of Dr. Marlin’s
colleagues?
•
• What about Marlin’s views?

7. Despite the Limits (cont)
• On his hospital duty one night in Marlin’s senior year, he
delivered a baby to a German immigrant woman in the
slum section of the town. It was born with one leg a good
deal shorter than the other.
•
• Force of habit made Doc blow into the baby’s mouth to get
him to breathe, but after a moment, he thought, “What
nonsense! All his life, he’ll have to go around with the awful
game leg. The other kids will call him “Limpy.” Why coax
him to live?
•
• “The world will never miss him.”

8. Despite the Limits (cont)
• Do you agree with the doctor’s opinion?
•
• Will he be different from others because he is
disabled?
•
• How do you think he will feel when people call him
disabled?
•
• What did the doctor do?

9. Despite the Limits (cont)
• But, the doctor in him was strong, and somehow he couldn’t
stop trying to make that small pair of lungs begin working, so he
started again. Finally, there was the gasp he’d been waiting for,
the rush of red to the baby’s face, and then a feebly protesting
walk.
•
• Doc picked up his bag and left, kicking himself all the way across
town. “I don’t know why I did it,” he grumbled. “Too many
children already in that poverty-stricken home. Why did I save
this defective one? The world would be better off without such
cripples.”
•
• Years passed by...

10. Despite the Limits (cont)
• Doc moved to a small manufacturing city and built up a large
practice there. His youthful radicalism was now gone and Doc
was just another plodding, always tired physician, working like a
dog to keep people alive no manner how much better off they’d
be dead. Old Hippocrates had won.
•
• Why has he changed?
• He has matured, reflected, has lived with many people who had
disabilities and were happy; they had families who loved them,
they worked and studied.

11. Despite the Limits (cont)
• Doc had his share of troubles. His only son and his son’s wife were
killed in a car accident, and Doc took their baby girl to look after her.
Doc adored her. The summer she was 10, Barbara woke one morning
complaining of a stiff neck and in her arms and legs.
•
• At first it was thought to be polio, but it turned out to be a rare virus
infection that occurs so seldom it rates only a brief reference in
medical textbooks. In all his long practice, Dr. Marlin himself had never
run across a single case of it. He called in neurologists, who shook their
heads. They said there was no known cure for the disease, which
always progresses slowly to a greater or lesser degree of paralysis.

12. Despite the Limits (cont)
• What is a neurologist? This is a doctor who treats diseases like
paralysis.
• “There’s a young doctor, however, who wrote an article recently
about his success in handling some of these cases,” one of the
specialists told Doc. “The name is T J Miller. I’d get in touch with
him if I were you.”
• What do you think Dr. Marlin has done?
• Dr. Marlin had no doubts. Doc took Barbara to the small private
hospital where Dr Miller had instituted crippling diseases. Doc
noticed that he walked with a decided limp.

13. Despite the Limits (cont)
• “This lame leg makes me one of them,” Dr Miller said, as he
noticed Doc’s glance. “I let the children call me Limpy and
they love it. In fact, I like that better than my real name—
Thaddeus—which always seemed to me rather stuffy. You
see, like a lot of kids, I was named after a young medical
student who brought me into the world.
• Dr. Thaddeus Marlin paled and swallowed hard.
• Why does Dr. Thaddeus Marlin felt this way? Because he
realized that the only person able to cure his beloved
granddaughter was the baby that one day he thought was
not worth helping to live.

14. Despite the Limits (cont)
• He remembered how, when he was a young medical
student he had said to himself. “The world will never
miss him.” How blind he had been in those days!
• “It’s better to go through life crippled than blind,” he
said.
• He then shakes his colleague’s hand; thanks to this
devoted doctor his granddaughter would be able to walk
again. He thanked God for having made the right
decision that night when he delivered that baby with a
shorter leg, helping him to start a new life.

15. What do we think about this?
• All actions have consequences.
• We have free will to make choices.
• The consequences of the acts may be positive, if the
acts are positive. If the acts are negative, they may be
negative. The acts may be from this or from a previous
existence.
• This is called the Law of Cause and Effect.
• Hence pain and suffering are not God's punishments
but just consequences of our thoughts, words and
attitudes.

16. What will happen if?
• We eat too much?
• We studied a lot for a test?
• We don’t take a shower?
• We spend too much time in the sun?
• We go to sleep late and wake up early?
• We played video games for a long time?
• The examples above refer to us.

17. • And when we cause others to suffer?
• How do we harm others?
– Gossiping,
– chatting a lot in class,
– lying,
– picking up something borrowed and not returning,
– ruining other people's things,
– disturbing others with words or actions,
– putting a fellow colleague against another one.
• What are the consequences of those actions?

18. Activity: Do unto Others
• Distribute small paper cards to write an action
– (say hi, stepping on the foot, grimacing, a hug, a smile
...) What ever was written in the paper should be done
by the person sitting on their right hand side.
• After each one puts his name on the back of the paper
received, this should be returned to a box. The spiritist
teacher should collect all cards from the children.
• Each child will then draw a card from the box, read the
colleague’s name from the card and search for him. This
child will then do for him what he wanted done to the
other (what is written on the paper).

19. What is the big secret to being happy?

20. FLUIDIC THERAPY (PASS)

21. Agenda
Feb 7th – Free Will – Law of Cause and Effect - CN
• Feb 14th – Spiritual Evolution – Plurality of Worlds - RS
• Feb 21st – Self-knowledge and self acceptance - RS
• Feb 28th – SSS BM Family Day Celebration III
• Mar 6th – The Good Spiritist - RS
• Mar 13th – The Meaning of Family Ties - CN
• Mar 20th – Freedom and Limits - CN
• Mar 27th – Easter in the Park

22. COMMUNITY PRAYER