Atheist Age

Gross on faith healing

© Fairfax by Dick Gross:

In March 2008, 11-year-old Kara Neumann lay on a mattress on the floor of her family’s home in Wisconsin while parents and friends around her were praying.

Within minutes she had died from undiagnosed but treatable diabetes.  Her parents had not sought medical assistance but had tried to save her through prayer.

Kara was a pulchritudinous girl and a great student. Her despairing aunt had rung the 911 emergency services but by the time the ambulance arrived, Kara’s curable disease had taken her life.

The aunt’s heroic and frantic pleas to intervene in her sister-in-law’s family were answered too late.  The parents blamed themselves, not for “not having enough faith” and rather than call in a doctor were desperately calling more people to offer prayer over Kara’s rapidly expiring body.

How can they have been so stupid?  Kara had not seen a doctor since the age of three.  Her parents belong to an online church Unleavened Bread Ministries whose web page proclaims “Warning: These are America’s Last Days”. The page is in incomprehensible mixture of dire proclamations and uplifting anecdotes of faith healings.  I tried to discern the underlying rationale of the faith but it is a diatribe even more opaque and illogical than this blog (amazing but true).

Her mother, Leilani, is quoted as saying, “I thought it was a spiritual attack. We stayed by her side non-stop and we prayed.”  Leilani expects that Kara to be resurrected.  I wish she was right.  I know she isn’t.

The parents were later charged with second-degree reckless homicide and found guilty.  The received an innovative six-month prison sentence where both parents are jailed for a different month once a year for six years so that the three remaining kids had the, perhaps dubious, blessing of having a parent at home.

Continued…

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Tags: Alternative medicine, Crime, Faith Healing, Fundamentalism, Medico-legal