Religion is often against advances in medicine and technology. Christian
preachers opposed Ben Franklin's invention of the lightning rod because
they
thought it was thwarting god's will to send down lightning bolts on
sinners.
In the early 1800s, when inoculations were just being developed, Catholics
were forbidden to get them while Protestants were being saved from
disease.
In recent times, fundamentalist Muslim clerics have been telling people
that
polio vaccines are an American plot to sterilize them.
Christian and Muslim clerics are often opposed to the use of condoms.
Recently in the U. S., mass vaccinations for the prevention of HPV, which
is
a ***ually transmitted
infection that can lead to cervical cancer in women, have been stopped due
to complaints from Christian fundamentalists that it would encourage
***ual
activity.
The Bush administration opposed funding family planning in condom
distribution in Third World African countries, where AIDS is rampant.
Various religions have some medical proceudres of their own. In Judaism,
the
Old Testament sets forth the procedure for cir***cision of male infants by
have a rabii "mohel" cut and orally suck the foreskin off the male member
--
a disgusting unhealthy procedure with disturbing implications. It is not a
practice relegated to the distant past. In 2005, Jewish NY City mayor
Michael Bloomberg stopped the city's health authorities from banning the
procedure, after it casued a babie's death. His grounds for inaction were
based on "religious freedom".
In some parts of Muslim Africa, young girls are subjected to a form of
cir***cision in which parts of the labia and the ****oris are sliced off.
In
United States, adherence of the Christian Scientist sect are sometimes
brought up on legal charges for denying medical care to their children.
Adherence of the Jehovah witnesses sect refused permission for their
children to receive blood transfusions.
Bizarre religious behavior extends to the treatment of young females. The
****a fundamentalists in Iran consider the age of consent for females to be
nine years old. The Mormon sect has a long history of marrying under age
girls to older men who already may have a number of wives. In India, Hindu
girl brides may wind up being burned if their dowry is too small. The
Catholic Church in America, has in recent years been forced to admit the
existence of, and compensate victims of pedophilia carried out by its
priests, which the church as an organization facilitated over the decades
and centuries, by denying the guilt of, and covering up for, the
perpetrators.
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