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

[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).