! This post hasn't been updated in over a year. A lot can change in a year including my opinion and the amount of naughty words I use. There's a good chance that there's something in what's written below that someone will find objectionable. That's fine, if I tried to please everybody all of the time then I'd be a Lib Dem (remember them?) and I'm certainly not one of those. The point is, I'm not the kind of person to try and alter history in case I said something in the past that someone can use against me in the future but just remember that the person I was then isn't the person I am now nor the person I'll be in a year's time.
A woman from Telford – a couple of miles away from where I live i fact – has died following childbirth.
She suffered complications shortly after giving birth and died because she refused to have a blood transfusion. She had just enough time to cuddle her twins before she died.
The woman, who was only 22, was a Jehova’s Witness and refused to be given blood because it was against her religion.
Religion: killing people for thousands of years.
Technorati Tags: Jehova’s Witnesses, Religion
I just want to comment on this tragic case.
As a Christian, but not a JW, I would observe that it is not religion that kills, but people that pervert its message for their own ends. I consider that the Jehovah’s Witnesses stand very much in the position of the Pharisees whom Jesus accused of putting a literal interpretation of the scriptures ahead of people’s needs. The JW’s rejection of transfusion rests on four passages of the Bible which prohibit the consumption of blood, or meat with blood in it, hence kosher and halal treatments. The JW’s interpret these passages to mean that they must not use blood in any way for any purpose, which is not what is said or meant.
Jesus said that ‘you should love your neighbour as yourself’. This implies not only that you should treat other people as you would wish to be treated, but that you should have a proper respect for your own person. The parable of the good Samaritan clearly shows that you should do everything in your power to help other people; the implication is also that you should not deny aid offered to yourself. This poor, deluded young woman has deprived her children of a mother; Jesus reserves his strongest condemnation for those who led her astray in this way. ‘Better for them that they hang a great millstone round their necks, and plunge into the depths of the sea.’ God preserve us from literal-minded fundamentalists of all religions. Kevin F.
The best solution would be total abolishment of all religions.
Well Mr. or Ms. Scaffold, the track record of various regimes that have attempted this is not very encouraging with regards to your suggestion; try ‘Nazi Germany’ and ‘Stalin’s USSR’, for a start. If they are not to your taste, how about Pol Pot’s Cambodia? The religious response is a universal in human beings. We might reject it, as I did for quite a period of time, and as you obviously do, or seek to recognise it. You might argue that it is an exterior projection of an interior state, or that it is a recognition that what we see is not what there is, nor all that there is, and try to understand. Living with faith is not easy, but indescribably rewarding. Your statement doesn’t make clear whether you wish to abolish belief or organised religion. Either way, the de-humanising consequences lead to the holocaust, the Gulag or the killing fields. Terrible things have been done in the name of religion, but worse things in the name of its antithesis. Kevin F.
It is wrong to suppress religious belief. It’s also wrong to suggest that the Holocaust, the gulag, and the killing fields came about because of a lack of religious conviction. We could point to the Spanish inquisition, the witch trials, or the Iraq was as evidence of religion leading people to evil – but it is a correlation, and not a causation…
I’m a humanist (atheist), but I have to support Kevin Fulcher here. I’d also like to point out that Jehova’s Witnesses use their own re-written version of the Bible. Very convenient. For them…