Faith and Healing

[Roofus]

Should parents go to jail for believing so devoutly in faith healing that they don't seek lifesaving medical treatment for their children?

Leilani and Dale Neumann of Wausau, Wis., will soon find out. Their 11-year-old daughter died of diabetic complications after they relied on prayer rather than doctors to heal her. Now they face trial for reckless endangerment and a potential prison sentence of 25 years. They're the third couple slapped with criminal charges in the last year for failing to seek treatment for a child. In today's New York Times, Dirk Johnson reports:

About 300 children have died in the United States in the last 25 years after medical care was withheld on religious grounds, said Rita Swan, executive director of Children's Health Care Is a Legal Duty ... Criminal codes in 30 states, including Wisconsin, provide some form of protection for practitioners of faith healing in cases of child neglect and other matters ...

Swan lost her own son after failing to seek prompt medical attention. She says she waited, catastrophically, because she thought "once we went to the doctor, we'd be cut off from God." The Neumanns seem to have been under the same impression. Johnson reports that they're "followers of an online faith outreach group" (on the Web here) that includes, among other things, an essay preaching that "Jesus never sent anyone to a doctor or a hospital. Jesus offered healing by one means only! Healing was by faith."

I don't know how the case will turn out. But the more important thing to communicate to parents is that this is bad religion. Science is a way of grappling with what we can know empirically. Religion is a way of grappling with what we can't. Each of these disciplines must recognize its limits and defer, beyond that, to its counterpart. Properly understood, there's nothing unscientific about religion, and there's nothing irreligious about science.

I'm not saying the distinction is perfectly clean. It isn't. Sometimes religion and science have to work together. But it's crucial to ask which kind of question you're facing. Healing is a physical phenomenon. Can faith influence it? Yes. Look at the latest study on acupuncture: It sometimes works, apparently because patients believe in it. But what happens when people pray for your recovery without you knowing about it? Answer: Nothing. Belief, not God, is the medically salient factor.

That's how science, at its best, works with religion. It doesn't claim to disprove God's existence. It can't. It addresses only empirically testable ideas, including faith healing. And it reports whatever its methods find. Instead of laughing at acupuncture, it looks at the evidence, admits that acupuncture sometimes works, and tries to figure out why.

Religion, at its best, needs the same humility. God isn't stupid. He doesn't give you a hammer and insist that you bang nails with your head. If this is his world, then so are the tools he has given you: doctors, medicine, and your brain. In the time of Jesus, most people died in childhood. Do you want to go back to that? Do you think that those deaths were God's will—but that today's long lives, made possible by modern medicine, aren't?

As medicine advances, difficult moral questions will arise. If failure to seek available treatment is reckless endangerment, what happens when the available treatment comes, for example, from destroying embryos to get stem cells? Can you be jailed for refusing to give your daughter treatment that's based on what you regard as killing? Or take embryo screening: Already, it has advanced to the point where parents who make babies the old-fashioned way, with all its risks, are seen as "inflicting" genetic maladies on their kids.

But taking your gravely ill child to the doctor isn't one of those tough calls. God doesn't hate doctors. He made them. Want to show your faith? Use what he gave you.

Source: Slate

[Ex-Cyber]

Shouldn't the criteria and punishment for child endangerment be exactly the same for religious and nonreligious motivations? I don't see how a religious exception can avoid turning into an establishment issue and/or a "get out of jail free" card.

[OneThirty8]

I can see how a moral complication might arise if a couple who believes that life begins at conception is given the choice of giving their child treatment that involves embryonic stem cells. These parents will be forced to ask, "Do we save the life of our child by taking the life of an unborn child, or do we risk the life of our child in order to protect an unborn child regardless of whether that unborn child will ever be born?" It's a tough question for some people.

Denying medical treatment to a child in your care, whether for religious reasons or any other reason, is morally reprehensible. If you have an opinion that differs from mine on this point, you are wrong. End of story.

[Jeeba Jabba]

I don't think they should be punished. Kind of ironic to do so, while abortion is still legal.

[U-said-it]

I don't know. It seems to me that if they want to arrest them for this type of behavior; then they will have to demonstrate at least willful ignorance to getting proper treatment for a serious ailment.

There have been studies done on the efficacy of prayer to help heal, in the short term and the long term, with mixed results.

It seems to be that the results weren't concluded to have any noticeable benefits, to being downright harmful in certain cases. Cases that beneficial effects were seen in weren't even considered statistically significant, meaning that they couldn't attribute any possible positive effects as any thing other than chance.

Heart Patients Benefit Little From Prayer, MIT Therapy

Study highlights difficulty of isolating effect of prayer on patients

Effect of rosary prayer and yoga mantras on autonomic cardiovascular rhythms: comparative study

Largest Study of Third-Party Prayer Suggests Such Prayer Not Effective In Reducing Complications Following Heart Surgery

Mind you that the healing being studied in some of these studies is post operative, or other procedure.

[OneThirty8]

It seems to me that if they want to arrest them for this type of behavior; then they will have to demonstrate at least willful ignorance to getting proper treatment for a serious ailment.

If it is not willful ignorance, what else could it be? Doctors would be out of business if prayer solved anything. Everybody would be out of business, in fact. We wouldn't need business, war, medicine, tools, or anything. Everything would be taken care of, and we would be free to frolic naked in the forest, so long as we don't accept fruit offered to us by talking serpents. And everybody knows that snakes can't talk.

[BlackAura]

If a couple refused to take their child to a doctor, instead offering prayer to... Cthulhu, or Thor, or whatever... then this wouldn't be an issue. It'd be considered exactly the same as a couple who sat on their hands and did absolutely nothing.

This couple should not get a free pass just because their invisible friend is the most popular.

[Specially Cork]

It's always felt to me like Christians who treat god as their holy concierge have completely missed the point of their religion.

[Jeeba Jabba]

MONETARY REBELLION!

[Stormwatch]

It's always felt to me like Christians who treat god as their holy concierge have completely missed the point of their religion.

It's supposed to have a point?!

[Lartrak]

If a couple refused to take their child to a doctor, instead offering prayer to... Cthulhu, or Thor, or whatever... then this wouldn't be an issue. It'd be considered exactly the same as a couple who sat on their hands and did absolutely nothing.

This couple should not get a free pass just because their invisible friend is the most popular.

I dunno. I think they'd get consideration for any established religion. I seem to recall something similar once happening with tribal shamans on a reservation a few years ago. Does that ring a bell with anyone?

[U-said-it]

I seem to recall something similar once happening with tribal shamans on a reservation a few years ago.

True, and not any more of an valid excuse.

But aren't reservations kinda like international embassies? I thought that they have they own mini-governments with there own applicable laws, and they only have to federally report to a certain extent through the BIA? In that light, if it's true, that would be a political issue and not a legal one.

[Lartrak]

I seem to recall something similar once happening with tribal shamans on a reservation a few years ago.

True, and not any more of an valid excuse.

But aren't reservations kinda like international embassies? I thought that they have they own mini-governments with there own applicable laws, and they only have to federally report to a certain extent through the BIA? In that light, if it's true, that would be a political issue and not a legal one.

They're not technically separate countries any more. That's about all I know. I really don't understand how the whole thing works.

[Kevin Beckman]

How many of you are pro-choice?