The blogger Slugger O’Toole expresses a very sensible view, in my opinion, about the recent case of a NHS nurse who was disciplined for offering to pray for a patient. I am all in favour of the separation of church and state, but then would reflect that this case shows just what happens when hospitals are part of the state and not part of the non-state sector, where they can be run by secular or religious groups without such issues arising. If a hospital is run by a church or has an endowment froma religiously-minded gazillionaire, and staff want to pray with its patients and the patients are okay with that, what exactly is the problem? Many UK hospitals, as their names often suggest – such as St Thomas’s Hospital in London – were founded by churches and religious orders. For all that I am not a religious person, I can greatly admire the spirit of compassion that motivated many religious believers to work in or endow hospitals with funds. Many of Britain’s greatest hospitals were started by churches and their history goes back hundreds of years.
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Another argument for crushing the National Health ServiceFebruary 6th, 2009 |
 17 comments to Another argument for crushing the National Health Service |
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Apparently the hospital has rather grudgingly reinstated her, but good point nonetheless.
I think it’s quicker running through the list of arguments FOR the NHS, as it’s much shorter than the list of reasons for scrapping it.
Though I’m happy to excoriate the NHS with the best of them, I’d hazard a guess that this situation could easily occur in a private hospital, or even an expilicitly religious one.
Since giving ‘offense’ has become one of the worst sins one can commit, and seeking restitution, (verbal and financial), has become one of the few ways a citizen has of getting some satisfaction out of life, fewer and fewer people are polite enough to simply say: “Thank you dear, but I’d really rather you didn’t pray for me.”
The word that sprang to mind as I read this post, and Slugger’s, was decadence. and since I’m apt to describe our society in those terms at the drop of a hat, I thought I’d better look it up on Wiki to check that it really applied in this case.
In a society, it describes corrosive decline due to a perceived erosion of necessary moral traditions. …. check
The upper class becomes either complacent or greedy, ….check (both)
The lower classes become hopeless and apathetic ….check
The middle class may exhibit either or both patterns, or it may vanish entirely. ….Hmm… need to think about which
Poor leadership is generally held to be both a cause and a symptom of decadence ….Oh yes
This sort of case is symptomatic of a hopeless and apathetic lower- or middle- class hitting back at the complacent and greedy upper class and, sad to say, even hospitals have become associated with our feckless ruling elite.
That that same useless ‘elite’ has given us the tools to behave in this way is both ironic and a further indication of our society’s decadence.
I’m a fairly militant atheist, but if someone offers to pray for me, I’m pleased. It means one of two things. Either they genuinely mean me well, or they have just lost the argument.
Not really. If a patient who was using a Christian-run private hospital objected to a nurse wearing a cross or whatever, then said patient could easily take the option of going somewhere else and would be told, politely one hopes, to do so if they made a fuss.
Does “New Age” count as a religion? If so, here’s an example in the other direction.
I doubt your modifiers match your classes. The upper classes may be complacent and greedy, the lower classes may be hopeless and apathetic, but that’s not the locus of the problem facing Anglosphere societies.
The intellectuals have embraced stupidity in Marxism – and its fraternal parts, the bureaucrats have justified their encroaching tyranny with that stupidity, and the public has rationalized their own part.
Without intellectuals providing cover, a lavish welfare program would be indefensible; without welfare, the subsidized violence, abuse, crime, addiction, and atomization of the underclass would be nearly impossible.
And both the least educated and the most lettered justify this continuing hell on the initial noxious stupidity, albeit in differing eloquence.
Thoughts are things. The lower and middle classes are not victims, not at all. They are participants, they are the mob. After everything that has happened to our cultures, we do NOT yet inhabit an aristocratic age; our age is thoroughly demotic.
I think your cause and effect is reversed.
Only thing to do is to close all hospitals named after Christian saints, because of the offense caused.
Ditto that highly offensive “St. John’s Ambulance” service.
Don’t even get me started about the Red Cross.
And while we’re about it, ban Switzerland because of that Christian symbol on their flag.
Or… we could just start crucifying all the Terminally Sensitive.
Or am I being too callous here?
Guy, but consider the context: a medical professional turning to prayer while treating me would be rather unnerving.
Ham,
It depends whether that’s all they were doing. If they are using modern medicine in an informed and skilled way, then I don’t think prayer as an add-on is more frightening than the disease unaccompanied. I’d rather be looked after by someone have someone who has concern for my spurious spiritual welfare, and wants to relieve suffering, than someone whose conduct towards me is motivated by the pursuit of the secular religion of equality and responsible lifestyles that the NHS promotes.
The NHS should be privatised (not simply abolished like most state run agencies), that’s obvious.
However, I have to tend towards Kevin B’s opinion. The offense industry is partly driven by government, but most of its impetus can be explained within the usual economic parameters of supply and demand. It is actually one of those “miracles of capitalism”, whereby a whole host of “entrepreneurial” people rush to meet the needs of Britain’s fastest growing demographic group: c**nts. In my experience and from what I read in the news, the private sector is just as riddled with this crap and people can have their livelihoods and lives destroyed by the aforementioned demographic whatever line of work they are in.
Which is why the following doesn’t scan.
Or maybe they’d just act like a total dick about it and the hospital manager would cave. The days when Britons are not so soft-headed as to tell people where to get off in cases like this are a long way off.
All this carping at the NHS, yet the Pentagon is a far fatter bureaucracy than the NHS.
The Pentagon spent $3 trillion on Iraq, which should only have cost about $500 billion at most. What happens if the US goes to war against a country with a reasonably capable military, given they couldn’t even beat a bunch of guerillas?
Going over-budget by $2.5 trillion is a display of incompetence unmatched by any other government bureaucracy in the world.
A russian woman was filmed taking ages to separate the yolk of an egg from the white, using nothing but psychokinesis. Whilst it took ages, it is on a film.
A frustrated german woman was the center of a series of poltergeist incidents, including lights swaying when she was near them- on film.
This all suggests to me that prayer might be a mild form of PK- we might really be able to affect things at a distance from our bodies, by unknown means. So I think that adding prayer to the list of techniques is a useful thing to do- the more, the better!
Sorry Regulus – but the NHS is British not American.
By the way the local, State and Federal health budget (unconstitional at Federal level of course) is vastly greater than the Department of Defence budget.
Have you campaigned against Medicare and Medicaid (and SCHIP and …..)?
If you have not opposed these things you have no right to attack the Department of the Defence – especially for a war they won (in spite of you and your pals).
As for the NHS – I had depressing experence of its effect on British culture recently.
I was looking at a history work (“British Achievements” or some such) in a bookstore and noticed that it had praise by Simon Heffer (a British conservative newspaper man) on the dust jacket.
So I opened the book – and (by evil chance?) the first thing I came upon was the “great achievement” of the N.H.S.
No doubt the B.B.C. (the last episode of “America: Empire of Liberty” on BBC Radio 4 was a good example of Marxist agitprop – the very title was “Capital and Labor”) and the Cambridge Five were praised as well.
Do not laugh Americans – as this place is your future (and it will get worse even than Britain now – although Britain will be getting worse also so……).
As W.D. said in his recent book “I have seen your future and it does not work” (no apology to the Red who said similar words – words he made up before he ever went to the Soviet Union).
The movie called ‘The Secret’ also has one redeeming fact in its’ wealth of conjecture- apparently, Transcendental Meditators all got together and ‘beamed’ peace at a neighbourhood chosen at random, and crime statistics show a drop in crime in that neighbourhood. Whilst once is not conclusive, it suggests how to research the effects of prayer and meditation, and what to look for.
So I say, pray! If, after physically treating a patient, someone then wants to add metaphysical treatment, such should be encouraged!
Except that misses that point that without the safety net of a welfare state and so on, the sort of destructive behaviours that you write about would simply not be viable. The society in which everyone wants to play the role of “victim” has been brought about, in large part, by the notion that everyone has a “right” to X or Y.
Well sure JP, if everything was different then everything would be different. That is not the same as saying that the victim/offense culture is now tied to or dependent on the welfare state, let alone any individual institutional component of it. The private sector is absolutely riddled with it because that’s simply how most people who went through the tertiary indoctrination system (and a good chunk of those who only went through the secondary bit) think.
How to deal with this worsening problem is beyond me. Root and branch reform of the welfare state and education system might start to show results in about 30 years or so I guess. I had rather hoped that the recession would at least take the edge off some of the worst degenerate inanities of our age, but that hope was evidently vain.
What I don’t understand is why a hospital set up by a charity, church or individual philanthropist ever became state-owned in the first place.