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.