On the sixth day, God creates human beings. He gives them brainpower to make sound decisions for their survival and the survival of their offspring. Several millenniums later, in the age of knowledge and several technological advancements, a friend’s wife; an educated woman gets pregnant but fails to go into labour. It is one month past her due date and her amniotic sac has dried up but she refuses to let her doctor induce labour or perform a C-Section. She is waiting for God to perform a miracle so she can give birth naturally. The baby dies in the uterus. The doctor cuts her up to remove the stillborn. A family friend; a Christian man in his early forties refuses to seek treatment for early stage cancer. His wife and children watch him waste away while his church sets up a task force to plead with and coerce God for healing through fasting and praying. He dies and church members come together to give him a grand send off to heaven because apparently his unwavering faith until the inevitable end of his life has made him a “soldier in Christ.” These incidents sound isolated. But in fact, there are countless people around the world who have such a stern belief in miracles that they completely disregard modern medicine. They continue to put themselves and their loved ones in harm’s way because they think that seeing a doctor is some sort of betrayal of their faith. When their prayers go unanswered, they take no responsibility for their inaction. They believe that it was God’s will or the devil’s fault that someone died of a curable disease or someone unnecessarily lost their limb. They believe that they are going through a test of faith and that if they stay strong, they will be rewarded. To be clear, I am not disputing the fact that sometimes people get well without getting medicated. I am also a strong advocate for letting the body repair itself as opposed to always running to take pain killers and antibiotics and all that. But it’s important to know where to draw the line. To know that exposing a child to the risk of permanent disability or death by denying them medical attention is sheer madness. To know that God gave us a brain and free will so that we would be able to figure these things out. I also believe that to completely disregard modern medicine is to say that God is wasteful. It is to say that he gave people the ability to make groundbreaking medical discoveries for decoration. There is nothing glorious about dying, especially dying of a condition that could have been managed or cured. Death is final. It is permanent loss of life. Restricting your choice to praying during sickness is playing Russian roulette with life. As an adult human being with fully functioning mental faculties you’re free to do this. But it’s inhumane and murderous to involve a defenseless child in that type of situation. I live for the day when it will be prosecutable in all parts of the world.
