faith healing and medical treatment--parents in Oregon charged with death of their child by a treatable condition

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/367863_prayerdeath21.html

I am not in principle against praying for healing. I've done it, but I don't think it means people don't get the best medical hep they can. A child dying due to a treatable condition the parents did not get treated for religious reasons brings up the old problem of the tension between freedom of religion and what gets considered criminal activity. Is it against the law to let your kid die because you refuse to get them the medical help they need? If it isn't or shouldn't be then death-with-dignity advocacy suddenly seems more than just defensible, it may be the only ethical position. If parents can decide to withhold medical treatment and that is the free exercise of religion that leads to the death of their chid it's a lose/lose scenario because the alternative, the state deciding when and where the death of a child may be permitted, is hardly an improvement!

This is another case where what we suppose going into the situation may confront us about the limits of our reason and ethics. A teacher I once knew said that most people fail to understand the nature of the presidency in the United States. They think it should be a question of deciding whether or not people must die or be killed. Politics isn't like that, and foreign policy particularly isn't really that. The president has to decide HOW MANY people have to die in a particular cause, so to speak. Actually, where formal declarations of war go that's the job of Congress but Congress doesn't seem interested in framing the issue in those terms when they can let the Executive do what seems right at the time and then complains about executive abuse when they should consider their abdication of constitutionally granted powers.

What seems most absurd about liberals who oppose the military ventures we have overseas is that they oppose it for reasons that have nothing to do with constitutional separation of powers. That doesn't mean I exactly buy everything Ron Paul pitches but at least Paul opposed the war on grounds that I think are internally consistent and defensible. It's also a case study in that the further left or right you go on certain issues the more the two poles seem to converge.

In fact I often feel that the far left and right should just have a conference on how evil international Jewish bankers are behind everything because then they could make it official.

How does any of that apply to the situation where parents refused to get medical treatment for their child who then died? I don't know. It seems as though it can be easy to not consider the cost of decisions and then blame someone else. If I were any good at assessing those things would I be where I am today? Eh, probably. Counting the cost is something I've done at the expense of taking risks so it's not like I have much business saying people ought to do this or that.

Still, in my own life, I had a medical condition that was pretty serious and my parents took me to get prayed over and when I had been prayed over by some people at a house church my mom asked me how I felt and if my eyes were better. I told mom I needed to see an eye surgeon as soon as possible, the surgeon who diagnosed my macular detachment. Fortunately I had parents who took me to go see an eye surgeon and that's why I can read and write this blog entry.

If it were easy to discern when something is walking in faith and trusting in Christ and when something is walking in sight it would be walking by faith. Sometimes it seems as though knowing doctrines and going to prayer meetings where people who are allegedly annointed by God to heal seems like walking by sight rather than walking by faith. And yet a cessationist can easily say "an evil and unbelieving generation asks for a sign". At some point, though, the cessationist is essentially a deist who wears a fig leaf of orthodoxy to hide the fact that he doesn't believe miracles can really happen. What's more painful is to truly believe God can and is able to heal but withholds that healing.

The paradox is that no one was more familiar with this struggle than Christ Himself. He went into towns where he could only lay hands on a few sick and heal them and marvelled at their unbelief. Even Jesus was in a situation or two where he COULDN'T heal people. The Father didn't have that appointed for some and Jesus, as a man, had to trust the Father about that. That's hard to do.