Statistically "love the sinner and hate the sin" or "love the sinful group and hate the sin" soon leads to defensive violent rage against them and provokes defensive rage from them. Such love knows it will potentially and even likely hate the persons with the sin so it is the problem in the first place. It knows you can think you care about somebody and not realise you want to harm them. Love the sinner and hate the sin is arsenic. When this love is riddled with the instinct for punishing, we can be forgiven for doubting Christian compassion for the sick. Many make it clear that they only want a reward from God and it is not about the sick people they attend. Even wanting to feel approved by God is seeking a reward.
Robert Ingersoll said that in the past believers thought,
"Man had no right to prevent disease - diseases were sent by God as judgments."
Is that surprising after we know how hypocritical Christian love is?
Christianity promoted bad medicine and did nothing to improve it. A minority of heretics and independent thinkers had to fight that battle. During the Great Plague, the only method of prevention the Church cared about was people getting together to do penance and how grouping lead to the evident spread of the disease didn't matter.
In its actions it showed the attitude Ingersoll said it had.
And many clerics and laypersons openly opposed measures, apart from prayer, to avert disease.
The notion was that you could try to treat it and if the treatment did not work it was a sign that it was meant to be, deserved or as good as deserved.
If an atheist does all he can to erase suffering in his village, he will not think,
Okay I have done all I can so that means I have no right to prevent the suffering I cannot stop.
The believer will.
The believer thinks that God decides how far you have the right to help. You may say it is silly to expect a person to say they have the right to stop suffering that they cannot stop. We are talking about principle here. So it is not silly. You can have the right to something you are unable to take. It is extremist to insist that there is no right to help others beyond the limits set by God.
Ingersoll is right. If God wants you to fight disease, you have to do it because he wants you to and it is not about your right but his. Christians will say that though God permits disease to exist, it does not mean he wants us to put up with it or let it thrive. His plan is that we fight it. But that is an admission that Christianity is essentially fanatical in outlook if not in action. It is saying that God is right to send the diseases and cause people to suffer until his will lets us do something about it. The truly good person opposes evil and suffering and disease full stop. No ifs. No buts.
People who say suffering has a meaning resort to calling it a game behind closed doors.
If it is true that we are all sinners and that we caused evil not God, then all suffering is ultimately our own fault. Even if God sends you cancer so that you might use it to grow in virtue, it is not punishment in one sense but it is in another. You are not given cancer because of anything you have done but it happens because of sin though not necessarily yours. Religion says the only difference between my sins and yours is the sins we choose to commit. If the sins that bring you torment are not yours, the fact remains that you are a sinner. You deserve it in the sense that you would sin. So other people's sins say what you deserve.
Today we can think of Mother Teresa who had huge funds but had babies injected with the same syringe and who only "cared" for the suffering to evangelise them and offer their pains to God.
The view that God tolerates a massive amount of evil and calls us to work with him and by his help to deal with it and bring about good is very arrogant. It needs to be true for if it is not, you are using all that evil to make yourself feel special. It is too big for you. You can only sculpt a bit of Mount Everest.
To argue that divine grace will help good come through your efforts is very future-seeing. You are working for this grace that you will not see yet and having people depending on you because of that. It is the same as giving people a stupid cure and saying, "We have to wait and see."
Finally, if you say there is a God you will ask yourself, "Is it his will that I help others?" Even asking that question is putting faith before people. If you help, you sully that help. And maybe those who do not help at some level think God does not want them to. If you are helping people you will be too busy and will not care if it is his will or not.