Faith In Western Medicine is Not Faith In God

You know, I don't really know why people believe in the things they believe. Believe me I have tried, I have simply come to learn to accept others and try to help broaden their "thinking perspective" whenever I can or am given the chance.

Faith is a complex thing. It is capable of moving mountains, and yet it is also capable of bringing down twin buildings and destroying thousands of lives. It is a two sided sword, and too many times we want to ignore the side covered with blood. We often romanticize about the beautiful poetry that faith speaks, and brush off the the failed experiments as simply incorrect applications of faith. But they are both very real, the ugly is not just a misinterpretation, it is the product of people taking religion literally.

Every man and woman of faith believes what they believe in the variety of the religious experience based on personal experiences. Faith is not something that we can prove to anyone, this is why it is personal. The problem arrives then when you look at the worlds religions. If we take but a minute to look at the world from the perspective of an outside observer, from beyond the earth, we then begin to understand how Islamic faith is as real to Muslims as it is for Christians. The Mormon's testify that the church of Latter Day Saints is the one true church and that if you read the Book of Mormon a second testament of Jesus Christ and pray to God for answers you too will have the answer from the holy spirit. The Mormons believe in the Curse of Caine, that is in Genesis God cursed Caine with dark skin, and thus black people are a cursed race. They did not allow blacks into the Mormon priesthood until recently in 1978. Jehovahs Witness believe that God has already chosen the anointed 144,000 who will enter the Kingdom of heaven, no more no less (Trillions of humans have existed in history). They also prohibit blood transfusions that can save hundreds of members lives each year, they believe it is up to the "Christian scientist to decide" (God). The Dingambar follow a practice of wearing no cloth. They are wearing the environment. Digambaras believe that this practice represents a refusal to give in to the body’s demands for comfort and private property. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that any form of birth control, other than natural family planning (the rhythm method) is a sin. The Catholic church sends their missionaries to Africa, where in some cities the aids ratio is 1/3 of the population, and teaches that aids is bad but condoms are worse. People believe this based on faith. Faith in God, faith in the doctrine, and most importantly faith in the "personal experiences" that have lead them to their religion.

I am a secular minded philosopher, I personally cant share faith with believers. I deal with empirical results, evidence, and reason. What does this all mean you might ask, where am I going with this. The birth of Western Medicine! It is based on science, on evidence, on real life reproducible results. Western medicine is based on hundreds of years of biomedical research, has gone through the test of the scientific method and empirical verification. It shows results, the results are constant in the objective world, they are not based on "personal experience."

Remember that science is also incomplete, as is medicine. Sometimes science can't explain certain questions, sometimes the knowledge available is limited at the moment, some hope is lost because of the dark spaces in knowledge, but miracles are real, in a metaphorical sense of course. Not because it is magic or gods supernatural influence, but simply because nature is unknown to us in its whole. Recoveries that are not explained by science are possible simply because science is incomplete and the human body works in ways which we are still yet to understand. They are real products of something simple, the natural world, nothing more nothing less than unknown products within the realm of scientific understanding.

Faith can make us ignorant, because similar to a delusion we become absolutely convinced that the belief we hold is true, regardless of evidence to the contrary. It suspends critical thinking in order to take iron age church teachings literally, teachings that were influenced by men who did not understand where the sun went at night. Faith leads us to arrive at really bizzare conclusions which can sometimes be very ugly and hurtful, sometimes even deadly. Let us not forget the murders that took place in the ancient Judaic world under the laws of the god of Abraham. The commandments of a jealous and angry god, and the story of the people who believed this god was literally giving them orders to kill, sacrilege entire villages and murder men, children, and animals, while raping the women, all based on faith, weather it be via personal revelation or revelation of prophet or church leader. I ask myself how many honest pagans, atheists, and non believers died at the sword of The Crusades, a religious sanctioned military campaign that was waged by Christian Europe in the early 1200's? As if God was some sort of omnipotent real estate broker, believers by the echo of faith literally believe that their god promised them this piece of dirt and rocks that we call the "Holy Land", and thus the crusades put the Roman Catholic Church against the Muslim in a holy war. The war for the "Holy Land" continues today.

The entire point behind this message is that Id like you to have another kind of faith as well, a secular humanist kind of faith. It is not a faith based on believing things that are supernatural, or that seem impossible, or that goes against science and logic. It is not faith in miracles, events so highly unlikely like oxygen molecule spontaneously turning to mono-atomic gold. I want you to instead have faith in people. Faith in your fellow brothers and sisters on this planet, that they know what they are doing, and with the knowledge that we have collectively gathered since the beginning of writing in the 4th millennium BC, we have a concrete foundation. While you may not know everything their is to know about Medicine, hundreds of thousands of doctors and scientists know a whole lot about it. The research has been done, every single day it is being done. Western Medicine is abound with knowledge. This is faith in something that exists. Faith that other people have done the research, have looked at the evidence, and actually know what works and what doesn't.

It is time we stop praying for miracles and hope our faith in God is strong enough to heal us and our loved ones, and replace it with faith in the medicine and results. After all when we are sick, we dont drive to church to seek advice from our bishop, we drive to the hospital to receive medical attention.