Christianity- the miraculous exemption

Credit to the blog Pharyngula for pointing out this story about a family in Wisconsin who let their daughter die from a treatable disease instead of seeking medical treatment.

So why didn't they get treatment? Were they too poor to afford it? Apparently not. Did the disease come on suddenly? Nope, she had been ill for about 30 days. They couldn't have missed it, she was dying from untreated diabetes and for those 30 days she was suffering from symptoms like "nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness". For 30 days they watched her grow sicker and sicker, weaker and weaker. The only reason the police even knew that she had died was that a relative from California called them and had them check up on her. If that hadn't happened I have a bad feeling that the girl's body would still be there.

Now that they've killed off one of their own children what about their other three kids? Oh they're still with them. According to the local police chief, Dan Vergin, "There is no reason to remove them. There is no abuse or signs of abuse that we can see."

Their sister is dead from neglect and the chief of police sees no problem or sign of abuse.

How can this happen? Simple. Instead of taking their critically ill daughter to a hospital to get fixed up they prayed. And when that didn't work their distorted rational processes told them that instead of trying something else, it just meant that they needed to pray harder. When that didn't work they tried to get other people to help pray.

Now that their daughter is dead they STILL haven't given up hope. "The mother believes the girl could still be resurrected, the police chief said." If the police hadn't been called in to this I suspect this means that they'd have left the girl wherever it was that she died while they tried to wish really hard to make her come back to life.

So, in any other situation what would have been the result? Let's say the parents were doing drugs and were oblivious to what went on. They'd be in jail on charges of something like involuntary manslaughter and the three other children would be in foster homes. But since they intentionally did what they did for Christianity it's all fine and dandy. Let's just face it, if they did this in the name of some other religion the outcome would have been different as well. Somehow I don't think I can imagine the chief of police treating the situation the same if the parents had been pagan, and the girl's body had been found surrounded by the components of a pagan ritual.

When did Christianity become a get out of jail free card? We have laws about this sort of thing, parents are responsible for the care of their children. If they fail to provide the minimum standard of care their children are taken away. In this case the family allowed the girl to suffer for an entire month, suffering alone that would have been more than adequate grounds for action to strip them of custody. But they show off the bible that they pray to and that makes it all okay?

No it's not okay. THEY KILLED HER! The fact that they did it through inaction rather than action does not absolve them of responsibility.

If the religion element was not present we could look at this two ways. Either they WERE responsible for their actions, and therefore should be suffering the consequences and the kids should be in a foster home where the people caring for them will do more than talk to an invisible being and ask for help. Or they were not responsible for their actions because of some sort of mental impairment, in which case they should be in a hospital receiving treatment for the impairment and the children should still be in a foster home.

There are those who would declare religious indoctrination child abuse. In cases like this I completely agree. Those parents didn't just wake up one day and decide "hey, I have the ability to handle anything by talking to an invisible being in the sky. I don't need to worry about the same petty physical concerns that the rest of the world does". They were raised to do this. In a sense they are victims as well, but unless you want to lump them into the category of not responsible for their actions due to this indoctrination they're still responsible for what they've done. The process needs to be stopped, the surviving kids need to be taken somewhere where the same thing that was done to their parents won't be done to them.

When they grow up (if they make it to adulthood) and have children of their own they need to understand that if you're sick you go to a medical professional to get treatment. This isn't Peter Pan, you don't save someone by saying that you believe in fairies!

As for religion, well, what more can I say? What can I say about an institution that raises people to think that if their children get sick it's a test of their faith, and if talking to an invisible man in the sky doesn't make the problems go away then it's because they didn't ask for help in the right way.



And don't tell me that "real Christians" don't act like that. The reason that people like this get the get out of jail free treatment is that all those "real" Christians out there would raise an almighty stink if the police had intervened. And as it is, when events like this transpire I don't see an awful lot of outrage from those real Christians. It rather looks like they'd prefer to sweep incidents like this under the carpet then speak out against the harm done in the name of their religion for fear of drawing attention to themselves.

the fundie problem with fantasy

There's something that I keep noticing about fundamentalist Christians. This started with an article in the newspaper that I read about certain people objecting to Halloween, thinking it's somehow demonic. There was a rather insightful comment in the story from someone who said that kids know that the monsters they're dressing up as aren't real. It's harmless fantasy to them. But some adults have problems understanding that.

I was reminded of this problem when I was reading the website ChildCare Action Project, a website run by people who are pretty much open, raving fundamentalist lunatics. For an example of this lunacy, check out this fragment of their review of Pinochio:

The youth of the Pinocchio era are the leaders of our country, policies. legal systems and society today. And what, may I ask, happened to prayer in school? To the Ten Commandments in public places? To Christianity in general? Hasn't Satanism become an official "religion" today? And Paganism? And how might you suspect the separation of church and state, which is NOT in the Constitution but was rather a letter from an early president to a pastor promising no national religion, became a law of the land? Maybe this multi-level inference is not as far-fetched as you might think.

A review of a Disney movie diverted into a rant about Satanism. I just have to say one more thing on it, the suggestion that maybe Paganism had become an official "religion", and of course what a bad thing that would be. I REALLY wish I could smack the person that wrote this upside the head. Paganism predates Christianity by a LONG time. Elements of Christianity were designed specifically to make it compatible with paganism, so that it would be easier for people to convert. It's not mere coincidence that most Christian holidays are thinly veiled copies of earlier Pagan holidays. It's marketing.

But anyay, the review site. It's good reading if you're looking for a laugh. Although I was outraged beyond belief at what they had to say about The Iron Giant.

But I'd like to mention something from the review of Pinocchio. In the review they go off on a tangent about the Blue Fairy. It was a classic Disney character, they've had fairies and magical godmothers and what have you throughout their major motion picture history. But the reviewer had a problem with them.

There is no such thing as a "good witch." If the magic does not come from God it comes from Satan.

My point is that he had no concept of fantasy. He had to decide what "real" thing was being portrayed in a Disney cartoon. I say real in quotes of course because to this person angels and demons were real. But that's just the point. He believes in the literal existence of creatures like angels and demons and witches with magical powers, yet he can't understand a FICTIONAL fairy godmother.

There's something very wrong with the thinking processes of people like that. It's too easy to say that they've gotten used to accepting the existence of absurd things and as such they're not able to understand the difference between fantasy and reality, but I think that's a little too simplified.
I think it's more a matter of a persecution complex. Like how the first portion of the Pinocchio review I quoted tried to lay the blame for the end of prayer in school on the movie, and went on about Satanism in America. Through this person's eyes the movie is either propaganda FOR Jesus or against him. Perhaps this makes sense for a person raised to believe his purpose in life is to fight to make the world over in what he thinks is God's image. Everything is a battle, if the movie isn't teaching good Christian values than it must be an enemy to be attacked.

Here, another quote from the Pinocchio review:

My "job" is to sound the horn about the coming enemy. And if what is coming is not of God, it is of the enemy.

But I still think there's a problem with the inability to comprehend fantasy and fiction. When I saw the reviewer begin to analyze what the fairy characters were, that since they weren't from God they must have been from Satan, I was actually a little disturbed. I can't imagine not being able to have a concept of "doesn't really exist" to file the appropriate things in my mind. It's like, whereas I get upset with movies when they're not realistic, this guy thinks it's all real. When I watch an overblown special effects laden martial arts scene, and see someone flying around on wires, I'm just disgusted with the whole thing (except for Kung Fu Hustle, for some reason I can accept the effects in that movie). But this guy doesn't see that. He figures that it must be evil magic that's at work.

I see a throwback to the dark ages in this mindset. I can imagine this person fitting right in in an era where someone who used medicinal herbs could be burned to death for being a witch. Since he wouldn't have understood how the herbs worked (frankly I doubt he'd understand it now, scientific literacy is not a common character trait for people like this) he would have filed it away as magic, witchcraft, and since there's no such thing as good witchcraft it must be evil and the person dispensing should have been killed.

I'm both dismayed and frightened that this kind of thinking can still survive in this day and age.