Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Revisiting Schiavo
My blogging partner at Article VI has a blogging partner at his other blog called The Kosher Hedgehog who writes about new data and Terri Schiavo
The irreligious, as personified most visibly in those that hold science has all answers, hold a view that all can be seen and experienced, and is pretty much mechanistic.
It is fascinating to me that so many that reject religion because they do not want to be directed by some other, are willing to assume they are directed by mere molecular forces - they prefer direction by the mindless over direction by something that can be presumed to be GOOD. - Sigh.
Anyway, the point is, if we do not believe in something other, something more, there is no hope. That is the key difference between those that thought Schiavo should be starved to death and those that did not - hope. In the article cited, we see that hope had some validity. We will never know if it did in this particular case, but in general this hope has validity.
This commonality of religion as a source of hope also speaks to religious diversity in a society. A society functions best when it is pulling together towards something. Hope helps to define that something. We hope for better things, we hope to improve ourselves, we hope to help others - that's what society is all about. Without hope, this common goal setting breaks down, and eventually so does the society.
The problem is, of course, if we make everyone find their hope in precisely the way we do - through precisely our religious formulations - we create conditions of actual hopelessness. Freedom is a large part of creating hope.
My faith, which I hold to be the true faith and the only faith that brings salvation, does not bring hope if coerced, only if adopted in freedom. Thus I hold dearly and encourage the religious plurality that defines our nation, but I do so while working energetically to invite others to my source of hope.
It just works better that way.
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Therefore, I was quite pleasantly surprised to read in the October 15, 2007 issue an article by Jerome Groopman, entitled "Silent Minds--What Scanning Techniques Are Revealing About Vegetative Patients." The article describes the research conducted over the past decade by Adrian Owen, a British neuroscientist. Conducting brain scans of vegetative patients, he discovered that many showed normal patterns of brain activity in response to external stimuli, such as speech, photographs and music. His subsequent research suggested that some vegetative patients not only reacted to speech, but comprehended it, and could even perform a complex mental task on command. Conventional medical science had assumed for decades that these types of patients lacked any capacity for conscious thought.This fact strikes right at the heart of where religion makes a difference AND the affect that most religions commonly create, I would answer in one word:
Inspired by the finds of Owen and other researchers, neurosurgeons are now experimenting, with some cases of stunning success, with therapies involving deep brain stimulation of vegetative patients. One of those patients, Terry Wallis, had spontaneously recovered speech to a limited degree after almost 20 years in a vegetative state, has recovered speech. With further medical therapy, he has shown marked improvement. Nicholas Schiff, a Weill Cornell Medical College neurosurgeon, and one of the physicians who is treating Wallis, says "After 19 years, Terry spoke a few words, but within seventy-two hours he recovered fluent, expressive, and receptive language."
[...]
Yet, one's conscience ought to be haunted by the words of Kate Bainbridge, the first vegetative patient that Adrian Owen studied in Cambridge. She has recovered the use of her arms and much of her mental function. She is still unable to walk, and has difficulty speaking, using a letter board to communicate with people not used to her speech. But she writes eloquently. In an e-mail to Jerome Goopman, she wrote:"Most scans show what is wrong with your brain, which the doctors need to know, but Adrian Owen's scans show what is working. I say they found parts of my brain were working. It really scares me to think what might have happened to me if I had not had the scans. They show people it was worth carrying on even though my body was unresponsive."When I read Ms. Bainbridge's words, I felt rather good about being a religious conservative troglodyte who opposed starving Terri Schiavo to death.
HOPE
Now think about it for just a minute. The first thing that religion brings to the table, and this is true for most religions, is a belief in something more than what we can sense and experience directly. Usually it is supernatural and deistic, but not all religions are that way, but they all provide for "more" somehow.The irreligious, as personified most visibly in those that hold science has all answers, hold a view that all can be seen and experienced, and is pretty much mechanistic.
It is fascinating to me that so many that reject religion because they do not want to be directed by some other, are willing to assume they are directed by mere molecular forces - they prefer direction by the mindless over direction by something that can be presumed to be GOOD. - Sigh.
Anyway, the point is, if we do not believe in something other, something more, there is no hope. That is the key difference between those that thought Schiavo should be starved to death and those that did not - hope. In the article cited, we see that hope had some validity. We will never know if it did in this particular case, but in general this hope has validity.
This commonality of religion as a source of hope also speaks to religious diversity in a society. A society functions best when it is pulling together towards something. Hope helps to define that something. We hope for better things, we hope to improve ourselves, we hope to help others - that's what society is all about. Without hope, this common goal setting breaks down, and eventually so does the society.
The problem is, of course, if we make everyone find their hope in precisely the way we do - through precisely our religious formulations - we create conditions of actual hopelessness. Freedom is a large part of creating hope.
My faith, which I hold to be the true faith and the only faith that brings salvation, does not bring hope if coerced, only if adopted in freedom. Thus I hold dearly and encourage the religious plurality that defines our nation, but I do so while working energetically to invite others to my source of hope.
It just works better that way.
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