“The free exercise clause of the First Amendment protects religious belief, but not necessarily conduct.”
This has been reported in the news since it first happened, and it's happened before, so it's not necessarily surprising, but this just goes to show how dangerous blind faith in religion is. Remember that study years ago that showed that prayer can help heal heart patients? Well, uh, I think this pretty much debunks that. Entirely.
Part of me feels like this could actually be looked at as weeding out all the nutters in some weird moderately ironic form of Darwinism (if they don't get medical care, they'll kill themselves out of existence), but it's hard to even jokingly justify that considering an 11-year-old is dead as a result. I mean, you don't believe in anything but God's power to heal, fine, don't go to a doctor, but don't keep your child from going to the doctor, you crazy fucking religious nutbar.
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It seems every few weeks another story about Christian Scientists comes out that ends in a dead child. The line has always been drawn between child neglect/abuse and religious freedom in cases where parents don't seek the minimum of medical treatment. What's even more frustrating is that there is compelling evidence that other Christian Scientists knowingly cover up cases where children die, in order to avoid what they perceive as religious persecution. At the end of the day, these children can't seek treatment themselves, and those who are meant to care for them care more about their ideology than about losing their child.
ReplyDeleteOh, and that Prayer study has been overturned recently by a more recent, better designed study, which showed that prayer made no difference in outcomes, but that people who thought they were being prayed for had worse outcomes than people who didn't know, or who didn't think they were being prayed for.
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