God vs. The Doctors
You would have to get up early in the morning to find anyone in America today who wanted to live in a house that was the pinnacle of luxury in 1500 BC. You are not likely to find anyone in your neighborhood who eats the diet of a shepherd tribe of fifteen centuries ago - a lot of those shepherd starved to death. It's uncommon to find someone who travels either by foot or by donkey, and thinks of fifty miles away like I think of New Zealand. And if you tried to apply the medical technology of 1500 BC to me, I'd slash your throat with the exceedingly sharp knife I keep in my pocket, and the law would saw I was right.
So how is it that tens of thousands of people subscribe to the social control policies of that centuries-gone era? Because a book from that era tells them too. Here we go with religion again.
A twelve year old boy in New York named Motl Brody has died of a brain tumor. He has no brain activity. He does not respond to stimulus - shout in his face, Motl does not blink. Put an ice cube against his ear, Motl does not jump. His brain is rotting, literally, decomposing. It is dead. But Motl's heart still beats, his lungs still inflate and deflate, because of the medical machines making it so. Shut off the machines, and those signs will cease. But his parents refuse to allow the doctors to do what the doctors know is necessary, because Orthodox Jewish law says that death occurs when the heart and breath stop.
When this law was written millennia ago, they didn't have EKG machines. They couldn't tell if the brain had stopped - they couldn't even tell if the brain was THERE, for that matter - but they could tell if the heart wasn't beating. So this rule was the best possible rule at that time. But that time is gone, and the Brody family needs new rules. There is no God. There is a corpse of a boy in a hospital bed. Do the obvious.
http://news.aol.com/article/ny-family-opposes-end-to-care-for-brain/241885?cid=14
So how is it that tens of thousands of people subscribe to the social control policies of that centuries-gone era? Because a book from that era tells them too. Here we go with religion again.
A twelve year old boy in New York named Motl Brody has died of a brain tumor. He has no brain activity. He does not respond to stimulus - shout in his face, Motl does not blink. Put an ice cube against his ear, Motl does not jump. His brain is rotting, literally, decomposing. It is dead. But Motl's heart still beats, his lungs still inflate and deflate, because of the medical machines making it so. Shut off the machines, and those signs will cease. But his parents refuse to allow the doctors to do what the doctors know is necessary, because Orthodox Jewish law says that death occurs when the heart and breath stop.
When this law was written millennia ago, they didn't have EKG machines. They couldn't tell if the brain had stopped - they couldn't even tell if the brain was THERE, for that matter - but they could tell if the heart wasn't beating. So this rule was the best possible rule at that time. But that time is gone, and the Brody family needs new rules. There is no God. There is a corpse of a boy in a hospital bed. Do the obvious.
http://news.aol.com/article/ny-family-opposes-end-to-care-for-brain/241885?cid=14