Core Tenet #4 Prayer is Not Medicine

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Topic: Core Tenet #4 Prayer is Not Medicine

One of my first acts as an ordained minister and the founder of a new religion was use a legal loophole to spring a love interest from a mental institution.

This should not have worked. The woman in question did not need yoga and meditation; she needed psychoactive drugs and therapy augmented with yoga and meditation. But the Religious Freedom Restoration Act says that you can choose to treat any condition, or any condition suffered by your children, via spiritual rather than medical means. This has proven dangerous, as children are being allowed to die of easily treatable illnesses because their parents do not believe in real medicine.

The fourth Core Tenet of the Path teaches us to respect science and the scientific method, and nowhere is this more important than in the field of medicine. We should be seeking effective, evidence-based treatment methods, whether those methods are traditional, alternative, or a combination of both. Refusing life-saving medicine, either for yourself or for your children, because you think illness can be cured with prayer goes against Path doctrine. If you let your children die of treatable illness, I believe you should be prosecuted for homicide. Denying them real medical care is a violation of their bodily autonomy. If you die of treatable illness because you wanted to pray instead, you basically committed suicide. While Path doctrine does not automatically condemn suicide, this death by ignorance is just tragic.

Science has given us near-miraculous medical advances, and it is up to us as intelligent human beings to learn about them in order to make informed decisions about our own health and wellbeing. It is also up to us to learn about potentially beneficial advances in alternative medicine. New discoveries are being made every day in both fields. For example, LSD, administered clinically in a controlled environment, has shown promise as a treatment for PTSD. (Look it up: Science.org)

There is nothing wrong with praying to get better, or praying for your children to get better. But it is more effective, and  in some cases, life-saving, to seek out actual medical assistance in addition to prayer. I do not know what it is about modern medicine that some people consider it the work of the devil, but it makes no sense and the blatant ignorance is often fatal.

Do you believe that prayer can take the place of medicine? How?

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