De religiösa fundamentalisternas inflytande över det amerikanska samhället är verkligen skrämmande. Richard P Sloan har skrivit en kolumn i Los Angeles Times där han ger ett rysligt exempel på detta:

HOW WOULD you like your doctor, at your next examination, to ask not only about your diet and symptoms but about your spiritual life?

How would you like your surgeon to ask, while you’re on the gurney ready to be wheeled in for an operation, if you’d mind if he says a quick prayer?

Or if he suggested that perhaps you should?

These questions are not farfetched these days. A concerted effort is underway to make religious practices part of clinical medicine. About two-thirds of U.S. medical schools now offer some form of training on the role of religion and spirituality in medicine, according to Dr. Harold Koenig of Duke University.

With support from the National Institutes of Health, researchers are now studying the effect of third-party prayer on cancer patients. Research on the connection between religious activity and cardiac health was published in the Lancet, one of the top peer-reviewed medical journals. The John Templeton Foundation, whose annual prize on spiritual discoveries exceeds the amount of the Nobel Prize in medicine, has funded dozens of medical researchers, some at top-tier institutions, who claim an association between religious devotion and better health.

Some prominent physicians are calling for the wall of separation between religion and medicine to be torn down. They declare that the future of medicine is prayer and Prozac, and they recommend that doctors take a ”spiritual history” during a patient’s initial visit and annually thereafter. Walter Larimore, an award-winning physician, for instance, has declared that excluding God from a consultation should be grounds for malpractice.

Och du trodde att demokraternas planer på att socialisera den amerikanska sjukvården (ännu mera) var det värsta som kunde hända?