Religion
In reply to the discussion: OR couple whose daughter died untreated wants faith-healing beliefs kept from jury [View all]Brettongarcia
(2,262 posts)This case is important not just in itself; but also it can become an important introduction to THE core systematic failure in conventional Christianity.
The particular case involves a couple of faith-based, faith-healing parents. Who decided that their religion, their faith, requires them to ask God to heal their child, rather than pursuing medical treatment. The problem that resulted was that God did not faith heal their children; instead, their child got worse ... and then died. From medical problems that doctors could have fixed.
Here traditional Christians are eager to distance themselves from all this; to assert that "mainstream" or "modern" Christianity does not have this problem. And yet the stress on faith healing is widespread in much of Christianity. While the related stress on faith in general of course is absolutely central to all of Christianity.
So the emphasis in faith healing, on faith, gets to the core problem of Christianity. This very stress on faith is what turns out to be the problem. Which is this: when we encourage people to ignore physical evidence, and to just follow religious or other authority just on the basis of blind confidence or faith, people are often fatally mislead. When people ignore all the many signs that say their faith-healing is not working, often their children will suffer for instance; and even die.
These individual cases of fatalities from faith, therefore, are just the tip of the fatal iceberg of all of Christianity; including "modern" and "liberal" Christianity. Looking into many such cases, we can begin to see what the general problem is: too much blind confidence or faith in unreliable authority. Finally, looking into deaths and poverty figures in the religious communities, we can soon come up with not just dozens or even hundreds, but millions of examples of how too much faith in bad ideas, bad religious leaders, has historically weakened the lives of millions of people. Often even literally, fatally. (Some recent free books by Dr. Woodbridge Goodman online, show how too much religion, too much faith, weakened or destroyed their ability to engage in reason, or critical thinking, or science. With often physically crippling and even fatal results. See particularly Vol. 6, The Harm Done.)
Beginning to see the really terrible and fatal side of traditional Christianity - even modern liberal, spiritual Christianity- is a devastating, even heaven-shatteringly disillusioning moment for Christians. However? Some of us are beginning to show that even the Bible itself told us that one day or another, even good modern Christians are supposed to discover that the whole world - including they themselves were deceived by a false idea of Christ. (See Dr. Goodman, Vol. ? The Day).
And their false idea of God moreover, was not just false in some harmless way; their false ideas actually weakened and killed many people. Including in many of the present cases, their own children.