Faith Healing and Government's role in religious belief..

oh and while we are at it

ie just because the parents believe it is irreverent, the rights of the child guarantee that children can make there OWN decisions about religion

Bells whenever this argument comes up the answer is articles 4, 6 and 24. The government has an internationally mandated responsibility to protect a child from exactly this sort of abuse.

 

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That is the limitation of law enforcement. The government should not try to intrude on personal rights unless they find probable cause to, which often only occurs after something tragic has happened. But once it has come to their attention, as in this case, the State has a responsibility (which was not sufficiently met, since a second death occurred).

 

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I mean that I might be "wrong" as in "incorrect". Not "wrong" as in "morally wrong".
It's silly to talk about morality as if it were objective.

I'm actually quite moderate when it comes to government intervention. More often than not, it is desirable. The only times where it isn't is where it can destabilize society.
The act of intervention to protect these children is not itself destabilizing. I only worry about establishing precedents that can be.
But, as I just said last post, I revised my thoughts and I doubt that this would really establish that.

 

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I think that is both absolutely morally wrong, and immoral, to kill your children. That you don't agree says everything I need to know about you.

 

He said he had no stake in it, merely that it's arguable.

The only case I can think of where it might be arguable is when the parents/guardians are actually innocent. In the US there is a presumption of innocence until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. And there is a Constitutional protection that defendants will receive effective assistance of counsel, right to confront the witnesses and evidence brought against them at trial, right to trial by a jury of peers (landowners, not equals), right to seek a writ of habeas corpus (appearance before a court to try to show that the arrest/conviction was unlawful), right to appeal a conviction . . . usually at three levels: the court of conviction, the state appeals court of appeals, and federal court. Having exhausted all of those (perhaps 10 years later) the Appellant can apply to the US Supreme Court, which is the court of last resort. Failing that, the conviction is upheld and cannot be appealed further without new evidence.

The presumption then, is that all of the convicted people are actually guilty. However, there have been instances of people being exonerated after spending most of their lives in prison for crimes they did not commit. For this reason I would have to allow that due to the possibility that a parent may be wrongly convicted of denying medical care to the child there should be consideration given for their victimization by crusading prosecutors and judges.

Other than that, it makes no difference whether the faith-healing parent feels emotionally damaged from state intervention or not. No one really cares. The idea is to protect the interests of the child who is unable to defend herself. There is no ethical reason to defend religious pseudo-medical ideas against penalties for the wanton infliction of substantial harm.

For that reason I would totally reject the defense of faith-healing groups or their claims that such beliefs are protected under the Constitution. They are not. The child's right to medical care is the Constitutional right at issue, and by comparison the parents feelings are mere trifles. I would only add that there may be parents who are falsely convicted.

 

I suppose to broaden the thread a little, it is clear to me that the State should not interfere in people's religiousness (is that a word?) unless it causes them to break any reasonable law - there are laws that are unreasonable, like anti-gay laws being enacted in Africa, and I would support breaking them (but don't get caught unless you intend to).

There are some grey areas though. France enacted a law banning the wearing of the muslim veil in public, because other people don't like it. I don't like being unable to see a person's face either but I wouldn't support that law. Nobody is actually hurt by it.

There are regulations in Saudi preventing Christians following their faith, and I think that's wrong too.

The big area for me is the indoctrination of children, which some (like Dawkins) have termed child abuse, and maybe it is. There is also the issue of genital mutilation, both male and female. FGM is illegal in the UK, I don't know about elsewhere. The status quo here is that parents can do what they like to their offspring both in terms of indoctrination and, for males, chopping bits off them, although they are too young to consent, or even know what's happening.

 

Bells, that is just truly awful.

 

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/09/20/224507654/how-many-die-from-medical-mistakes-in-u-s-hospitals

How many death per year come from faith healing? If there are fewer deaths due to faith healing, then many lives could have been saved. I tried to find the statistics for the faith healer based death, but Google tends to focus on one or two deaths here and there scattered over many years. Mostly tear jerker stiff to manipulate emotions. I would guess less than 10,000 per year. If these 300,000 dead per year had done faith healing that day, instead of the hospital, at least half would be alive to have people complain they should have gone to the hospital.

 

Guess this is why there are fewer and fewer religious people these days. Natural selection in action.

 

That you think morality is objective says that you are little different the people who put stock in faith healing. You both have faith in something that is unverifiable, and follow it with blind obedience.

 

That is the kind of answer I expect from you.

 

So your argument is that if the 300,000 people who died due to mistakes in hospital had done faith healing instead of going to hospital, you reckon at least half would still be alive??
Do you not see how flawed that argument is???

First, they would have been "saved" (if indeed they were) not by the faith healing but by simply not going to hospital.
The faith healing would be irrelevant to the matter.

Second, death through "preventable harm" suggests people would have died without medical treatment, but the hospital merely didn't prevent what ailed them when their ailment was actually preventable.
Faithhealing does not prevent the ailments either.

Third, you can't just take the 300,000 that have died and ignore the millions that survive due to hospital treatment.
To do so, as you have done, is the grossest case of selection bias I have ever seen.

Fourth, you need to look at percentages, not raw numbers.

Fifth, it is not the mortality rates per se, as, unsurprisingly, mortality rate is 100% whether you shun medical treatment or not.
What is key here is how long people live - is it higher for people who shun medical care or those that use medicine?


Your argument is so logically flawed I find it depressing that people can actually think as you do.

 

This study shows that 200-400k patients die from "preventable harm".
This is not necessarily the same as causing their death but merely in not picking up things that ultimately the patient died from.
(Although I'm sure there are stats on how many deaths are actually caused by the hospitals).

To me this makes it sound that these people would have died without hospital treatment.
So while the report shows that going to hospital is no longer the guarantee of getting better that it might have been perceived to be, even if one person gets better then it is still more successful than spiritual healing (scientifically speaking).

 

Sadly its deliberate, freedom to impose religion and the right to own your child rather than the child having rights over you is specifically listed as the reasons why the US is 1 of only 3 countries in the whole world who have failed to sign and ratify the convention on the rights of the child

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Whether its followed or not even the "evil states" like Iran have signed this, yet the "great moral authority" still considers children to be slaves, the property of there parents.

 

The objective test for right and wrong is found in civil law, not religion. Hence, you harm your kid for Jesus and you go to jail.

 

For reasons like this religions are a threat to society. They interfere in public policy. People die from it. The entire Health Care War was predicated on the "dumping" of indigent patients from the hospital beds to the streets, where some died. The opponents to the plan to fix it were largely fundamentalists.

For all the lip service given about how righteous they are, I think it's time for them to pay the piper. Past due, actually. Way past due.

 

In a society that does not even agree on when a child exists, at least this is consistent. After all, some people call it a child before it is born, and people deliberately not only allow but actively cause it to die.

And the same argument about "the child [not] having rights over you" is used to justify killing those unborn "children".