Thinking Out Loud, Volume CCLVII

A little two year old boy is dead today, and his parents were charged and convicted in his death, although their sentence was nothing more than probation and an admonishment from the judge to never let it happen again. The cause of death was pneumonia. The parents were charged because they refused to seek medical attention for the child, although pneumonia is now very treatable in most every hospital in the country. Their defense was that medicine is against their religion. They believed that if God did not heal their child, then apparently it was not His will that he be healed. We live in a country where we have freedom of religion, and are supposed to be free from any interference from the government as to what we believe and how we practice our beliefs, but there has to be a line drawn somewhere. I think the line is where an act or a failure to act may cause harm to another individual, in this case, a small child who is totally dependent on his parents for survival. If you listen to the news much at all, you are probably familiar with the story of the Muslim father in Texas who shot his daughter because she would not agree to an arranged marriage that they had planned for her. And as we speak, there is a Muslim father who is on trial for intentionally running over his daughter in a car because she was becoming too "westernized."

That leads me to ask this question: If you really believe something but you're not passionate about it, how strongly do you believe it in the first place? But doesn't it also stand to reason that if I have strong religious beliefs that I would want everyone else to join my movement and believe as I do? Now let me ask you this: How many of you, after reading about the little boy that died of pneumonia, had a desire to become a part of the church to which those parents belong? To be honest with you, when I heard that story, it had the opposite effect on me. I believe that God can and does heal people, but I also believe that when He created us, He gave us the brain power and "common sense" to figure out how to take care of ourselves and each other. That's how some individuals among us are able to become doctors. I'm happy to report that the church with which I'm affiliated believes in doctors and medicine. I believe this story proves that we can become too "radical," and when we do, our actions actually become counterproductive.

What is our ultimate goal anyway? Do we want to live our lives so that others might have a desire to live as we do, or do we just want to make sure everyone knows how we believe? And how will my actions today affect my ultimate goal? I'm not advocating giving up on any of our core beliefs, but I am saying that if we become too extreme, we can actually do damage to what our belief system instructs us to do. I can give you another example of what I'm talking about. I've seen political candidates, who don't have a snowball's chance of winning, jump into a race because he wants to make a point, and what he ends up doing is taking enough votes away from the other candidate who is closest to his point of view and who could've won, so that the person who did win the election was the one with which he disagreed the most. Therefore, the net result is worse than if he would've stayed out of the race completely. I've also seen senators and congressmen who say it's going to be 100% my way or not at all. The "not at all" usually wins in that situation.

I believe in being passionate about my beliefs, and if you're a non-believer, I would like to bring you into my camp, but I don't think I will have any success in doing that if I make my way seem repulsive to you. If I'm here just to prove a point, I may be ignoring the fact that most other people don't really care about my "point" to start with. Results are what I'm after.

Preston