How many people would change their moral beliefs, or stance, under certain circumstances?

Not enough do, to be honest. And usually not when it’s their own mortality at risk, but that of people under their care.

Ghandi’s own wife died of a treatable illness due to his moral compunctions. Those compunctions were notably absent when he required treatment for malaria.

It would have to be under very dire circumstances because doing so would be admitting you were wrong, and very few people especially extreme right wing republicans can admit they were wrong in their thinking.

Assume it is dire circumstances. They’re gonna die. Or their kid is gonna die.

Jehova’s Witnesses are against anything to do with blood transfusions and hospitals recognize this.
Jehovah’s Witnesses frequently carry a signed and witnessed Advance Decision Document listing the blood products and autologous procedures that are, or are not, acceptable to them. A copy of this should be placed in the patient record and the limitations on treatment made clear to all members of the clinical team. It is appropriate to have a frank, confidential discussion with the patient about the potential risks of their decision and the possible alternatives to transfusion, but the freely expressed wish of a competent adult must always be respected,

It is just like a living will that says “no resuscitation”

Right @Tropical_Willie. That’s the point of my question. Do you think many would change their minds when actually faced with the preventable death of them or their child?

It is their belief and they believe they will NEVER go to heaven if they receive a blood transfusion ! Forever in heaven is longer then their time on earth.

It’s really easy to find examples of people too stupid faithful to accept treatment.

I understand that @Tropical_Willie.

Seek, looking at the last one, the poor woman changed her mind, but it was too late. :( Assholes.

Reading the rest, Seek. Assholes.

I think that any religion has true believers who, under life and death circumstances, will break the tenets of their religion.

Jews (orthodox) are no exception. The Torah teaches that you should not ride in a vehicle on Sabbath, but if a woman is about to give birth, or a person is in need of an ambulance, then it’s quite OK, even commanded, to do save the life.

Then there’s pork. I don’t remember the precise details, but there was a well known rabbi who had a transplant of certain tissues from a pig into his heart. (or something similar). The rabbi had no issues with being dependent on a non-kosher (unclean) animal that saved his life.

Religion is no different from any other set of rules, which have a “In case of Emergency” clause.

All of them.

Some of them don’t. I mean, it’s often in the news that a poor child dies from treatable pneumonia that the parents refuse to get medical help for because of religious reasons. I wonder, though, if faced with their own death, they’d change their mind.

Some won’t. Some can’t. But “certain circumstances” is an enormous arena for altering scenarios. In this case, if the parents were deprogrammed from whatever cult impeded treatment of the kid…..

I think many opponents of stem cell research could very easily change their minds given time. It won’t happen over night or even within the next few years. But it will happen eventually.

Same with GMOs.

I find it interesting, @Dutchess_III, that you ask about “moral beliefs” for beliefs that are absolutely immoral.

I agree wholeheartedly, @zenvelo.

It’s no different than people who feel that abortion is immoral even if the mother’s life is at risk.

To me, it makes no sense but some people just dig their heels in and that’s it.

I suppose I probably would in areas that are not clear to me. For example. If I were going to be a quadriplegic but I would be alive, would I accept medical care that would save my life. I say no. So is it suicide to refuse? Or am I following God plan for me?

I hope it is never a choice I have to make. I keep planning of writing a DNR Will but I never get around to it. I don’t want my family to have to make the choice but at the same time if the Doctor says I have a 80 percent chance of a full recovery and only 20 percent that I will end up a drooling body that torments my family for the next 20 years or that I feel trapped in my body, which will I take? If I write the DNR, will I just be signing a death sentence that could’ve been avoided?

I try not to imagine that I have any ability to predict what another person would do, especially if I were to base my negative opinion about another person’s beliefs on such a prediction. It seems insufferablly arrogant to me. Like because I believe differently, I automatically ascribe the lowest and most cowardly motivtions to their actions, as if my beliefs are superior, and theirs are inferior becuase they are different than mine.
What I know for sure is that no one can know what motivates another person. We can know their actions, but not their motivations.

Not all that many, I would think. Unless they were total brainless flakes to begin with. A person could say that they changed their mind, but who could say if they really did or not?

@jca That reminds me of politicians who stump anti-abortion….but behind the scenes they get a girlfriend-on-the-side knocked up, and they want her to have an abortion.

GA for that one! Also, politicians who are anti-homosexual with their legislation, but are in the closet in their personal lives.

My mother is a life-long Jehovah’s Witness. A few years ago, she suffered a surgical mishap that left her with an internal hemorrhage that went undetected until she had almost bled out.

Witnesses will take plasma expanders, which are just for making up for lost blood volume but don’t actually perform any of the functions of blood. At one point, her hemoglobin level dropped below 2 grams per deciliter (normal is 12–15), not nearly enough to sustain life. Her organs would soon begin to fail.

The doctors were dismayed. This was such an easy problem to fix. On at least 5 occasions while I was there with her in the ICU, doctors told her that if she didn’t take a transfusion she would probably die. Each time, she refused without any hesitation.

One doctor, as a last-ditch gambit, gave her massive doses of a med that stimulates the body’s own production of hemoglobin (I don’t recall the particulars), and her levels slowly climbed. She recovered, but even if it hadn’t worked, I could see that she never would have changed her mind.

In her mind, the decision was pretty simple: All her life she had made hard choices that she felt assured god’s favor and would guarantee that she would be resurrected to eternal life in paradise. She wasn’t about to blow that for a few more years of life as a feeble old woman.

To all the rest of us who didn’t share her beliefs, this was craziness, but to her it made perfect sense.

@thorninmud do you think her certainty would have wavered if it was one of her kid’s lives on the line?

Of course, had she died, @thorninmud , the excuse would have been “it was god’s will”

I was wondering, to piggyback on @Dutchess_III‘s recent question to @thorninmud, if his mother would have wavered if one of her children were suffering.”

You could at least give me a GA before reposting my question, @jca! ~

@Dutchess_III I doubt it. Witnesses are fed a steady stream of anecdotes of parents “remaining faithful” under just those circumstances. There’s quite a lot of social reinforcement that goes with this: They understand that their entire social network (because Witnesses have very closed social networks) is expecting them to hold the line. If they hold fast, they’ll have plenty of social support and the comfort of believing that god will fix it all in the end. If they don’t, then they lose their entire social network and have to rethink their reality and their beliefs.

My oldest daughter’s bio mom was an on-again, off-again JW. She kept getting kicked out, then brought back.

My little daughter once came home in tears, because they told her that “Santa,” meant “Satan,” and the proof was that you just change a couple of letters around.
I said, “Well, switch the letters in GOD around, and you get DOG…so what does that tell us?” They were assholes.

@Dutchess_III Well, I don’t think the Santa=Satan thing is an official position. But the JW rank and file aren’t exactly critical thinkers, so I’m sure that more than a few could see that as a valid assertion.

I just finished a good book about the psychology behind con games, specifically why so many otherwise reasonable people consistently fall for schemes that are transparently bogus. As I read, I had a barrage of insights into how the JW system hooks people in and keeps them hooked in. It fits all the criteria of a con game perfectly.

@thorninmud – in terms of ‘getting them hooked’ – do you see parallels between JW and Scientology?

@elbanditoroso Both promise to clue you into special knowledge that only they possess, and that will open doors to benefits beyond your wildest dreams. There’s a persistent feature of human psychology that loves that idea and will override rationality if the idea is packaged well enough.

The demographics targeted by JWs and Scientology are quite different, so the “bait” is different. JWs target the disempowered, those who are disenchanted with society and like the idea of god rebooting the earth so that they (and their resurrected loved ones) can play with lions all day. Scientology targets the successful and powerful, so it offers them a system for gaining even more success and power.

If a JW relative was that stubborn, I would say “who says you are in the 144,000? And being against transfusions is as reliable as the world ending in 2015.”

Then again, any JW relative would be shunning me.

@zenvelo But see, your argument was doomed from the beginning because it gets their doctrine wrong. This would just mark you as a good candidate for further education.

There pretty much isn’t any argument that any JW worth their salt hasn’t been prepared for. And even if there were, the bottom line is that the “endowment effect” and the “sunk cost fallacy” will almost certainly carry the day: If all of your hopes, all of your life choices, all of your friendships have been hitched to this scheme, it will be almost impossible for you to just write all of that off as a loss and move on. As long as there is even the most tenuous argument in its favor, you will want to cling to that.

@thorninmud Yep, I get that. Like a lot of things, one must find the impetus to change internally, not by people outside oneself telling you. But that is happening a lot, as there have been an increase in JW defections as news spreads of the internal abuse and inconsistent teachings. I guess that is why I see them a lot more at public transit trying to get people to convert.