Ok, now at least you’re backpedaling to a slightly better position IF we’re are talking about objective reality only; but of course I was talking about reality as a whole (the combination of objective and subjective reality that makes each individual’s realities unique), and you knew I was. That’s where your disingenuous comments fail to sway nearly anyone in this thread.
Hmmmm, I don’t know DT…maybe you missed the links I gave you. I guess I should not assume that you actually took the time to read, process and learn what real human beings are talking about here on the board, instead of shooting from the hip.
But I guess that’s a part of reality. Borg be damned.
Fair enough.
We all act both logically and illogically. While I agree with you that they are religious because they are illogical, religion supports their illogicality, by naysaying logical arguments against it.
I think studying science does the same thing, in reverse. You might go into science or math because you are logical, but any traces of poor reasoning ability and illogic gets marked wrong on tests.
They weren’t making a decision based on full information, they were assuming without justification that they knew the solution and didn’t have to bother getting the information. How would they have responded if a doctor told them the girl would die without treatment? I don’t know, but I’m sure that they didn’t know the problem was life threatening.
This type of religious person works hard to avoid hearing anything that would challenge his beliefs. A familiar analog is the nutjob who wanders into GD, spouts a bit of standard creationist nonsense, then refuses to answer when asked what books on evolution they’ve read. An informed choice is far more supportable, even if wrong, than one made out of ignorance.
Very good point. Thank you.
Abe Lincoln asked: “if you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?”. When people responded “five”, he’d say “No, just four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg”.
“And then he’d chuckle, free the slaves, save the Union, and get shot in the head. Just a typical afternoon for ol’ Abe.” Who had little to say on the proposition that nonreligious people could be just as wrong, just as often, on the same subjects, as the devout, just for different reasons. Which is the point.
The fact that there may be a certain type of religious person whom we can imagine closing his ears to science because his brain has been poisoned by religion, doesn’t do much in this case except provide an excuse to advance the preconceived narrative while ignoring the fact that these parents (even though it would benefit them to do so) don’t seem to fit that mold, that bad, inattentive, and neglectful parenting is not the sole province of those who pray, and that the faith-healing, science-denying, evolution-decrying scarecrow in your head is not necessarily the person in front of you.
I was replying to someone who spurns medicine and uses prayer instead. Not sure if he decries evolution, but he sure does deny science.
If you said “for one less reason” I’d accept what you say. Religious people can be wrong due to their religion and for secular reasons. Non religious people can be wrong for secular reasons.
They thought their daughter was seriously ill. They stayed “fast in prayer then”[emphasis added]. You can either read the second sentence as a non sequitur (ie the mother just happened to mention praying hard at this point in her speech) or you can read it as saying that they began praying hard as a reaction to their daughter’s serious illness.
If the latter, they clearly thought that their daughter needed assistance. The suggestion that they were merely neglectful of their daughter and didn’t think assistance was required won’t fly. The assistance they chose was prayer. Prayer is useless, and their daughter died due to the parents religious belief to the contrary.
Way to duck the question. OK, what would your attitude be if a controlled study of medical science showed better results than prayer for the treatment of any illness?
For a certain definition of “treated” such as “doing anything at all as long as you have steps to follow and a methodology”. By which definition chopping off each of your patient’s limbs counterclockwise starting with the right arm would qualify as “treated”.
I think most of us who live in the 21st century would tend to think that “treated” meant “did something objectively effective”.
A question:
What if the parents had been atheists who believed in a looney from of social Darwinism that stipulated that genetics defects like their daughters’ should be weeded out of society, and thus allowed her to die? What if they were diehard liberatarians who couldn’t afford treatment, and refused to have the state pay for it? What if they were radical Nietchzeists, who believed that what does not kill their daughter made her stronger and so risked her death to build her character?
It’s not religious belief that’s the problem, it’s belief, period.
It’s not that simple.
I believe that if my child was showing the same symptoms as the child discussed in the OP my child would be best assisted by a doctor. And I would be correct.
It’s not belief that’s the problem, it’s belief without evidence that’s the problem.
Futhermore, I accept religious belief is not the only sort of belief that is a problem. Nor does all religious belief necessarily cause problems. However, it is one category of belief that can be a problem, and in this particular instance, it was the problem.
Then their belief in a loony form of social Darwinism would be to blame.
Additionally, why does the word “atheist” appear in the above sentence? It seems a non sequitur. It seems frankly as if you are trying to link atheists with weird beliefs, when atheism is simply a lack of belief in gods and does not imply anything else.
I’m sorry if I implied this. I only stated their hypothetical atheism so as to remove the influence of religion from my example. Obviously, if they had been religious their behaviour would have been similar.
And yes, religious people also hold non-religious beliefs.
The parents of this unfortunate child were blind to how sick their child was progressively getting over a period of at least 2 weeks, based on the accounts given. While I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt that this was not willful blindness (but rather extreme levels of ignorance), it beggars belief IMHO. Most parents tend to err on the side of seeking medical assistance early for their kids, “just in case”, because they love the munchkins and take their responsibility to keep their kids safe very seriously. Even when they don’t, a prompt from other family members that maybe taking the kid to the hospital would be a good idea given how sick she is would get almost *all *parents to get the kid to some medical attention. These parents have failed their responsibility to their child and IMHO deserve every bit of the public and legal /judicial humiliation that they are in the process of getting.
If a mentally competent adult chooses to decline medical assessment for themselves because it would mean they didn’t have faith in God’s ability to heal - fine by me; it’s your life and your body and your choice. But the parents should not be able to claim freedom of religion as a viable defence for not bringing a progressively sicker child to medical attention in a timely fashion. If they claim pure ignorance without the freedom of religion defence (how were we supposed to know that she was so sick and needed medical attention? we aren’t medical professionals), I wonder whether they can get away with that unscathed in US law?
Either way, they will be forced to clarify the extent of their stupidity publicly: they have to argue either (1) they couldn’t recognize when the faith healing attempts were failing and so didn’t figure out they needed a plan B until after their kid died, or (2) they couldn’t recognize when their kid was sick enough to need medical help, even when relatives in California could figure it out over the phone. I absolutely adore it when idiots are forced to admit they are idiots publicly, and spell out the full details of their idiocy - serves them right. 
Hello, friend Princhester! Boy, am I glad to run into you again! How are you? I hope you’re stepping from success to triumph to stardom!
Okay, then, suppose I had said “one reason fewer”(I know you’re not wrong, but man was my New England American elementary English teacher strict)? What then? A hard slog toward reason, is what. Everybody can be wrong, and probably is, but nobody, absolutely, positively has to be right.
I have a hard time getting past the parents’ insistence that they did not exclude medical intervention because of their religion, especially because it would redound so much to their legal advantage to say otherwise. But there’s enough doubt left to spread around simply because I’ve known (sane if not smart) people who believed in (non-religious) fasting, enemas, dairy diets, exercise, fresh air, raw beef, sea voyages, orange juice and pulp, and plenty of other things to call upon when their children disappoint them by taking sick. And of course, when children are threatened, parents try everything. This is good for the survival of the species as a whole, and bad for organized systematic medicine, and great for whomever can yell the loudest in the aftermath of a tragedy.
Their daughter died of diabetes, which is not a religious malady. She died of that disease, and not of some other, nor of a reluctance to heal her, nor of a surfeit of prayer, nor of any antipathy toward medicine. Her death may have been hastened by a delay in medical care, and I am stricken by that knowledge. But it is not only religious parents who delay care for their children. In general, there are so many causes of death, some of which seem encouraged by some religious teachings and some of which are proscribed by others, and most of which are addressed by none, that I am still forced to admit that I have known poorly-equipped, neglectful parents who had religion, and some who had none, and I can’t pick out in advance those kids whose futures are bright or dim or non-existent.
At that point prayer hadn’t worked and their daughter had died and they probably figured (correctly, witness this thread) that wider society would condemn them for reacting to their child’s serious illness by praying. They may well not have known that the prayer defence was available when making their first public utterances.
What does all this have to do with my point namely that these parents’ religion caused this child’s death? Sure they could have engaged in any number of looney and or ill advised remedies. They didn’t. They engaged in a religious remedy, which is my point.
Your comment that when children are threatened parents try “everything” would seem to be belied by the situation at hand.
Well I think her death was caused by the parents. If they hadn’t given birth to her she never would have died. Or it could have been because they prayed instead of getting medical treatment for a serious but treatable disease. Whatever.
As I understand it you are pointing out here that parents can be neglectful for a variety of reasons. What would you see as the relevance of this to my point?
Princhester, it’s good to have you here, not least because when you disagree it’s a good bet that it’s because there’s a real problem with the argument, not merely that you find it unpalatable and difficult to understand. I think perhaps you are conflating your clear-headed vision with respect to a child’s health with your clear-headed refusal to accept a faith-based religion. Unfortunately, while the two can co-exist admirably in some people, there’s no guarantee that the presence of one either ensures or denies the other. Thus, even devout churchgoers may rely entirely upon medicine when it comes to the well-being of their loved ones, and even the folks who scoff at their primitive religious beliefs may behave contrary to modern science through personal bias or ignorance that has nothing to do with religion. There are even one or two instances on record where parents collaborated with doctors in the needless death of their children, in the face of evidence as clear as that adduced in this case, because of a blind and unreasoning or misunderstanding faith in a scientific, rather than a religious, authority.
Parenting is terribly hard, and people get it wrong all the time for a hundred thousand reasons, and the results are tragic. But sometimes prayer is just one way to acknowledge and compensate for our human failings, not the cause of them. I still think that parents who pray rather than go to the hospital are not more blameworthy than parents who watch TV or drink beer or burn incense or do nothing at all rather than go to the hospital, and there’s no evidence that the former outnumber the latter. In other words, religion may be a poor answer to some problems, but it’s not necessarily worse than many of the alternatives.
The short version of your first paragraph is religious and non-religious people can make mistakes about child health based upon their religion or not. OK, granted. With the exception of your last sentence which is ambiguous as to what you are saying precisely, but ignore that.
The short version of your second paragraph is that people who do something silly due to religion are only as blameworthy as people who do something silly due to something secular and the former may not outnumber the latter. Granted.
What does all this have to do with my point? My point being that the parents in this case caused their child’s death by their religion.