Medical Monsters.
Posted by Big John on October 11, 2008
I’ve never been able to understand how supposedly intelligent well educated people such as scientists and doctors can believe in God, so I am completely at a loss to even begin to comprehend how a couple of medical doctors set out to murder countless numbers of people in his name.
How does someone who has dedicated their life to healing the sick decide to pack vehicles with various explosive devices and set out to massacre people who they would be expected to treat if they were brought to them after a similar atrocity ?
I know that fanatics of many faiths have killed throughout history, and that the world is still full of religious nutters, but how does someone’s brain become so ‘twisted’ that they believe ‘their God’ wants them to kill ‘infidels’ rather than save lives ?
I see that one of these terrorists is a neurologist, a doctor ‘trained in the diagnosis and treatment of nervous system disorders, including diseases of the brain’.
Obviously The Koran doesn’t include the phrase …
… “Physician, heal thyself” ?
Darlene said
The only explanation I can come up with is that the doctor’s were so brainwashed when they were young that ‘faith’ overcame pragmatism. That’s the problem I have with all religions. You must accept everything they say on faith, no matter how illogical. Logic and a faith based belief are opposites.
SilverTiger said
One answer is that humans are “extra-logical”, that is, that they follow logic only when it suits them and switch to other reasoning processes when logic no longer provides the desired results. This makes sense in evolutionary terms because in order to solve a problem logically, you need sufficient evidence. When evidence is not available, you have to make guesses or resort to pseudo-reasoning processes such as superstition, old wives’ tales and dogmatic assertion.
We are also very good at compartmentalizing life. For example, many people behave like believers on Sunday and like non-believers the other 6 days of the week, without noticing the inconsistency.
Unless these doctors are insane (which is, after all, just an extreme version of life-compartmentalism), they have probably divided the two domains of their life – the professional and the religious – into separate compartments that never meet. Perhaps it is an extreme version of the inconsistency of the Muslim who goes to work as a pharmacist and then refuses to sell certain products to customers on the grounds that this is “offensive” to his or her religious sensibilities.
We might also add that because someone is a doctor this does not necessarily mean that he has humanity’s interests at heart. For many people, a career in medicine is simply a way out of poverty and deprivation and a route to status, money and an influential position in society. How many other doctors might there be who are really “sleepers” for some militant organization or other?