It eliminates THAT error. You won’t find an atheist relying on prayer or God to heal someone.
Virtually all religion is wrong. That’s pretty much the point; if a claim has facts or logic behind it, people base it on those. Religion is for claims that are garbage, that can’t survive without the “religion” label slapped on them to protect them.
It is the nature of religion that following it leads to error.
Why so defensive? It was, as I said, an actual question. I had no “point.” I’m not up on my physics.
I understand you now. I just think there’s a difference between “faith” and “blind faith.” That if you adopt a religion, you should trust in its principles, but still be prepared to analyze and process those principles constantly, and not allow others to spoonfeed you your thoughts. Faith is trust and belief in the principles of your religion and a willingness to reform that faith if necessary; blind faith is foolishness. I realize that most people aren’t that analytical about their choice of religion, though.
I’m not a very spiritual person. Maybe I’m having trouble understanding faith in the context of spirituality, rather than rational thought. Even when I was little and went to church, I never looked at mass as a matter of faith or spirituality, but as an academic sifting of good and bad, a method of finding ways to treat people kindly. Eventually I came to the realization that I didn’t need a homily to tell me how to respect people.
Up with people!
If you honestly think there’s only one, religious path to child neglect, you’re a fool. Religion is just one way humans try to transcend or overcome or justify or remedy their flaws and mistakes: it’s more often effect than cause. And you have just provided proof that you, at least, can’t tell the difference. The mistake is similar to your conceit that the nation loathes atheists, when the truth is less noble-sounding and more prosaic, along the lines of “people find repetitive one-note tin-plated trumpets annoying.”
The nature of humanity is that we are prone to error. To bury the dead horse for you and give your whipping arm (and the rest of us) a rest, I’ll concede that religion often leads to error. So what do you blame when you’re wrong or self-centered or malicious or partly responsible for something bad?
And I never said anything like that. But removing religion removes one cause of child neglect, and worse than neglect.
No. Religion IS one of those “flaws and mistakes”. And it’s the cause, instead of the effect of evil or stupid behavior all the time; that’s the norm, not the exception. Given that anyone who buys it is operating on a distorted view of the world, that’s inevitable.
No, atheists are the least trusted group in America. America has always hated atheists, and as a Christian country, it always will as long as Christianity remain dominant.
Myself ? Still, not being religious, I’m less likely to be wrong, or malicious, or self-centered.
If not, then how did you end up that way?
I’m not.
Wow. My devout Catholic grandmother is way less of a dick than you’re coming off as. The last words I’d use to describe her are probably malicious and self-centered. Those qualities are things that occur irrespective of a person’s religious affiliation. Bastards just use religion to justify their actions; it isn’t the cause of them. Holy books are just text. They don’t become weapons until someone interprets them that way.
Don’t go insulting my grandma now.
Given the existence of Clarence Thomas, I figured I’d better check. 
Voyager, that’s the first time I’ve laughed in this entire thread. Thanks!
As DerTrihs said, only that particular error. Scientists and science acknowledge the possibility (no, the certainty) of error, and science is all about advancing despite this. There is no Holy Book, no clergymen with direct connections to god. People who happen to be atheists can be just as blindly faithful about something else.
There seems to be this meme developing around here of atheists being accused of thinking that a world without god would be a paradise, without error. I wish people would cut it out - I’ve never seen any of us say anything close to that.
Let’s look at these people. It is not clear that they even had a specific religion, other than some personal version of Christianity. They didn’t seem to go to any church, which is too bad, since the average minister would tell them that God wants them to take their kid to a doctor. They did have faith. Their faith told them that God and praying trumped medicine. I see no evidence that they were doing this to make a point, and that they didn’t truly believe they were doing the right thing. If they did not have this faith, I’m sure they would saved their child. This looks like a textbook example of blind faith being responsible for the death of an innocent.
If they had believed that praying would pay your mortgage, they might be broke and homeless, but they’d have been together.
It’s good of Der Trihs to act the part of the atheist who has removed the pernicious influence of religion from his life without having replaced it with anything resembling a clear and informed humanism: s/he serves as a warning to anyone who thinks there’s only one cause of bigotry or cruelty or error, and that simply by denying it they’ve attained enlightenment. They haven’t. But they sail confidently on, seemingly unaware that even after you eliminate the scourge of religion you still have to contend with ignorance and venality and egoism and fear and sloth and anger and pride and greed and envy and…well, all the stuff various religions have tried and failed to eliminate. Saying that you’re immune from humanity’s common failings because you shun religion is kind of like saying you’ll never be involved in a traffic accident because you refuse to drive…a Buick.
There are all sorts of ways to be wrong, and ten casuistries to justify each and every one. And then there’s simple-minded and transparently bogus denial that one can be wrong, based solely on one’s relationship to and understanding of God–
–which I used to think was the one flaw unique to religious persons, but I see now that such is not the case. And by the way, I’d wager that atheists come in fifth on the “do not trust” list to (a) people who say “loathed” first to make a point and then fall back on “distrusted,” (b) people who do that and then back it up with a link that doesn’t work, and © people who say that they blame only themselves for their mistakes but won’t extend the same courtesy (that of thinking of people as thinking individuals) to others, and (d) those who punctuate their assertion of superiority with a question mark.
Miss Purl, I pressed hard because I saw the story evolving according to a well-rehearsed narrative structure rather than according to the established facts. I don’t know enough about the progression of juvenile diabetes, but I’ll accept your version and consider it settled that the parents should have done at least the last twenty-four hours of their praying in the hospital chapel. One of my flaws (one that I think has little to do with religion) is a tendency (at least when there’s no real danger to myself) to let my knee jerk to the defense of individuals against a mob, with too little consideration that sometimes the individuals concerned are creeps. I’d like to come away from this thread with the additional understanding that we agree that irresponsible parenting isn’t the sole province of religion as a whole or of any particular sect; that it is wrong to use religious beliefs to justify wrongdoing of any type, that Wisconsin legislators should pay more attention, and that your grandmother isn’t an ignorant, malicious, self-centered bastard.
Of course. :rolleyes: It doesn’t matter if they kill someone because their religion says to, or claims that they are evil. It doesn’t matter if they say they are doing it for religious reasons. It doesn’t matter if there’s no other reason than religion. It’s never, ever, ever the fault of religion.
If I said I was “immune to humanity’s common failings”, you might have a point, but I didn’t. You are simply distorting what I said; not that I expect honesty from a believer. You and your fellow defenders of religion consistently distort or ignore what I say, and I doubt that such dishonesty troubles your conscience in the slightest. You are defending faith, and I’m only a vile atheist, worse than a murderer, after all.
I am, however, free of one common human failing - religion. And, statistically, the non-religious tend to be better people. More charitable, more sympathetic, more ethical, more rational, better educated, more intelligent. Therefore, I am “less likely to be wrong, or malicious, or self-centered.” Even if I, personally, were none of those things, it wouldn’t prove me wrong.
Of course not. You didn’t say “immune”, you merely asserted that your stance on religion made you less likely to share the failings to which the religious are prone. You stated that because of your atheism, you would not make errors the religious might, including that of child neglect. You still don’t seem to grasp the concept that foregoing one self-diagnosed erroneous path does not guarantee your destination.
One of us is, and it’s not the first time.
Gee. I hate to see such a clear-headed deep thinker fall into such a trap, but, what gave you the idea that I’m a believer? When it comes to religion, I have little use for it, and I don’t encourage it in my children. Where and why did such a paragon of the scientific method as you go astray from the rules of evidence? Apply Occam’s razor: I do not have to subscribe to an entire religion to detest your sloppy thinking and arrogant attitudes. You’re drawing a causal link between religion and a specific instance of child mortality where none is proven, which is ignorant, and asserting a cure based on removal of just one associated trait, which is stupid. Der, you may or may not be free of religion (and you’re obviously not, given how much time you spend on it), but you’re full of all the same fallacies and flaws as all of us, and your justifications sound just as sour and lame as that of any God-botherer.
Why do you insist on applying these epithets to yourself and then accusing me of doing it? The only things of which I might accuse you are incivility, dishonesty and hypocrisy, and I don’t need to misquote your posts to accomplish this. Your habitual attempts to paint yourself as the victim more than suffice.
Wow. Finally we have a complete overhead view of your empty sense of superiority, and of your wrongheaded attempt to blame effect for cause. I would love to know how the grant proposal for the study (which must exist, because you love truth so much) you didn’t have time to cite went:
ATHEIST: Yeah, religious people are lame and atheists are better and I want to prove it.
BUREAUCRAT: Really? Better how?
ATHEIST: Atheists aren’t prone to the errors of religion.
BUREAUCRAT: Isn’t that kind of a tautology? I mean, Jews aren’t prone to the errors of Catholicism, hunter-gatherers aren’t prone to the errors of architects and leopards aren’t prone to the errors of gerbils. It doesn’t mean they don’t make the same mistakes, it just means they have different reasons for making them.
ATHEIST: You just say that because everybody hates and distrusts atheists.
BUREAUCRAT: But everybody doesn’t. I don’t.
SCIENTIST: Then gimme.
BUREAUCRAT: Okay.
Der Trihs may be the anomaly in the statistics – someone who is honestly and irreligiously a bigoted moron, and therefore a step forward, in some way. When someone figures out exactly how, and can tell me with a straight face, I’ll be over here.
If you say so.
Ditto. + I hope people are now also a little more aware of the insidious “flu-like” symptoms that may signal acute diabetic distress.
Juvenile diabetes *can *be tricky to notice as a parent, but the later reports do seem to indicate that this particular case wasn’t.
If you don’t have anything new to say, it’s not really necessary for you to comment. It gets old after a while.
I think Der Trihs is being pretty heavy-handed, but I also think people are missing one of his points (whether deliberately or because they dislike him, I don’t care which). He’s saying that because of the NATURE OF RELIGION - that is, that its followers don’t necessarily take logic into consideration when they make important decisions - this type of tragedy would not happen if the child’s parents were not religious.
The thing is, none of those comparisons speak to the LOGIC of taking your child to the doctor vs. praying REALLY REALLY hard. A non-religious person would think, “Goodness, my child seems quite ill. I should see if a professionally trained physician can find out what the problem is.” ONLY A RELIGIOUS PERSON would think, “Goodness, my child seems quite ill. Obviously I have not asked the master of my destiny to cure her ENOUGH. I should keep on asking him over and over and over because if I ask enough times he might say yes.”
Note I am NOT saying that ALL religious people would act this way. MOST of them would not. But ONLY a religious person would.
But now we’re back to the same argument - the same exact action (not taking the child to the hospital) can and does occur for non-religious reasons. Sure, only a religious person would not take their child to the hospital because God might make it better. But plenty of non-religious people don’t take their child to the hospital because “it might get better on its own” or because “she didn’t seem that sick.”
Lots of people - most of them, in fact - “don’t necessarily take logic into consideration when they make important decisions”. Denial is not exclusive to religion. My guess (of course I have no way of knowing this) is that someone so prone to denial would find another reason to not take her kid to the hospital if you took the Jesus reason away.
The only thing that’s arguably exclusive to religion is the praying part. Sure, a non-religious parent might not pray over her dying daughter. But if she’s mopping the brow of her dying daughter *hoping *she gets better soon, is that any better? Or, really, any different?
It’s different that the state won’t give non-religious parents a pass on their failure to act which results in the death of a child. It is absurd that there is a law which protects parents from their own negligence because they chant nonsense over their dying children.
Actually, I can give you an entirely rational, and arguably logically correct reason why an atheist would deny medical attention to their child. A parent might say, “I believe in evolutionary theory, and in particular natural selection. If my daughter cannot grow to breeding age because of weakness or illness, it’s better for the species that she die young before being able to procreate and pass that weakness on.”
There is no exception to the law for a parent who says that to the authorities, and I would argue that it’s at least more rational than calling on God.
But that’s *not *what he was arguing. He was arguing that a non-religious parent would never have let her daughter die at home from complications of undiagnosed diabetes (or, one assumes, other medical conditions) because they’d be logical enough to take her to the hospital.
And, by the way, I agree with you, and wrestled the evolution angle myself when my daughter was born a micropreemie. In the end, I decided that since her premature delivery was not due to genetic reasons, but an acquired infection on my part, it was okay for me to have her treated. The law and the doctors would have supported me either way. With an older child, it gets stickier and more “it depends”, but there are certainly plenty of cases where parents have pulled life support from sick children or refused cancer treatment without going to jail. Diabetes, of course, is usually too treatable to let it get to that point, at least early on.
ETA: I guess my point is that people let their kids die all the time, often with a doctor holding their hand. Only when it’s in the home with a cross on the wall does it make the papers.