Religious dagger OK at Auburn elementary school

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

82. I actually have seen quite a few religious nurses who 'take it work'.

Many of them don't seem to see it as a problem to tell patients they'll 'pray for them', or even to offer to 'pray with them'. They're competent as clinicians, usually moreso than I, thanks to more experience, but I do find that a bit troubling.

If we want to stay medical, you don't even have to go to 'love'. Just look at 'signs and symptoms'. You, as an outside observer, cannot 'prove' a symptom. If you're feeling pain, I have to take your word for it. Sure I can make guesses, if you're grimacing, or holding your muscles tight, or whatever. But I can't actually feel it, or measure it (at least in any normal setting, without neuro tools to 'watch' your brain in realtime), I have to take your word for it. But 'pain' in and of itself is something common to humanity - anyone with a functional nervous system can tell that pain exists, through their own experiences. So you could be lying, if you tell me you're feeling pain 'right now', but it's certainly possible that you're feeling pain, whether or not I can tell you are.

Ditto 'love'. We've got a lot of experience that tells us it exists, as defined in a variety of ways. So again, if I were to tell you 'I love ...' I could indeed be lying, I could be telling the truth, or I could even be deluding myself. But you tell me how you define 'love', and how you prove you love someone, and I can probably point to a similar history of actions I take that are usually undertaken by human beings who 'love' someone else.

You're certainly free to disbelieve me, consider me to be lying, or again simply decide I'm delusional, but this is something humanity generally has direct experience with.

To go back to my unicorns or bigfoot (or the 'flying spaghetti monster' that someone brought up in a comment, iirc,) I think there's a bit of a qualitative difference. While there is some slim possibility they exist in some weird, remote, uncharted piece of real estate, and we simply can't find them, I think the chances are pretty strong they simply don't exist, and won't until humanity gets a LOT better at gene splicing. Now there's a lot of historical writing about unicorns, a lot of paintings of them, going back hundreds, even possibly thousands of years. Some people would even be tempted to call that 'proof'. They would say 'Humans have been writing about unicorns for a thousand years, making pictures of them, describing their habits', etc, etc. And obviously lots of people in the past believed in their existence. But do we have any actual proof? Bones, horns that aren't narwhal or ibex, DNA, whatever? I don't think so. So I'm prepared to stipulate I believe people who tell me they saw unicorns yesterday to be mistaken, quite likely deluded. Just like folks who tell me 'supply side economics works'.