The One With Aldacron

Another death in Oregon this week from religious kooks failing to seek medical treatment and instead relying on prayer. This time, a teenager. Unfortunately, it looks as if the parents in this case will not be prosecuted.

Tuesday’s death of 16-year-old Neil Beagley, however, may not be a crime because Oregon law allows minors 14 and older to decide for themselves whether to accept medical treatment.

“All of the interviews from last night are that he did in fact refuse treatment,” police Sgt. Lynne Benton said Wednesday. “Unless we can disprove that, charges probably won’t be filed in this case.”

The problem with this is that the boy was not competent to make such a decision. Most likely, he was inundated with nonsense from the time he was born. Because of his parents’ delusional beliefs, he failed to develop the mental tools necessary for logical and reasoned thought. Courts often declare metnally ill or mentally retarded adults incompetent when it comes time to make decisions regarding their medical care. It’s time now for us to declare teenagers incompetent when they have been subjected to a life of religious indoctrination. Anyone who favors prayer over medical treatment for a disease that is treatable is not competent to decide what to have for dinner.

But let’s not stop there. It’s past time to legally label religious indoctrination what it is: child abuse. How many children have been ruined because they were born into a family who doesn’t believe in reality? How many adults lack critical thinking skills, making them a danger to themselves and to others, because their parents forced upon them a belief that Bronze Age fairy tales are reality? Let’s call a spade a spade, shall we?

This is the year 2008. Most of us are not ignorant, backward peasants with no ability to understand the world around us. We know that lightning isn’t caused by Thor throwing his hammer and that thunderstorms aren’t the result of Zeus being in a bad mood. We know that Ra doesn’t ride across the sky in a boat with the Sun and that the seasons aren’t summoned by Dagda’s magical harp. We have dismissed all of the ancient mythologies as nonsense. So when are we going to give the same treatment to the mythologies that we allow to thrive?

Continued tolerance of stupidity breeds more stupidity. Lousiana is dangerously close to teaching stupidity in science classrooms. State-sactioned stupidity is too horrible to contemplate, but there it is. I know there are secularists out there who are content with letting the religious kooks do their own thing. All they ask is that the religious keep to themselves and not force themselves on everyone else. The problem is that they can’t do that. Proselytizing is a major tenet of many religions. Christians score points with the invisible man if they bring others into the fold. They gain points when they force their ‘values’ on the rest of us. They aren’t about to sit down and shut up.

So let’s just say no to tolerating religious stupidity, ignorance, bigotry, self-righteousness. Let’s say no to tolerating the indoctrination of children. Let’s just say no to violence in the name of god. Don’t tolerate. Educate. Ridicule. Exclude the religious from public functions. Marginalize them. But never tolerate them.

If the world is going to have any kind of positive future, we need to accelerate the demise of religious belief. We can start by dropping the word “religion” from our collective vocabulary and calling it what it is: mythology. After I post this, I’ll be editing the ‘Religion’ category on this blog to reflect that. Let’s set a goal of stamping out the active practice of mythology in modern society by the end of this century. Religious Mythological beliefs deserve no tolerance.

Technorati Tags: mythology, prayer, stupidity