A reader sends a link to yet another appalling story of a child condemned to a life of ill health because of her nitwit parents’ refusal to seek medical care because the Bible promises a cure for those who have sufficient faith, yadda-yadda-yadda.
Mariah Walton’s voice is quiet – her lungs have been wrecked by her illness, and her respirator doesn’t help.
[ … ]
All this could have been prevented in her infancy by closing a small congenital hole in her heart. It could even have been successfully treated in later years, before irreversible damage was done. But Mariah’s parents were fundamentalist Mormons who went off the grid in northern Idaho in the 1990s and refused to take their children to doctors, believing that illnesses could be healed through faith and the power of prayer.
These stories exemplify the reason I believe that faith is a serious moral error. So what if a ridiculous old book says that praying will cure disease? This is 2016, and modern medicine does know better than those Bronze Age goatherders. But belief without evidence is supposed to be some sort of virtue — Every Holy Man says so! — and now Mariah suffers. Faith is not a virtue; the only people who benefit from that teaching are the Holy Men who peddle it.
Even so, the prospect of prosecuting the parents who do this makes me uneasy. The parents are no threat to society writ large and, in all likelihood, sincerely believed they were doing the best thing for their daughter. They suffer her illness, too, and have probably mentally cataloged their entire lives searching for the act or mean-spirited thought that caused Our Heavenly Father Who Loves Us to visit such misery on their daughter. They aren’t dangerous; they’re ruinously stupid.
Nor will they be punished, even if they are sent to prison. They live in a shoebox-sized world having a culture which teaches that suffering is to be expected for those who uphold the Bible; being sent to prison proves they’re genuine-article followers of Jesus, the Real McCoy. The cult-members who remain at large will conclude that the foretold persecution is at hand.
It’s not that they’re mentally ill, exactly, but neither do they have a firm grip on reality.
They are a danger to their other children, if there are any, and I wholeheartedly endorse removing those children and irrevocably terminating their parental rights.