Background follows.

Back in college, two of my professors, a husband and wife team that taught Math and English, respectively, went through a flash of tragic fame. The Swans had been Christian Scientists, and as their son fell ill with meningitis.

They followed their faith – and the boy died. The Swans left the church (although they apparently kept their faith in a broader sense), and have spent a few decades lobbying to change state laws that protect parents whose religious practices lead to their childrens’ deaths. It’s an issue fraught with emotion on both sides…

…and one I stay happily out of. I’m a Christian who sees no rational reason to find conflict between an allegorical reading of the Old Testament and science. There is no battle between “creationism”/intelligent design and evolution. It’s pretty simple.

And I regard zealots on both sides – the snake-handlers along with the fevered, bigoted caricatures that Big Atheism sends forth to do battle in the media – with suspicion and a little bit of sorrow.

Fast forward to today, and the dumbest post that’s ever appeared on Anti-Strib that wasn’t written by Ed Salden. It’s written by a fellow named Jeff, who must have gotten video of Tracy Eberly doing something really awful to get included in the Anti-Strib stable of writers in the first place.

Of course, part of the problem becomes clear at the conclusion:

(via Pharyngula.)

P.Z. Meiers is to religion as David Duke is to black people.

Onward to be beginning:

Just when you think that prayer can’t do any harm:

“Even as her 11-year-old daughter lay dying on a mattress on the floor of the family dining room on Easter Sunday, Leilani Neumann never wavered in her belief in the power of prayer.
“We just thought it was a spiritual attack and we prayed for her,” Neumann said, according to a police report. “My husband, Dale, was crying and mentioned taking Kara to the doctor, and I said the Lord’s going to heal her and we continued to pray.”

Prayer didn’t save Madeline Kara Neumann, who died of untreated diabetes March 23.”

No, it didn’t.

Neither, “John’s” claims notwithstanding, did it “do harm”. A couple of parents with a view of God and faith that is, to say the least, on the far fringe of orthodoxy, did.

So what’s my point? I’ve often accused faith of having no accountability, and this is exactly what I mean.

Well, good for you!

Except that for people of faith, accountability is a constant thing. Yes, accountability to God is a pretty powerful force, and if people see that accountability differently than you do (see also: female circumcision, suttee, substituting prayer for medicine, faith-healing, whatever) it can seem anything from “weird” to “barbaric” to “just plain wrong”.

And that accountability is why Christians devote 25% more – of their own free will, rather than via government coercion – to charity than do secularists, and are more likely to vote and volunteer for civic causes than atheists.

At any rate, “Jeff” seems to have missed (or never really understood) the Christian injunction to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”. Understandable, perhaps – liberals think means nothing more than “be happy to pay for a better Galilee Minnesota“. It actually means that Christians need to recognize civil authority (although the Protestant Reformation added the rather important bit about “evil governments are bad”). So there’s nothing “unnaccountable about faith”; there are merely people of faith who, through over-narrow interpretation or over-broad religious hubris, make the wrong choices.

And this wrong choice, like the Swans’ a couple decades back, ended in tragedy. Life happens. You live and – like the Swans – you learn, or at least, like the couple from Wisconsin, get some nasty consequences.

I might add that science – which is often delegated to merely another religion around these parts

That’s right, “Jeff”, which is why we have the North Memorial Snake Handling Auditorium, Regions Prayer Center, and the University of Minnesota Faith Healing Center, and why you can’t find a doctor on any regional golf courses.

Bad choices – whether driven by a fringe-y view of faith or its mirror image, the belief that ones’ self is the only intelligence that really matters – are the problem.

That, and Tracy Eberly’s lax HR standards, apparently.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Crime and Punishment, Faiths And Their Followers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.