Acyually, I don’t really see any religious conflict here. God didn’t want Abraham to sacrifice Isaac in His name; why should he want you to sacrifice your child?
He still wants to make sure that you would sacrifice your child.
As for not indoctrinating kids with a particular religious belief im all for it. Not indoctrinating that is, a child can choose a religion.
Damn it! Susan Smith murdered her children. The people in question are trying to HELP their children.
You don’t really need to leave the country. We are just a group of people who have nothing better to do that debate obscure and rare topics on the internet.
Also, the group of people here is not a representative sample of the USA population. President Clinton scored many political points for years using the ‘for the children’ argument. This is also likely to be part of the reason that many people become enraged whenever someone uses the ‘for that children’ argument.
Many things are a matter of prospective. My Lebonese (sp) friend saw one of the school shooting on the tv news and said, 'I need to go home and raise my children where its safe." Safe!! In Beruit!!!
I see, Labdude. It seems as though I inadvertantly used a contreversial catch phrase. When I say “save the children”, I mean “save the children’s lives”; saving their souls, morals or innocence doesn’t interest me much, at least on the governmental level (although I believe that more emphasis should be placed on a good, efficiant education system in this country). And I believe that any parents who refuse to do everything humanly possible to save the life of their child - including giving their principles, or even lives - has something seriously wrong with them. But then, I’m from Israel, Homeland of the Jewish Mother. 
For those who are advocating overruling parents’ decisions in the medical arena, in which (if any) of the following situations would you have the government step in? If there are other facts that you need to make the call, what would they be?
[ol]
[li]Child has a life-threatening disease. Mortality rate without treatment is 10%; with treatment, it drops to 2%.[/li]
[li]Child has a life-threatening disease. Mortality rate without treatment is 0.5%; with treatment, it drops to 0.001%.[/li]
[li]Child has a broken leg. If not treated, child is expected to have a permanent limp, but his life is not in danger.[/li]
[li]Child has diabetes. Parents wish to supervise diet to control condition; doctor feels that insulin is more appropriate, because it is difficult for children to keep track of everything they eat and to resist temptations such a sharing a friend’s candy.[/li]
[li]Child has asthma. Parents are addicted to cigarettes, which exacerbate child’s condition. They provide smoke-free room for child, but do not attempt to quit smoking.[/li][/ol]
ENugent:
None. There is no immediate danger to life or limb involved, and the child in none of those cases is likely to die beyond a reasonable doubt. I would say that the parents are foolish in all those cases, but not criminally so.
Just to clarify, and without agreeing or disagreeing, you then feel that intervention is warranted only when parents are guilty of a crime? Do you advocate prosecuting the parents as well?
First of all, I would contend that all slippery slope arguments are indicative of deep moral cowardice. They’re saying, “we’re afraid to make a call on the actual merits of the issue, so we’ll point out what might happen if we take this situation to its absolute extreme.” The problem is that anything taken to an extreme is generally pretty disastrous.
For instance, the right to bear arms, taken to its extreme, would put everyone on earth in posession of a weapon capable of destroying the earth. One person having one bad day can wipe out everyone. Does this show that allowing gun ownership is bad? Of course not. So slippery-slope arguments prove nothing, except that their user is afraid to deal with the pros and cons of an issue as it stands. One might as well argue by jumping out and going, BOO!!
Second, I should mention that the Declaration of Independence mentioned three inalienable rights, of which the first was life. Seems to me that the right to free exercise of religion - a right that I hold dear - nowhere includes the right to deprive someone else of their right to life, even if that ‘someone’ is one’s own child. We are stewards, not owners, of our children.
Third, when one person is in the care and custody of another, I see no moral difference between harm done by acting, and harm done by inaction in the face of readily apparent threats. If I watch and twiddle my thumbs while my kid plays on the railroad tracks as the train approaches, I’ve killed my kid just as surely as if I’d strangled him with my bare hands.
Fourth, parents are stewards. But just like the steward of property can be removed for conduct that crosses certain lines (e.g. an executor stealing from an estate, even in modest amounts), the same certainly has to be true for the steward of a human being, who is much more valuable than mere property.
In cases 1 and 2, I’d need to know whether immediate intervention is necessary to end the threat to the child’s life, or whether treatment at a later point will save the child if the disease progresses. But if the last point at which medical treatment is effective is at a point where there’s only a 1-in-200 chance that the child will die, I’d want the state to intervene if the parents didn’t seek treatment. I wholeheartedly concur with Stoidela and the others who believe that the child’s life isn’t the parents’ to risk.
In case 3, I’d need to know whether the parents are capable of, and willing to, set the leg themselves. A broken leg is a serious enough injury, IMO, that it needs reasonably effective treatment, and its denial is what I would consider prima facie evidence of child abuse/neglect. But people were capable of setting broken limbs before modern medicine came along, so while the state has a right to require appropriate care, that care doesn’t have to come from a M.D.
In cases 4 and 5, it’s quite possible for parents to be sufficiently protective of their children, in both cases, to prevent death or disability. The state has every right to step in if the parents have shown themselves to be unable to protect the children involved from the threats, but not until.
If the diabetic child keeps getting into candy and going into insulin shock, then the state can say, “Hey, you suck at being steward of this kid’s life. Either make sure he gets insulin treatments, or be prepared to give up custody of the child.” And if the asthmatic kid’s condition becomes life-threatening due to the smoke exposure, then the state can take that child and put him in foster care.
But these are not ‘slippery slope problems’; these calls are all questions for the body politic to consider where the line should be. Parents are voters, and even those who aren’t parents can sympathize with the notion of a child being unfairly being jerked away from its parents by a heavy-handed bureaucracy. The idea that we’re on some ‘slope’ is a bunch of BS; we’re in a valley, with the upward slope of public opinion as a check if the laws are written in a manner that allows the state either too little, or too much, power to intervene to protect kids from parental abuse and neglect.
Anyplace we draw the line will result in some bad calls: some kids would be left with abusive or neglectful parents too long, and some kids would be inappropriately taken from their homes. That would happen if God Himself wrote the law, and left us to administer it. So our obligation is to try to find the best balance we can.
Well said RTFirefly!
As far as religious upbringing itself as a form of child abuse, I have to strenuously disagree you there, Stoidela. Why should a religious upbringing be more objectionable than an upbringing under a nonreligious philosophy? Religion is surely no prerequisite for psychological abuse.
Besides, while we can come up with reasonably clear standards for what constitutes unacceptable physical abuse of a child, I don’t think we’re within light-years of being able to do the same for psychological abuse. And the stewardship of the parent has to be respected, in the absence of convincing evidence that the parents are bungling their obligations as stewards.
Sorry, I guess I wasn’t completely clear on this one. The offered choice is either to decline medical care in compliance with religious beliefs, where declining will result in permanent non-life-threatening disfigurement, or to accept medical care which will avoid the disfigurement. I’m trying to figure out if people are drawing the line sharply at death, or whether there are other “conditions” severe enough to justify intervention.
Fair enough - that’s actually what I was looking for. I don’t think anyone is arguing that there is no line - I’m pretty sure that everyone here agrees that child sacrifice is out, no matter how sincere the religious belief. So I’m wondering where a good place to draw the line is. Most of the examples that have been tossed around involve certain or near-certain death. But in the real world, probabilities (and uncertain ones, at that), are the rule, not certainties. Further, death is not the only “bad thing” that can happen to children. So let’s get beyond the posturing of “you could save a child’s life!” and talk about the difficult cases.
::bows::
That’s certainly a fair thing to ask.
I’d also include permanent and substantial loss of function, and excessive pain. Again, what constitutes ‘substantial’ and ‘excessive’ are both judgment calls, but as I’ve indicated, I think we can deal with that.
In the specific case of the broken leg, I mentally included things like the pain of an untreated injury of this sort, the likelihood of further injury as a result of having to minimally function despite the broken leg, and so forth. (Not being a medical type, I can’t catalogue the risks very well. But as a layman, it seems to me that - in addition to the expectation of long-term disfigurement and loss of function - an untreated broken leg is an accident waiting to happen.)
I wasn’t making any point about what I expect people to do. I was just stating my view that I think it is plain wrong to pour irrational and superstitious religious cant (sorry about the tautology) into the mind of a young, intellectually-defenceless child, and I find it very regerettable that this happens.
I know the word ‘values’ sounds so wholesome and innocuous, but ‘values’ can be the pretty wrapping paper around just about anything. Charles Manson had some pretty strange ‘values’, and so did Rev. Jim Jones.
If values = sound tenets of personal and social behaviour, then all well and fine. If values = ‘base your life on antiquated and egregiously irrational nonsense, and find reasons to look down on other people’ then not so fine.
So what’s this got to do with religion? Plenty. Here are some religious ‘values’, which are accurately paraphrased: “Don’t think or reason for yourself, just accept this is true because we say it is”; “Don’t analyse or question these asinine and inherently self-contradictory statements, or you’re a bad person”; “Realise that if people don’t share our faith, they are wrong, and sinful, and will never get to heaven”; “Think of yourself as belonging to the one and only true and ‘correct’ faith, and you must never accept the equal validity of any other faith”.
In my opinion, to fill a child’s mind with this kind of pernicious sewage is just wrong.
**
I know. I’m just stating my own point of view.
**
A nice idea, given the damage done by religion. But I guess it will never happen.
is The Hero Of The Day.
I’m just cuttin’ loose with my own prejudice there. Which happens to include an active hostility towards organized religion, which I have never personally observed to have improved the quality of anyone’s life. Oh, perhaps a few scattered souls, but in the aggregate, the harm far outweighs the good.
Which is not to say that I am actively hostile to a belief in God or a practice of such belief. Just organized religion of the modern day and history. Pretty much every Christian faith (A few of the mellower ones that don’t have any hardcore attitudes seem relatively benign), Islam is really horrific, Judaism…hmmm…well, depends on what level of practice.
But I think it seriously blows to fill a kid’s head with this shit before they have any chance to fend it off. The Jesuits said, and I think they had it right: “Give me a child until he is 6 years old, and he is mine for life.” And that just strikes me as kinda rude. Religious training is so intense, or can be, and can have such a profound impact on every aspect of who we are, that it just doesn’t seem fair.
But hey, that’s just me. We all know what a fascist I am and that’s why it’s a good thing that ** Stoid ** doesnt’ rule the world. 
stoid
Why, thank you. ::bows:: You ain’t half bad yourself!
I guess my response to that is that parents are always filling their heads with shit, intentionally or not. My parents filled me with plenty of crap, much of it pretty intense, and almost none of it had to do with religion. That wasn’t fair either, but WTF can be done about it? It’s just life. Eventually, if we’re lucky, we figure out how to put ourselves together a bit better, and try to at least not make the same mistakes with our kids that our parents made with us.
I’ve heard plenty of horror stories about religious upbringings, but I’ve heard plenty of good ones, too. I suspect that if we banned religious education before a certain age, the parents who screw up their kids with religious indoctrination would just screw them up some other way. As Gilda Radner said, it’s always something.
[nitpick, but not really] The Declaration of Independence, while fine as a call to arms and a basic FU to our imperial oppressors, is not the supreme law of the land. The Constitution is. And Amendment I (one of ten that form the Bill of Rights) states, basically, that the state should butt out of religious matters.[/nitpick, but not really]
It may be stupid, evil or (insert your adjective here) is for
[nitpick, but not really] The Declaration of Independence, while fine as a call to arms and a basic FU to our imperial oppressors, is not the supreme law of the land. The Constitution is. And Amendment I (one of ten that form the Bill of Rights) states, basically, that the state should butt out of religious matters (for or against).[/nitpick, but not really]
I posted some song lyrics about a similar subject here: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=50225
Someone please read them and let me know what you think.