Being an atheist saved my daughter’s life. When my daughter became ill with a severe case of pneumonia I took her to the hospital where she was treated with modern medicine, by doctors and nurses educated in medical science. Using the latest knowledge from multiple scientific fields, they were able to pull her from the brink of death, back to full health, from a disease that in the past would have been fatal.
If I had been religious, however, like the Beagley’s, the Worthington’s, and the Neumann’s, we would have relied solely on faith to heal her. Instead of watching her progressively get better and know that powerful medications were easing her pain, I would watch day after day as she weakened, and would have to looked into those big brown eyes filled with pain, knowing that I was doing absolutely nothing to help her. She would have been sacrificed, so that I would have maintained my integrity, in a belief of a god that doesn’t exist. These three children each had illnesses which are completely treatable with modern medicine, and yet the religiously motivated hatred of science has caused people to turn their backs on it. And their children are the ones who pay the price. If it weren’t for the belief in God, and the spread of mysticism these children, like mine, would each be alive today. That is the price of faith, and the answer to Pascals Wager. If you as a Christian, and an advocate of faith are wrong, your children die. We don’t need God to heal the sick. We need the full power of the human mind, unmitigated and uncorrupted by deadly superstitions.
It is ironic to me that in seeking to recover from absolute, life wrecking addiction many counselors, specifically Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, would advocate another kind of dependence. Their 12 steps advise that believing that you have no power over your own life and that only a mystical god can heal you is the proper road to recovery. What they fail to realize, apart from the fact that there is no such thing as god, is that it is that kind of dependence which is soul-sucking. To offer the abdication of one’s mind and judgment as a remedy for the abdication of one’s mind and judgment, stating that a “different master” is what is necessary ignores a crucial element of human nature. Independence is a requirement of human life. It is the fire in a person’s soul. It is what enables them to drive themselves toward goals of their choosing. It also means that a person is responsible for the choices they make and the goals they set, and that the rewards or punishments from those actions are theirs alone to receive. By accepting the standard of dependence and irresponsibility, the counselors set the stage for psychological frustration, specifically a lack of self-worth that comes from knowing that life is worth living and that you are capable of living it.
Addiction to drugs and alcohol is a symptom of a minds attempt to escape, not from reality, but from itself. It is a manifestation of frustration, of the wordless struggle, implicitly stating “this is how the world is, yet it cannot be.” Faith, the belief in something contrary to the facts or evidence, is the main perpetrator of such cognitive dissonance.
In the realm of ideas, everything counts. One cannot simply say “If believing in god makes him happy, why not?” This precisely is why. This one false idea breeds ignorance and destruction into every mind that accepts it, and corrupts even the noblest of processes.
For true addiction recovery and prevention, we don’t need god. We need a a moral philosophy that teaches responsibility and independence, which we won’t find in any religion.
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2008/01/shawn.html”A hemophilic boy in Pennsylvania bleeds to death over a period of two days from a small cut on his foot. An Indiana girl dies after a malignant tumor sprouts from her skull and grows so enormous that it’s nearly the size of her head. A boy in Massachusetts succumbs to a bowel obstruction. (His cries of pain are so loud that neighbors are forced to shut their windows to block out the sound.)
None of these children benefit from the readily-available medical treatments that might save their lives, or at least mitigate their suffering. Because the tenets of their parents’ religious faiths mandate it, their ailments are treated by prayer rather than medical science. The results are tragic.”
This is where faith lead you. Who can be surprised at the results when people ignore the evidence?
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