A Marginal Believer
Posted on:: October 22nd, 2003
USAToday reports that a protestor outside the hospice where the brain-damaged woman in Florida is kept responded to Jeb’s decision to reinsert a feeding tube by saying, “It’s restored my belief in God.”
While I strongly support the right to die, I am nowhere near close enough to this tragic case to have an opinion worth the air to express it. But I do think that if allowing a woman to die after being basically brain-dead for 13 years is enough to make you believe there is no God, well, you just haven’t been paying enough attention.
Are you sure it wasn’t the fact that the woman been allowed to die that caused this person to say he/she believed in God. I think rather that it was that the Governor had the tube put back IN that caused this exhultation of belief.
I’m frankly disgusted by the Governor’s decision because I strongly suspect that the protester is quite right – it’s all about God and what God likes and doesn’t like. It’s not at all about the woman herself. God (via his scriptures, his clergy or his church doctrine) dictates that we can’t allow this shell of a human being to die. Forgetting practical matters, the utilitarian weighing of human suffering…forgetting real, measureable outcomes, ignoring what is right before our eyes…as long as God is placated we’re fine. This is one of my most fundamental problems with religion: faith requires the back-seating of reason and allows the justification of all sorts of injustice and suffering. Consider the recent story about the Catholic church telling 3rd-worlders not to use condoms because they “don’t prevent AIDS,” which of course they do. In their minds they are justifying the millions of people who will suffer and die by holding revealed religion above the very plain, practical, in-your-face matter of real human well-being.
It’s horrifying. That’s what it is.
The polls have the US as a nation rivaling Saudi Arabia in its commitment to religion, but I sometimes wonder, or perhaps I wonder what sort of religion we’re committed to. The relative who turned the poor lady’s survival into a test of God’s existence (and proof that He operates through Florida state government) should probably be excused, but we have a US general who seems to falling into the Manichaean error, some sort of preacher trying to put a spell on the apparatus used to remove the Ten Commandments monument, people who believe that the Pope’s sole error has been to denounce aggression against Iraq, and any number of Americans who refuse to allow that Moslems worship the same God they do.
Is the US being measured by the same yardstick as all those un-religious nations?