Religious zealotry and why it should scare you.

Here's another juicy news item, right up there with the needles death of that child a few months ago whose parents refused to take her to a doctor, claiming her diabetes was nothing more than a demon possession.

I'm posting this before I get to work this morning because I'm simply amazed at the stupidity of religious zealots. This is a typical case of religion getting in the way of common sense. If you read the article, along with the case itself (I've been following it for quite some time now), you will see that the child has Hodgkins lymphoma, which is a highly curable form of cancer. As I recall it has something like a 90+% chance of being curable...if it's caught in time and if it's treated properly.

For months the parents have refused to let their child be treated by doctors, instead claiming that their prayer combined with herbs and backwoods remedies are enough to cure their child. Meanwhile, his tumor has considered to grow, showing no signs of getting better, and the poor little guy has gone through immeasurable amounts of pain due to the tumor, and he is too young to understand all of his options. From the way the article reads, his parents haven't even allowed him to be counseled by a doctor regarding his options because he's still their ward, and they have brainwashed him into thinking that the only cure for his disease is a bunch of hokey alternative medicines that have no medical backing whatsoever.

So the wife was due in court this morning to show proof that her alternative medicine was or wasn't curing the boy. Dad shows up in court...wife is gone, and she's taken the child with her. He allegedly has no idea where she has fled to, and he now believes that his son needs to be taken to a real medical professional to seek treatment. Smart man, and it's admirable that he's pulled his head out of the sand for long enough to actually have the desire to save the life of his son.

The mother, on the other hand, has only gone on to prove what everyone knew all along...the alternative medicine isn't working. She's killing her son. But rather than let him be taken care of by the "evil" doctors and taken out of her care (because, let's face it, she's not fit to be caring for her child in the first place if she can't be responsible enough to get him medical help), she bailed on court, disappearing with her child. There is now an arrest warrant out for her, and you can bet your money that when they catch up with her she will never be able to see her child again, which could have been avoided had she simply acted like a responsible parent in the first place.

It also goes to show that apparently her alternative medicine wasn't going to paint the results in court that she claimed verbally, and rather than admit she was wrong by presenting the cold-hard facts to the court--those being, that her medicine had failed and the only way to truly save her child was, in fact, to take him to a MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL!--she took her son and is now on the run.

It's wrong on so many levels. And every bit of it stems from the fact that she and her husband are religious zealots who believe that medicine is evil, that doctors are the "great satan", and that the only way to heal themselves or their children of illness is to pray and rely on hokey alternative medicines that have absolutely no medical proof whatsoever that they do anything other than imbue the believer with a false sense of hope. It's frighteningly sad.

So not only has she effectively signed her own son's death warrant, she has insured that her child will be stripped away from her by the legal system because she has proven to be an unfit mother.