indentitee #fundie reddit.com

You dismiss people's religious beliefs rather cavalierly. I don't rely on faith healing, personally, but I have no problem with those who do. As I pointed out in another place, when parents are prosecuted for not seeking care, what's really happening is that the State is attempting to punish adults for having different values than the State. The State's value is "Physical life and health are the highest values, nothing else competes." But many people believe that there is something more important and valuable than physical life. If such a person enacts such a value in the life of his child, the State has a fit and says, "NO, you must enact MY value instead -- physical life is the most important thing!" So, either you have parents enacting their values in the child's life, or you have the State enacting its values in the child's life. I think the parents have a higher claim to be the ones to choose the value, rather than the State. And personally, I don't care if the parents' values are based on religion, philosophy, science, materialism, political idealism, or anything else. It's easy to look in from the outside and say, "Those poor children, they're at risk." But you don't know the richness of their inner experience, which their parents may be expert at imparting, because they have a purpose in life that's higher than simply continuing to exist.

If parents starved their child to death, that would be horrible. Only a miniscule percentages of parents are so malicious. There are SO many more likely threats to a child's life, I find it kind of silly to hyperventilate over this rare hypothetical. There are better targets for self-righteous rage. The vast majority of parents would give their own lives for their children, and they deserve the benefit of any doubt, as well as the assumption that they do, indeed, act in their children's best interests as they understand them. That might not be the way YOU understand them, but really? It's not even your business.


People act to preserve their children's well-being in different ways. Sometimes taking your child to the doctor is a harmful thing to do, such as in the Stiehler (sp?) case that's ongoing in Michigan right now. Without knowing exactly what was wrong with the 7-month-old in this case, without knowing how easy it was to KNOW that something was wrong, and without knowing the efficacy of various forms of treatment, it's impossible to judge whether the parents did "enough" to care for their child. A large part of the tyrrany of the medical establishment consists in its ability to hookwink everybody into thinking that it has the only solutions, or the only valid solutions. There is often a scientific reason to refuse medical treatment, not just a religious reason.

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