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[Flying Dice]

Two children dead due to their parents' belief in 'faith healing'.

Yeah...

Ignorance makes monsters of the virtuous.

I say put them away, for good.  I try to say everybody has a right to believe what they want to believe.  But when doing that results in 2 deaths that's a different story.  When their prayer causes god to directly intervene on their behalf, I'll change my mind. 

Until then, their remaining children need to be adopted by parents that are more worried about their children's safety and health than selfishly securing their own place in their imaginary afterlife because an old bronze age book of fiction tells them so.  The parents don't care so much about their kids as they do their own ticket to heaven.

Hear hear. Seriously, this shit has got to stop.

Here's the last little bit to make this perfect:

Prosecutors on Monday sought to have the couple jailed, but Lerner permitted them to remain free because their seven other children had been placed in foster care.

"Another one of the kids died from easily preventable illness, honey. I guess we weren't praying hard enough."

"No worries, plenty more where that came from!"

ಠ_ಠ

[SalmonGod]

Now Playing:  Metallica - The God That Failed

[Sirus]

Now Playing:  Metallica - The God That Failed

Stop listening to it if it makes you mad?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Now Playing:  Metallica - The God That Failed

Stop listening to it if it makes you mad?

He's referencing the faith healing case.

[SalmonGod]

Now Playing:  Metallica - The God That Failed

Stop listening to it if it makes you mad?

I'm not actually listening to it.  It's just the perfect theme song for the above topic.  Says everything there is to say on the whole "faith healing" thing.

Lyrics

Hetfield was raised among so-called christian scientists, and his mother died rejecting medical treatment.  He wrote these songs from bitter personal experience.

Fun Fact:  Until my early teens, when I started to become critical of religion, I was prepared to reject a blood transfusion if I ever needed one, due to being raised Jehovah's Witness by my mom.  Since I didn't have the authority to make that decision for myself, I carried an ID card that stated I couldn't receive one.


I gotta say, though... exorcisms are where the real rage is at.  One or two children die every year in my state alone from exorcism attempts.  I can't imagine my last living experience as a child being all the people I trust torturing me to death because they think there's something evil inside me.  Not to mention how many more there likely are who survive the experience and get to carry it with them forever.

[Flying Dice]

Perhaps this is just me, but I'm snarking at the mindset that allows for things like easily preventable deaths, willful ignorance of things which were accepted as fact centuries ago, and so forth. If it so happens that such views tend to correlate pretty closely with organized religion (or, more specifically, certain types of it), as the vernacular goes, tough shit. I mock vitriolic atheists, but I tend to do so less than I mock dogmatic true believers in part because they're less common, and in part because bullheaded atheists are hypocritical dicks whereas bullheaded religious types are hypocritical dicks that are willing to let children die through inaction in order to uphold their beliefs.

In other words, I don't dislike religion per se, but I dislike a tremendous amount of things which-coincidentally, I'm sure-happen to be associated with religion. It's also a matter of group-versus-individual; I try to avoid judging individuals based on their religion or lack thereof, just like I try to avoid judging them because of anything else. But when someone does something atrocious specifically because of their religious beliefs, I'm not going to avoid noting that out of fear of offending someone. Part of having opinions is dealing with the fact that other people don't agree with them, and with the fact that other people who hold the same beliefs can be irredeemable bastards. I get told to my face on a fairly regular basis that I'm going to burn in hell for eternity, that I'm incapable of moral action, etc. and that's just with me being an atheist who is open to discussing religion, but I'm not complaining about how people shouldn't criticize atheists. If you feel offended, then challenge the assertions the person who offended you was making rather than just saying that people shouldn't be allowed to criticize the beliefs of others.

In the case in point, that couple killed two children specifically because of their religious beliefs. There is nothing wrong in bringing up religion in the discussion of it.

[Descan]

Personally, no idea is sacred, and if it can't survive under the light of discussion, dissection, and debate, it wasn't worth having in the first place. One shouldn't go ahead and say "You can't say that about this! It's a personal belief!"

Of course, there's a difference between merely having a sacred personal belief and legislating or allowing harm based off that belief. The latter deserves far more vitriol and condemnation than the former.

[SalmonGod]

I make a distinction between religious belief and practice.  While one may lead to the other, there are plenty of people of any given religion who manage to be completely normal, decent people, even though they have the same basic religious beliefs as the extremist who does horrible things.

So as a matter of personal policy, I don't ever discuss beliefs (except maybe the occasional meta-point) unless it's invited, because I'm content to leave those alone.  However, I'll not think twice about digging at a practice that I believe is harmful for objective reasons.

[penguinofhonor]

Naxza, is this about the thing with the parents letting their kid die? There are way better examples than that for discussions that unfairly bash religion.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

You can probably guess my opinion on this whole thing. Religion is at fault for this. You can go on all you like about how they "must have been bad people not bad Christians", but it does not change the reality of the situation. They acted in this manner, knowing full well the potential consequences for their child, after having already seen another one die because of it. Only the sheer rejection of reality that comes with religious brainwashing can cause this kind of thing.

Whenever bad things happen because of religion everyone is so quick to defend it, and that is what makes me angry today.

[Nadaka]

I on the other hand have a TREMENDOUS and entirely justified disrespect for religion. The kind that can only be developed after growing up in a radical fundamentalist religious home and barely making it out alive.

[SalmonGod]

And I was bullied and ostracized in school for 8 years in large part because I was the only non-christian in my class.  I was called a devil worshiper because I liked D&D and all that fun stuff.  I don't really get why bad experiences are supposed to excuse prejudice.  It's one thing to criticize specific practices or sects of organized religion, and it's entirely another to blanket condemn.

[LordSlowpoke]

Over here it's kind of weird. Religion is a "sure, let's do it once in a while" thing for most, but if you actually believe in something and practice it (Christianity comes to mind, mostly.) you're... not exactly laughed at, but your views are questioned more than rampant racism at most occasions. I didn't happen to fall victim to these practices but I'm not exactly religious either. Let them do their thing, et al.

[Ultimuh]

According to my own family (who is mostly christian), healing through prayer does help in some cases,
however we should always have faith in a doctors abilities.

[DrPoo]

I have realised that we are slowly causing our own demise.
We exploit the resources, we exploit the capitalist system.
We accept lies and ignore our doom.

Cause? Cancer.
Cancer manifests everywhere in the human system.
Biological, as the cancer we know.
Economical: The basic human greed.
Cultural: Internet memes and retarded audieces destroying formerly good phenomena.
Fucking everywhere.

We are all in a late stage og cancer. And we are going to die.
And i will be fucking happy once its all over.