Keep Health Care Safe and Secular is a new project hoping to expose the “powerful influence of religious dogma, psuedoscience, and misinformation on American health care” that is contributing to bad policy. The Center for Inquiry, a secular humanist organization that works to promote scientific reason, wants American voters to realize that many of the controversies related to health issues aren’t rooted in fact.
“The campaign, broadly speaking, is focused on two issues: the use of religious beliefs to limit access to health services, and the remedies and cures that aren’t scientifically sound,” Michael De Dora, who’s leading the new effort, told ThinkProgress. “We wanted to put all of those issues together in a coordinated campaign to make the point that health care should be guided by science and reason.”
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Although it may appear as though Safe and Secular is hostile to religion as a whole, De Dora says that’s certainly not the case when it comes to Americans’ right to practice their personal beliefs.
“There’s absolutely room for religious believers in this campaign,” he said, noting that the commitment to get junk science out of our health care system doesn’t require you to be an atheist. “If you’re compelled by your religion to protect women’s access to abortion, we would say great, let’s work together. But the policies still need to be secular. Once you’re inspired by religion to do something, you can still enact policy in a secular way and ensure that it’s universalized for our plural society.”
“Religion should never force you to leave your brain at the door. Nor should religion and science be seen as inherently opposed to each other,” Sally Steenland, the director of the Faith and Progressive Policy Institute at the Center for American Progress, added. “Quite the contrary: religion should encourage us to challenge dogma, embrace scientific inquiry and curiosity, and be open to discovery and new interpretations of ancient truths.”
The Fight To Take Back Our Health Care System From Junk Science | ThinkProgress
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