Stephen got stoned, and God didn't save him from it.
Paul was beaten to near death, God didn't heal him nor did he save him from it.
St. Stephen the Illustrious Protomartyr, and ultimately St. Paul, became martyrs for Christ (St. Paul was ultimately beheaded, rather than crucified, due to his status as a Roman citizen, following Nero blaming the fire that devastated Rome on the Christians, which also led to the martyrdom of St. Peter).
By the time the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul* were martyred, there were few of the Apostles left, with only St. John the Beloved Disciple living to a natural death. From the time of the martyrdom of St. Stephen, one of the seven deacons ordained in Acts, to the martyrdom of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, most of the other Apostles were martyred, with St. James the Great being the first to die for Christ.
Winning the crown of a martyr or confessor (one who is tortured for Christ) without yielding and denying our Lord, but continuing to confess Him, strengthend by the Spirit, is a great spiritual victory, for our Lord says “he who confesses me before men, I will confess before the Father.”
You cannot compare this blessing with Alzheimers, which is by nature a disease, an affliction, that over time destroys the victim’s ability for rational thought.
Regarding Neuralink, I have reservations as I tend to oppose transhumanism, although I would not oppose the use of this kind of technology to restore mobility to paraplegics and quadriplegics, who as victims of accidents suffer greatly, and in many cases lack the necessary moral fortitude to be able to put their suffering to a Christian use.
However, computer I/O into the brain for other purposes is a transhumanist objective, and like much of what the transhumanists propose, raises serious ethical questions, and also like much of what they propose, includes a risk of interfering with human consciousness. Thus I cannot avoid being opposed to the use of this kind of technology for non-therapeutic purposes.
Conversely, I cannot ethically avoid supporting this technology for therapeutic purposes, because to restore sight to the blind, and restore mobility to the paralyzed, even if done medically rather than through miraculous means, is to follow in the footsteps of our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ. The early church furthermore venerated doctors who gave away their services to the poor; in Holy Orthodoxy we have an entire class of saints, called Unmercenary Healers, who are venerated for doing precisely that - voluntarily providing medical care to the poor free of charge, in many cases, full time, as a holy vocation. Such saints include St. Panteleimon and St. Cosmas and Damian.
Additionally, St. Basil the Great, one of the Three Holy Hierarchs, three fourth century bishops venerated by the Eastern Orthodox*** used the treasury of his church to build the first recognizable hospital in the world where anyone could enter and receive medical treatment for whatever their ailment was, regardless of their ability to pay (much like a modern emergency room even in the US, where medical treatment is available to the poor, contrary to popular belief, although the service provided to people via MedicAid (and also, distressingly, through the VA, which has its own clinics and hospitals for some reason) tends to lag behind what one gets through Medicare, which is the free healthcare available to senior citizens which allows one to make use of private practices, provided they accept Medicare, which most of them do.
I should stress that the views expressed in my posts on this thread regarding the ethics of human-AI interaction, and also the use of AI-based systems for treating certain diseases such as blindness, paralysis and Alzzheimers, as well as my discomfort with the prospect of the non-medical use of direct neural interface technology such as Elon Musk’s neuralink, are entirely my own and do not reflect the official doctrine of the Eastern Orthodox Church, which has not yet come to any kind of church-wide consensus on these issues (and on some of them, probably won’t address them, but I would not be surprised to see much or all of the trans-humanist movement condemned by at least some of the Eastern Orthodox churches, as well as some or all of our Oriental Orthodox brethren (the Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Indian and Syriac Orthodox churches, which are more consistently socially conservative than EO churches, but are also quieter about it, due to the extreme persecution and danger of persecution they are in, with many families barely escaping the Middle East to safe havens in Europe, North America and Australia) and our some bishops in the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East, all of which have close relationships with the Eastern Orthodox, sharing our rejection of the filioque and various other heresies and having similar liturgical styles of worship.
* The feast of the Holy Apostles St. Peter and St. Paul is coming up on June 29th on the Gregorian calendar, and 13 days later on the Julian and Coptic** calendars (which this year aligned with the Gregorian for Pascha and the movable holy days connected to Pascha, such as the start of Lent, Palm Sunday, the Ascension, and Pentecost Sunday, also known as Whitsunday in the English-speaking tradition), but not the fixed feasts. At present, the Eastern Orthodox are in the Apostle’s Fast, which starts the Monday after All Saints Day (the Sunday after Pentecost, which in Western churches is Trinity Sunday; it was last week basically - in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Pentecost is both a celebration of the descent of the Holy Spirit and of the Holy Trinity, much like how historically, prior to the late fourth century, the Nativity of our Lord was celebrated together with the Baptism of Christ on January 6th, which is still the custom in the Armenian Apostolic Church - every other church moved the Incarnation into a separate feast nine months after the existing feast of the annunciation on March 25th (which was the date that Easter Sunday fell on in 33 AD according to the Julian calendar, and is also the earliest possible date for the celebration of Easter in either the Julian or Gregorian Sunday; for various reasons, the Early Church believed that our Lord was conceived on the same day He rose from the dead. Separating the Feast of the Nativity was not done, as some falsely allege, for reasons of Pagan influence, but rather to counter the Arians, who denied the Incarnation; the Feast of the Nativity, historically called Christmas in English speaking countries, is above all else, the feast of the Incarnation of our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ
par excellence.
**The Coptic calendar, used by the Coptic Orthodox Church, is synchronized with the Julian calendar; indeed the Julian calendar was implemented when Gaius Julius Caesar discovered the Alexandrians had a calendar that correctly tracked the length of the solar year with as much precision as anyone had in the first century BC, and subsequently had this calendar modified for Roman usage, by adopting the traditional Roman months, and moving the leap years to February; the Coptic calendar has traditional Egyptian months named after various deities from the Egyptian pantheon, who Coptic Orthodox Christians do not worship in any way, shape or form, except for one month out of the year which is extremely short, the name of which is Coptic for “the short month”; this month if I recall is usually five days long, but is six days long in leap years, being used for the same purpose as February; all other months in the Coptic calendar are exactly 30 days long. The way the Coptic calendar is set up, Advent always takes place in the month of Khiak, and particularly beautiful hymns about the Incarnation and the Theotokos are sung during that time, known as the Khiakh Psalmody, comprising one of the most exquisite examples of our liturgical patrimony.
*** The Three Holy Hiearchs, in addition to St. Basil the Great, include St. John Chrysostom and St. Gregory the Theologian; St. Athanasius the Apostolic, another fourth century bishop known as the Pillar of Orthodoxy, is also venerated to a great extent, although I have often wondered why we have a special feast of Three Holy Hierarchs rather than Four Holy Hierarchs; I suspect it has to do with the fact that the Three Holy Hierarchs were Patriarchs of Constantinople, except in the case of St. Basil the Great, but he authored the primary liturgy used in both Constantinople and in Egypt, displacing the older Alexandrian divine liturgy variously attributed to St. Mark the Evangelist, St. Serapion of Thmuis and St. Cyril the Great
