AP: Parents pick prayer over docs; girl dies
WESTON, Wis. - Police are investigating an 11-year-old girl's death from an undiagnosed, treatable form of diabetes after her parents chose to pray for her rather than take her to a doctor.
Prayer: the ultimate post hoc fallacy. If you pray, and you get what you prayed for, then God answered your prayers. If you pray, and you don't get what you prayed for, then, well, that's just God's will. No matter what happens, it's construed to prove that prayer works. Irrefutably beyond the grasp of logic, either way!
These frightfully daft parents chose to pray instead of getting their daughter to a doctor, and now their daughter is dead from a treatable illness. Is that God's will?
A more appropriate term might be manslaughter.
Anyone who refuses a safe and preventative medical treatment on religious grounds deserves the illness that consequentially befalls him. And anyone who refuses a child such a treatment on religious grounds deserves to be prosecuted for neglect to the fullest extent of the law.
This is well beyond the purview of religious freedom. Religious freedom protects one's personal views and actions only insofar as they do not harm others. If you choose to die of measles or diabetes because you hold the idiotic belief that an imaginary man in the sky is a better medical provider than your local hospital, then Requiescat In Pace, you moron. But if your foolish beliefs cause the death of a child, then you'll have a long time to come to terms with that by praying in your prison cell.
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In early 19th-century America, a certain traveling show featured a remarkable pig that, on command, could spell out letters to form words. This "pig of knowledge", or "learned pig", baffled superstitious mobs, and excited frenzied accusations of witchcraft. In response, the pig's trainer published a pamphlet that sought to dispel the rumors by detailing his methods of instruction, and demonstrating that this apparent miracle could be accounted for through reason and observation alone.
Tacitus once wrote, "everything unknown passes for something splendid." Humans by nature desire to know, and when they encounter something seemingly inexplicable, they tend to fill in the holes with religion, superstition, or inane anti-intellectualism that dismisses the need for knowledge altogether. But these are cowardly subsitutes for reason and observation. The learned pig reminds us that if we wish to be wise, "observe; for observation is the source of wisdom."
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1 comment:
hey zach - things to think about with that article. social services is not recommending possible charges against the parents because they "thought they were doing the right thing. they believed up to the time she stopped breathing that she was going to get better."
in order for that girl to die of diabetes, she would have had it for at least three years. in that time she would have lost a significant amount of weight, and her eyesight may have blurred, her fingers and toes would have lost feeling. if the ignorance of that is not negligence, then i'm the queen of england.
- molly, diabetic of 18 years.
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