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Wednesday, April 24, 2013

And They Let Him Die!



Many of you know that I serve as a medic in my community.  I just read about couple serving probation for the 2009 death of their toddler after they turned to prayer instead of a doctor, and have once again allowed another son to die without medical care. They will face charges on this one, too, I am sure.  It is a controversial arena where child abuse laws come into conflict with first amendment religious freedom rights.  And make no mistake, the media and Satan love to use it to demean Christianity.

Many fundamentalist Christians believe only in faith healing. I get that, and I know that faith healing has been practiced for centuries.  Jesus did it.  The disciples did it.  Luke talks about it in the New Testament.  But there is something very wrong when you demand that faith be the only avenue to healing.  I suspect that Luke, as a physician would have clearly spoken about the need to only rely on faith healing if it were what Jesus had taught, but it simply isn’t so.

These people allowed their 8-month-old son to suffer for at least a week and die after he experienced diarrhea and breathing problems and stopped eating.  The other one died from bacterial pneumonia four years ago.  All of these are eminently easy to treat medically with very good outcomes.

God gave us brains and hands to implement what we learn.  Christianity is an intelligent faith.  It is one of the things that I find most comforting about it.  The earth and mankind are the result of an intelligent design, and even many unbelieving scientists admit this.  God gave us the charge to be in dominion over the earth, and that includes implementing what we learn about disease prevention and cure in the context of God’s design of the universe.  The same applies to healing starvation and poverty and evil governments.  We are to pray, but we are to also “be Jesus Christ to the world” in what we do.  We give food and medical care to those who can’t afford it, we stand up for the weak and abused, we don’t just pray that food and medical care will miraculously appear.  That’s just not the way God expects us to live out our Christianity to those around us.

I believe the first amendment rights are important, but this crosses the line.  It is no more logical than not driving a car, because God didn’t provide it or not living in a house because God didn’t make it.

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