Hello, everyone.
If you’ve followed my posts for a while, you know I’m a new nurse and that religion makes me crazy at work.
Well . . . I found a popular article that claims that no nurse is an atheist.
Please see below:
What are your thoughts?
Thank you in advance.
I worked in a hospital years ago as an orderly between the Psyche Ward and the Emergency Room. I would say the majority of my coworkers were atheist, agnostics or just plain hedonists…
The article makes more than a few assumptions and assertions that I find bordering on comical.
“Whatever the spiritual belief system teaches, there is certainly more after death. Believing nurses, then, are much more able to cope with the tragedy of death by having that assurance that the patient is no longer in pain but is receiving their eternal reward for their life. In essence, spiritual belief can take away the sting of witnessing death. Without this assurance, nursing would be too hard to bear.”
Seriously? You spent how many years in school studying medicine only to fall back on mythology and happy talk to cope?
“Nursing is a demanding field that often leaves people drained, tired, and burned out. Because religious people often hold to certain moral standards, their level of self-care is much more productive. While non-believers may resort to alcohol, drugs, food, or other unhealthy addictions to help them cope, believers turn to God for support and commit to spiritual self-care as a way of managing stress and pressure.”
One of the biggest alcoholics in the hospital was a Baptist from Indiana. This is so contrived as to be a fallacy masquerading as virtue.
Keep practicing as an atheist nurse. Be that bastion of reality in a deluded world.
I figured the article was crap when, in the first paragraph, I read, “Atheism, then, is a belief system…”. Didn’t read ant further, didn’t need to.
Thank you very much.
It is religious propaganda, pure rhetoric.
“A good nurse must be motivated, empathetic, kind, and compassionate”
I can see nothing in that negated by disbelieving in deities and superstition?
“They must also possess a level of spiritual fortitude”
A bare claim, evidence required, Hitchens’s razor applies.
“many nurses rely on a faith system”
Another bare unevidenced claim, and it gets a so what, many hateful dictators sported a moustache?
“Spirituality and religion are almost necessities to surviving the difficulties that nursing presents.”
Another bare unevidenced claim, yawn… fairy dust I tells yah, they must has fairy dust…
“Atheism, then, is a belief system that is rare in the nursing world.”
“How Religion Helps
A belief in God or other higher power allows nurses to become better at their work.”
Another entirely unevidenced claim, my bin is filling up with this BS.
“The belief in a higher power is what sets many people apart.”
Like Hitler, Himmler, and the SS for example?
“One thing that all major religions have in common is the belief that something happens after we die, whatever it may be.”
Indeed, and yet the belief is not supported by any objective evidence.
“Whatever the spiritual belief system teaches, there is certainly more after death.”
I don’t think that certain means what that author thinks it does, but presenting no evidence at all speaks for itself, and certainty expressed in this fashion simply screams closed minded.
“Every major religion has some sort of instruction on how to treat fellow human beings”
Indeed, just read the bible and see how it endorses slavery, ethnic cleansing, sex trafficking virgins, genocide, stoning chilrden, and infanticide to name just a few.
maybe I’ll take a break now…
Every major religion has some sort of instruction on how to treat fellow human beings, and they generally agree that compassion and kindness are the best ways to go about it.
I got one that IMHO is better:
Every non-asshole person with empathy and good [secular] upbringing has learned how to treat fellow human beings, and they generally agree that compassion and kindness are the best ways to go about it.
Actually, I would even dare say that with empathy and a good [secular] upbringing, a non-religious person will even tend to treat fellow human beings nicely, irrespective of their religion. Unlike how social pressure enforcement within certain religions/denominations/sects is.
Leave it to religion to pat themselves on the back for managing to behave as decently as secular humanists achieve without the saccharine promise of heaven, or the threat of hell.
I guess this article interested me because there seems to be a belief that atheistic nurses are not to be trusted.
Also, I run into contradictory stumbling blocks that interfere with my work when it comes to religion.
As an example, I had a devout Shi’ite Muslim patient who was receiving a life-saving medication called heparin as a continuous infusion (an IV given over time).
Heparin comes from pigs, and no one had bothered to ask the patient (in her own language via our professional translation service) if this was acceptable.
I asked the patient, the patient got upset, and everyone got pissed off at me (at the time).
However, if we withhold blood transfusions from a Jehovah’s Witness because of their religious belief, then what’s the difference when the patient is Muslim and heparin comes from pork?
I got the situation cleared up rather quickly when I asked this question, and I didn’t have any negative consequences.
My point in bringing up this incident is that there seems to be a difference between the Jehovah’s Witness and the Muslim patient, and I don’t see what it is (perhaps because I’m autistic).
I was told–at first–that I “don’t have common sense” because I treated the pork issue like a blood issue.
Incidents such as these have led me to the idea that Christianity is given preferential treatment in the nursing world, and I run into problems when I try to extend (more or less) equal treatment to everyone, although I do have to say that hospital administration has been very supportive of me when these things happen . . . so I’m not claiming to be a misunderstood victim.
This article helped me understand a little about why this shit happens.
In any case, I do appreciate everyone weighing in, so thank you.
I don’t see any difference in the principle between those two cases other than hypocracy and differential treatment, and I think your analysis is correct. A possible explanation (not an excuse) for this might be that your christian colleagues see muslim aversion against pigs and products derived from pigs as nonsensical, while the JW objection to blood transfusions is seen as legitimate, as the JWs are (at least nominally) on the “correct” side of the religious divide.
Edit: On the other hand, I do tend to think that all such religiously motivated taboos are nonsensical. But to each their own, as long as they don’t harm or disadvantage others.
2 thoughts:
I find it funny (in an ironic way!), that you were the one to bring this up!
The only thing I can fault you on is that perhaps you should have brought this up to the doctor before the patient.