Miscellanea Agnostica

I blogged earlier about the death of a girl at the hands of parents who knew she was sick but refused to get any medical care, hoping instead that prayer and faith would take care of her, and not really caring if she died. The good news: Today, authorities decided to charge her parents with reckless homicide.

The parents of an 11-year-old Wisconsin girl who prayed instead of seeking medical help for the diabetic child are facing homicide charges in connection with her death.

Dale and Leilani Neumann were charged with second-degree reckless homicide, Marathon County District Attorney Jill Falstad announced at a press conference today. If convicted, the couple could be sentenced to up to 25 years in prison.

The Neumanns’ ignorance and obliviousness is downright sickening:

Dale Neumann, a former police officer, told The Associated Press at the time that he started to perform CPR on his daughter “as soon as the breath of life left.”

If this guy knows CPR, why didn’t he try it when it might have been useful — before the breath of his daughter’s life left? If he truly knew CPR then he knew it was too late, by that time!

In an interview with The Associated Press, the girl’s parents confirmed that they believe healing comes from God, but said that they did not want their child to die, that they are not zealots and that they do not have anything against doctors.

First, these people are definitely “zealots,” regardless of what they may claim. Second, they may not exactly have willed their daughter to die, but they certainly did absolutely nothing to prevent her death, and that’s functionally the same thing.

In the US, blending religion with politics is typically a Right-wing affair. The Jeremiah Wright controversy, though, which involves liberal Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, has just gone from being a political squabble with religious overtones, to a religious one. The retired Reverend has decided that the furor over his remarks is an “attack” on black Christianity:

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s speech before the National Press Club this morning was not intended to be a political one. It was billed as the start of a religious gathering, and he came to talk about the black religious experience in America. …

“This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright. This is an attack on the black church,” he said. “This is not about Obama, McCain, Hillary, Bill, Chelsea.” He said he was not going to sit back and let his church — comparing it to his mamma and grandma — be attacked.

But at the same time he was defending black Christianity as a distinct entity, he downplayed differences between black Christianity and other forms of his religion:

“Being different does not mean one is deficient,” he said. “It is just different. Black preaching is just different from European and European-American preaching. It is not deficient. It is just different. It is not bombastic. It is not controversial. It is just different.”

I really don’t see how black Christianity could be different enough that it comes under attack, yet basically the same … but there you go. It’s clear — to me at least — that the Rev. Wright is out of control. He’s so arrogant that he interprets critiques of his own preaching as an attack on black Christianity as a whole. Wow.