Offering God On A Wing & A Prayer: Nurse Suspended for Offering Prayer to Patient

On a Wing & A Prayer: Proselytizing in Public Hospitals

Amongst the myriad of religious practices which are practiced by religions, prayer is one of the most sacred of duties: It is supposedly a two-way communication line between you and your favorite cosmic deity (although I tend to suspect prayer to be a one-way, nonreciprocating kind). Most prayers come in the form of accosting for divine favors, and people do pray for all kinds of divine intervention, from trivial nonsense such as winning football leagues to more serious endeavors, such as killing your enemy or seeking some form of a divine cure for supposedly incurable ailments.

Imagine this scenario: You are suffering from a terrible migraine, and here you are, taking your seat next to your doctor, who examines you, and instead of dispensing his expert medical advice and some prescription drugs, decides to offer you a free prayer for your health. Sounds familiar?

From time to time, most of us, I am sure, will encounter folks from the field of medicine who will take our religious liberties for granted. During my post-op visit to a hospital to have my stitches removed last year, I was attended to by a male nurse who, during the process of removing my stitches, decided I would do well with a bit of proselytizing. I wasn't very much offended, given the fact that my knee was at his mercy, but is the hospital the right institution for spreading religious dogma?

A nurse found out the answer the hard way, according to this BBC news article:

Nurse Suspended For Prayer Offer
1st Feb 2009

A Christian nurse from Weston-super-Mare has been suspended for offering to pray for a patient's recovery.

Community nurse Caroline Petrie, 45, says she asked an elderly woman patient during a home visit if she wanted her to say a prayer for her.

The patient complained to the health trust about Mrs Petrie who follows the Baptist faith.

She was suspended, without pay, on 17 December and will find out the outcome of her disciplinary meeting next week.

The Roles & Responsibilities of Hospital Staff

One stubborn trait that keeps cropping up in such delicate "religious" issues is that religious folks are very insistent in blurring the line drawn between Church & State, exploiting any crook and cranny to proselytize to unwary, secular citizens as well as citizens who somehow do not share their religious zeal.

Sure, these religious proselytizers have their right to spread the religious virus in their churches and to a certain extent, public places, but to allow for such unabashed pimping of God in secular, government institutions not only impedes important work, it breeds discontentment and intolerance towards other folks who do not share the same faith as the proselytizers who seek to shove religion down the throats of other people.

I have little doubt that Carrie Petrie is a well-meaning nurse and a devout Christian, but let's try to reverse the roles for the sake of argument: Suppose Carrie is the patient, and sitting next to her attending to her is a Muslim nurse who begins to rant about the virtues of Prophet Muhammad. Will the Muslim nurse be offending her religious sensitivities?

Clearly, the need for secularism and separation of church and state is evident here: It allows for the smooth running of the hospital, minus all the negative bias and unnecessary bickering arising from religious disputes, thus allowing the hospital to function normally.

In short, being a government entails certain conformance to rules and regulations, and that includes not proselytizing to folks when you are dispensing government service. For the nurse in question, that means no proselytizing to patients, which she had quite willingly and blatantly commit.

The Faith of Patients?

The moment a patient steps into a medical institution, he or she no longer places faith in cosmic deities: After all, if you really trust in God to deliver you from the pain and suffering caused by your ailments, why would you visit a doctor, instead of a priest?

To put it bluntly, why should God bother to inflict disease upon you, only to have you find a cure from a priest? A case of divine sadism on the cards?

Sure, religious folks who are inevitably cured of their ailments by doctors will attribute their convalescence to some invisible deity. Faith, it seems, is dispensable when life-and-death is at stake, but upon recovery, the good doctor is all but forgotten, his actions replaced by the wild imaginations of a supposedly loving, powerful deity.

Keeping Government Institutions Secular

The need to maintain equality and bi-partisanship is the basis of government institutions, such as hospitals. Hospitals should be dispensing medical care and services, not prayers and dogma. Sectarian religions should never be allowed to be dispensed by medical professionals and government staff.

While the fundamentalists may decry secular rules as being infringements upon their religious rights, I am quite sure that they will also be the same folks who will complain vehemently if someone else who is of a different faith from theirs attempts to shove down religion down their throats. These folks simply want the government to indulge in their fantasy entities at the expense of the rights of others.

If indeed patients are really so confident of their respective deities, they should be visiting the Churches, not hospitals.

And finally, if prayers do work, not a single hospital we see today will be left standing today. We'd all be cured on a wing and a prayer.

Prayers Don't Work.......




-"Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish."
Anonymous

Perverse Religious Ruling: Rape Victim In Saudi Arabia Sentenced With Whipping

As an atheist and a secular humanist, it seems to me that whenever religion is thrown into the cauldron of a judiciary system in a bid to form a religious court, more often than not, the askew judgments and gross abuse of human rights become centerfold: From gross misogyny to outright ridiculous punishments of victims & criminals alike, religious laws belong to a somewhat archaic age, when it was customary for thieves to have their hands chopped off, or mandatory stoning for convicted adulterers.

For various obvious reasons, most democratic, modern nations do not ascribe such ridiculous concepts of law into their statutes, and while some countries still practice the ancient, non-reversible death penalty in their books, it is safe to say that as civilized countries go, most countries have removed a significant number of barbaric punishments from the law books.

There are, however, some religiously-charged countries, particularly in the Islamic mold, that still dish out unacceptable punishments for certain crimes, and it really galls me to say that most of these supposed "crimes" are merely deliberate acts of lynching meant to subjugate one particular class of human beings: Women.

Saudi Gang-Rape Victim is Jailed
By Frances Harrison
BBC News

An appeal court in Saudi Arabia has doubled the number of lashes and added a jail sentence as punishment for a woman who was gang-raped.

The victim was initially punished for violating laws on segregation of the sexes - she was in an unrelated man's car at the time of the attack.

When she appealed, the judges said she had been attempting to use the media to influence them.

The attackers' sentences - originally of up to five years - were doubled.

Extra penalties

According to the Arab News newspaper, the 19-year-old woman, who is from Saudi Arabia's Shia minority, was gang-raped 14 times in an attack in the eastern province a year-and-a-half ago. Seven men from the majority Sunni community were found guilty of the rape and sentenced to prison terms ranging from just under a year to five years. But the victim was also punished for violating Saudi Arabia's laws on segregation that forbid unrelated men and women from associating with each other. She was initially sentenced to 90 lashes for being in the car of a strange man. On appeal, the Arab News reported that the punishment was not reduced but increased to 200 lashes and a six-month prison sentence.

Subjugating Women and Stoking the Male Ego

Burkas: A Symbol of Misogyny

For all intents and purposes, the Syariah (Muslim Law) has, within its tenets, rules that subjugates women: In Saudi Arabia, women can't drive cars, step out of their homes without the mandatory burkas (The ugly veils that make them resemble out-of-place Martians), & yes, generally speaking, women are conspicuously absent in a large proportion of a male-dominated social setting.

In short, Muslim women living under the shadow of the law live a shady, oppressed kind of existence, their survival deemed as nothing more than tools for raising children, looking after the household and yes, perpetual sex slaves for males destined for 72 virgins in Paradise.

Sickening Ruling

The idea that a rape victim should be able to seek legal recourse without undue fear of reprisal is strangely absent in Islamic courts: As for the case in question, the farce just keeps snow-balling into gross miscarriage of justice: For the mere act of getting in a car with a male driver, she gets 200 lashes, up from the earlier sentence of 90 lashes.

A Muslim apologist can argue that the male rapists didn't go scot free: But how does one justify one deserving punishment for a misguided (& misogynistic one at that) one?

This is another classic example why religion should never be allowed to meddle in court matters, or any other issue for the matter. Wherever religion trots on secular ground, the end result is often a disaster in the making.







"When I began to study the Koran, the holy book of Islam, I found many unreasonable ideas. The women in the Koran were treated as slaves. They are nothing but sexual objects. Naturally I set aside the Koran and looked around me. I found religion equally oppressive in real life. And I realized that religious oppression and injustices are only increasing, especially in Muslim countries. The religious terrorists are everywhere. But if I criticized Muslim fundamentalists and mullahs in particular, it is because I saw them from close quarters. They took advantage of people's ignorance and oppressed them. They considered women as chattel slaves and treated them no better than the slaves of the ancient world."

-Banglasdeshi Writer, Taslima Nasrin

The Punishment Must Fit The Crime

All too often, when religious proselytizers prance about, hawk-like, waiting for any unsuspecting heathens to fall into their elaborate traps, in the hope of spreading their "good news" to the heathens, infidels and other non-religious affiliates, the subject of "Sin" inevitably crops up. Sin, in religious parlance, refers to acts of malice or ill-intention that are not in compliance with religious tenets: There is a "crime" or "sin" that is committed, which is duly dealt with and punished, at least through divine intervention. Be it Buddhism, Christianity, or other more or less "morality-based" faiths, the subject of crime and punishment seems reasonable.

After all, the Court of Law in every civilized country specifies and dispenses relevant punishments for all manner of crime: Incarceration, caning (in barbaric, pseudo-democratic nations such as Singapore), or the death sentence (again, Singapore, & I must say, some US states, still executes it's inmates), are meted out to offenders who fail to toe the line. From minor crimes, such as petty theft, to significantly more harmful ones, such as murder, every punishment that is meted out is inevitably designed to fit the crime. After all, one would not expect a judge to ascribe a death penalty to a burglar, or a week's jail for a serial killer. The punishment, if anything else, must fit the crime.

It is only rational that our sense of justice is aligned with our "ethical" compass: Our sense of right and wrong is often weighed in from a social point of view, and not delegated or bestowed upon us through a rigid code of conduct which we must all allude and seek advice when meting out punishment.

While secular law has a fairly accurate system of meting out punishment on a "pound-for-pound" basis, that cannot be said of Religion, which, if anything else, perverts and distorts the meaning of justice wholesale.

In determining what is and what isn't punishable, I would like to set up a few parameters that are central to my arguments in this post:

1. Since I am fairly well-versed with Christianity (No, folks, I am not a theologian), I shall use Christianity as my primary focus for this topic.

2. "Punishment" in this case refers to the mythological definition of hell: A cauldron of burning inferno for recalcitrant souls. I shall not deal with the punishments afflicted by the Inquisitors and other religious mad men in this post.

Proving The Existence of God

As an institution based on hearsays, superstition, fabrication and sheer subterfuge, religion has to maintain a facade of dignity and authenticity, and this can be especially tricky, when the whole institution of religion is based on a imaginary Father in the sky. Not only is the Emperor without clothes, he seems to have vanished with his clothes altogether!

If reality is based on a God-centered existence, the very mundane trait of belief would have been an all-natural and inevitable affair: For example, no one doubts the existence of George W. Bush. We see him on TV gawking and staring in our TV screens, talking gibberish like a half-evolved chimpanzee. We know him for the moron he is precisely because he is real, and that he speaks gibberish, and doesn't seem to get his act right. We need not necessarily evoke belief (Although sometimes I wish I could invoke disbelief when asked to explain why someone so stupid can be an American President) to ascertain that he exists. It just comes with the territory.

Not so for God, who, incidentally, has Bush as his biggest, dumb-assed fan. God doesn't exactly talk to us (If someone tells you God talks to him literally in his head, recommend him to the nearest psychiatrist. God may be a figment of his imagination, but Schizophrenia isn't.) like George Bush jibbers to us on TV, and no, for the love of Jebus, we can't exactly see him, although his son, Jebus, occasionally appears on pancakes and fluffy clouds as weird apparitions to beguile the masses. We can't smell God, so we don't exactly know if he has bad breath (excluding the burnt pancake with the image of Jebus on it......), and............you got the drift.

So, God seems to be quite absent from our mundane lives. None of us can talk to God as if you were talking to a friend: In order to "communicate" with this rather invisible Pink Bunny, we have to clasp our hands, bow our heads, and intone wistfully in a relevant, almost servile voice (verbally, or as always, in our minds. Doesn't that give us a clue or two that God may be no more than the products of our own depraved minds???) to invoke the aid of the Divine One. Hardly a friendly Deity! If you were a Muslim, you will need to prostrate yourself on the floor and align yourself in the direction of the Mecca (A huge problem indeed, for the Malaysian astronaut who had the opportunity and ignominy of zipping around Earth in orbit at phenomenal speeds!). Indeed, the idea of this made-shift character is an alien and distant one: He may have been omniscient, omnipotent and omni-benevolent, but try asking God to buy you a jolly good round of lager!

Since we cannot define God on a personal basis, the last ditch attempt would be Science. Some theists, in a bid to add a little credibility to the God conundrum, will use the Air Hypothesis: We can't see air, but we know it exists. But we know air exists because we can prove its existence in a laboratory! Try filling up a test-tube with hydrogen, throw in a little flame, and watch out for the fireworks. One of the most fundamental flaws here drummed up by theologians is that we can only verify a phenomenon through sight alone: Alongside our other senses, Science is a good, reliable indicator for testing a potential hypothesis, including the God Hypothesis.

It is not good enough for theists to simply reject Science as a means of testing God through NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria), which states that Science cannot interfere in matters of theology and its related dogmas. While scientists are quite willing to bend its back to accommodate this quaint little idea, note how fast theists would react, if Science were to truly find the first remnants of a reliable piece of evidence pertaining to Noah's flood. Scientists may be willing to play the ball, but don't expect theists to play fair. Religion, after all, is a dirty player, and that fact alone has been found indelible in centuries of sectarian strife.

On this count, Science has turned up a pretty blank patch: There is not a single scientific hypothesis, theory or experimentation that can triumphantly prove the existence of God.

In sum, since we cannot, in any sensible, reliable method, define God within a logical parameter, the God hypothesis has little common ground to play with.

ENFORCING BELIEF IN THE ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE

As we sieve through the layers of subterfuge, hearsays and myths from the Christian fabric of lies, we realize that, hey, presto, God really isn't there in the first place! Try as theists may to explain the metaphysical, spiritual and whatever essence of an imagined deity, there is no denying the fact that God is either reluctant to acknowledge our pathetic existence, or simply doesn't exist.

With this uncomfortable butt plug in the ass of Religion, belief becomes an unnatural anal-retentive stress reliever: Not only must believers be constantly reminded of the perils of apostasy, Religion ups the ante by defining the disbelief of God as a crime punishable by death i.e eternal damnation in the form of an imaginary barbecue pit, Hell, to prevent a mass exodus of the religious flocks of dull-witted sheep.

Forgiving the "Blood Debt": Infidels & Blasphemers Need Not Apply

As depicted in the Gospels, one could be forgiven, and even pardoned, for all manner of crimes: Apparently, Jesus is quite the gracious host in welcoming all manner of sinners to the proverbial kingdom of heaven:

"If you had one hundred sheep, and one of them strayed away and was lost in the wilderness, wouldn't you leave the ninety-nine others to go and search for the lost one until you found it? And then you would joyfully carry it home on your shoulders. When you arrived, you would call together your friends and neighbors to rejoice with you because your lost sheep was found. In the same way, heaven will be happier over one lost sinner who returns to God than over ninety-nine others who are righteous and haven't strayed away! (NLT, Luke 15:3-7)

That said, Heaven, it seems, has no place for the unbelieving soul:

“There is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men, by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

&, not to forget, those that commit blasphemy against the Holy Ghost:

"Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men." (Matthew 12:31)

CRIME & PUNISHMENT

Clearly, such litanies of religious diatribes seem ridiculous to the point of absurdity: When punishment is meted, punishment is delegated based entirely on the elegance of one's creed, instead of the arcane or, on the other extreme end, law-abiding actions of a person. Another remarkably sinister and similar trait is the atrociously malicious nature of the God dilemma: Like a cruel tyrant and despot, God has little tolerance for anyone who smears or violate his "good" name (In this case, God seems to have a dubious fixation with Holy Ghosts). Isn't this enough evidence for the average human brain to sound the alarm bell, that this very caricature of the despotic tyrant in heaven is no more than a figment of a nobleman's desire to enslave the slavish masses through sheer vehement threats of violence?

RECANTING BEFORE DEATH: A GREAT COP-OUT?

As if this is not enough to befuddle the most logical of minds, consider this: If a mass murderer, half a step away from the noose that is about to snap his neck at a snap of the throttle, decides to recant: His "sins", or should I say his evil deeds, are automatically wiped clean. He gets a clean slate, a clean bill of health for his otherwise wretched soul and presto! Off he goes to join the merry bands of hairy angels in heaven!

Conversely, imagine the man who, throughout his life, slogs slavishly in the fields to feed his children, finds time and effort to do great deeds of charity, but hell, he dies without believing in the right deity. When he meets God, he quivers in his knees, begs God to give him a chance on account of his good deeds........but no........hell, fuck no. He didn't pay the right allegiance. Off to hell he goes, with the rest of the scumbugs, infidels and Hitleristic characters who had consigned themselves to an eternity of punishment not as a result of their deeds, but on account of their wrong or absent allegiance to the right deity.

THE SHEER LUDICROUSNESS OF RELIGIOUS JUSTICE

I wouldn't know about my readers, but I have a sense of outrage that amounts almost to the feeling of blasphemy to even refer to religious biasness of this form as "religious justice".

While murderers who had recanted on their deathbeds may really have "repented" of their guilt, the appalling idea that the likes of terrorists, murderers and other hideous monsters may somehow lurk in the realms of heaven strumming a guitar and having sex with 72 virgins sounds like a gross miscarriage of justice, to say the least.

Let us just hope that the likes of Jerry Falwell are being embuggered by legions of crotch-sniffing, cock-loving angels who can't get enough of his homophobic ethics. Now that is what I call JUSTICE!

Why I'm Here

I'm an atheist and I don't care about the argument of whether a god or god's exist or not. My premise is that I don't want to sit here and argue bullshit that gets thrown back and forth. The same bullshit over and over. It may have been pertinent the first time around, but after a while it gets really old. Because neither on one side or the other is going to convince either party otherwise.

This is why I much prefer discussing current events. For this simple reason: whatever happened 1000, 2000 or 200,000 years ago is history. What can we as human beings; Muslims, Christians, Jews, bushmen, Slavs, Finns, Mayans, Taoists, Buddhists, atheists and whatever -ists and -ans are left; do to move forward and do our best to fashion a future that best describes the nearest we can come to a utopia.

The only way I see this coming about is strict secular policy that in and of itself is very loose with liberty. Of course there has to be a balance, but in my opinion a moral code dictated by religious ideology has no part in my interpretation. Because a moral code can just as easily be found in tribes with no organized religion whatsoever. A clue that religious morality has always been obsolete, since it's inception. Back to this balance; human beings know what is right and wrong, and Christians (or any other faith for that matter) have absolutely no monopoly or infallibility in this department...

A departure: If religious moralists think that their code is THE right one. The RIGHT way to live. How do they account for (or view) non-believers (as apparently a god delivered unto whatever prophet THE right codes that we should all live by)? When we as non-believers don't believe in this, it's obvious we are viewed as being "in the wrong". How wrong? Evil? I guess so, because what I've heard in these post comments is that we non-believers are absolutely deserving of hell and eternal suffering. And possibly my wife (if she were a Christian) because it's shameful to marry an atheist (that's a whole other post coming).

I don't want to post about the metaphysical. On occasion, yes, I will engage in this discussion but I prefer to stay away from it (because "I don't care" for it). Please, when it warrants the premise of the post stick to the topic, as it gets kinda stale rehashing the existence of the Cosmic McMuffin over and over again (kudos to my good and personal friend Bob for coining that term. And I double-dare any of you fundies to comment there. You'll get nothing but...well, I'll let him speak for himself.)

Let's get back to "goodness" and "badness". Zoroastrianism really skewed the notion of human nature and it's sense of morality. There's no such and easy thing as the black and white of morality. Never has been. Seems to me that most devout faithful have a notion of what is right and wrong for everybody on this earth. I don't see it that way.
Here I really hope to lead into the root of my concerns. What is "right" and "wrong". What is the punishment for being "wrong"? And NO I don't refer to some mythical nether-world. What laws should dictate a punishment for being morally wrong? Who's laws? What society? Does this apply to me (as an unbeliever) just because I don't ascribe to these effervescent laws? I suppose if I were a blasphemer I should have my tongue cut out of my head, huh? Is that a rightful punishment? Is it justified?

If some of you answered yes, then you do not believe in freedom and liberty. According to me should you be jailed and sentenced for hate crimes? No. Not for speech, not for speaking your mind. Actions speak louder than words. That's why we need laws specifically targeted towards acts of this kind.

I'm ending this by saying that everybody has a true right (in my book) to say whatever the hell they want to say. But if it infringes on true liberty those words shall never be made law.

Thank you. 4 beers.

Government-Sponsored Bullshit: No Tax On Fengshui Property Sales

Secular Law Tips Its Scales Once Again, This Time on The Side Of Superstition

In my previous posts on religion, I wrote about how tax grants can often be bantered about for religious organizations, even though most of them are not exactly operating under "not-for-profit" or charitable statuses.

Why religion is given such financially lucrative tax breaks with regards to their modus operandi is beyond me: Anything and everything that is tagged with faith, superstitious piety and unquestioning belief is given a width berth, to the extent that even secular law can be circumvented to accommodate ridiculously fraudulent beliefs.

Sep 6, 2007
Court accepts bad fengshui as valid reason to sell property

IN WHAT is believed to be the first case in Singapore , the High Court on Thursday ruled that bad fengshui is a legitimate reason for the owners to sell their property, for which they should not be taxed on the profits. It ruled in favour of a couple who argued that they had been compelled to sell their Waterside apartment they have owned for just over two years on this ground - and not because they had intended it as a trade. The taxman had taxed the couple on the gains they had made from the sale of the Waterside flat, as well as three other properties, asserting that the couple were engaging in the trading of properties. The sales took place between 1993 and 1996.

I do wonder if such a ruling is even constitutional in the first place: But the idea that fengshui is any legitimate reason to uphold taxation on the profits of property sales seems to reek of soft, warm, stinking piles of bullshit.

Such a ruling will only serve to promote superstition: By tacitly promoting tax breaks for people who sell their flats and demanding for taxbreaks on the whimsical claim of bad fengshui thereafter, what kind of message is our government sending to the masses?

If our legal courts insist on basing their rulings on ancient, religious rituals that have no basis of practicality and scientific validity, I doubt I will have sufficient trust in Singapore's legal system to give me any kind of fair trial.