Several weeks ago The Onion published a satirical piece wherein a Christian woman described her brand of Christianity in part as:
My faith in the Lord is about the pure, simple values: raising children right, saying grace at the table, strictly forbidding those who are Methodists or Presbyterians from receiving communion because their beliefs are heresies, and curing homosexuals.
That’s all. Just the core beliefs. You won’t see me going on some frothy-mouthed tirade about being a comfort to the downtrodden.
The problem, of course, is that there are Christians who believe this kind of thing such as Kenneth Hutcherson, an anti-gay equality pastor from Washington who recently stated that, in his opinion, the Bible does not support charity towards the homeless:
Providers of tent cities say they are offering the homeless much needed shelter. But some are offering a much different perspective on tent cities.
“Our Saviour died to keep us off the cross. I don’t think he’d be satisfied keeping us in tents,” Pastor Ken Hutcherson of Antioch Bible Church in Redmond, Wash., said.
“I think the Bible gives it to us straight, if you don’t work, you don’t eat,” he said. “We’re supposed to give hands up, not hand outs to the point of letting people stay the way they are.”
Thousands of people starve to death every day. Hundreds of millions of people are chronically undernourished and at risk of dying everyday themselves. Starvation doesn’t just effect the body, but the mind also.
According to subjects of the semistarvation experiment, tiredness was the worst effect of the low calorie intake, followed by appetite, muscle soreness, irritability, apathy, sensitivity to noise, and hunger pain. Standard personality tests revealed that the starving individuals experienced a large rise in the “neurotic triad” — hypochondriasis, depression, and hysteria.
Also, the subjects of the experiment noticed a marked decrease in the drive for activity, and a remarkable decrease in sex drive. In peer evaluations, other experiment subjects noted great changes in subjects’ personalities during the period of semistarvation.; In interviews years later, subjects reported that they felt that they had not returned to normal by the end of the three month recovery period.
Subjects’ own estimates of the time it took for recovery ranged from two months to two years.Many subjects reported that they grossly overate and put on fat after the experiment due to the urge to eat.
And remember – the above was the result of a controlled study in which the subjects knew what was going on and understood that there would be an end to it.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
