Praying nurses

[ciphergoth]

Nurse suspended without pay for offering to pray for a patient during a home visit - what do you think?

(Snowed in today, trying to work from home but it's not really a workplace atmosphere around here today :-)

Updated: the patient is described as a Christian in the article. One wonders if this means Christian as in really a Christian, or "Christian I suppose" which AFAICT is the majority religion of the UK. Updated: actually "have Christian beliefs myself" is more like the phrasing I'd expect from someone who takes it seriously.

Comments

[barakta]

Difficult one as versions of events vary so much.

I don't like it when people offer to pray for me, but if they accept "no thanks" or are vaguely quiet and tactful about it I can ignore it. I know for example my mum prays for me or Kirstie but in a "wishing us peace" rather than "fixing stuff she disagrees" with type of way.

The NHS is full of religious folk, it's horribly religious - it's only just recently started accepting non CofE on med stuff. I used to get harassed by hospital vicars all the time, even my mum thought they were annoying bastards and used to help me make them go away. They were second only to the "teachers" on children's wards. I seem to recall having both the vicar and teacher hassling me last time I wasn an inpatient and requesting that the nurses made them both fuck off and leave me alone kthx etc - the vicar buggered off, the teacher didn't.

[ergotia.livejournal.com]

yes - you see, the NHS being "full of religious folk" bothers me in various ways. One of those ways is the question of whether anyone would work in the NHS - or indeed any caring profession - if religion withered away completely. It is stuff like this that keeps me swinging between atheist and agnostic.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

With the meanings I'd attach to the words, if you're agnostic, you can be an atheistic agnostic or a theistic agnostic.

Second, even if it turned out that religion was responsible for 99% of people entering caring professions, it wouldn't make it any truer.

[ergotia.livejournal.com]

No of course it would not prove or disprove anything. That was not my point.

[ergotia.livejournal.com]

I think what I am clumsily groping for are reasons why I dont proselytise atheism quite as fervently as I used to. Global capitalism without any kind of altruistic religion/values is a mega scary prospect :(

[palmer1984.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think it's far less useful to proselytise atheism than to proselytise left wingery.

[booklectica]

Lots of us work in the NHS and aren't believers, so anecdotally I'd question that. Although I have noticed a higher proportion of churchgoers among my colleagues than in previous jobs (and this is only the ICT dept).