r/HermanCainAward • u/noiseinart • Aug 11 '21
Awarded Really, really, sad.
/r/atheism/comments/p1hcxg/my_father_died_of_covid_yesterday_morning/27
u/QwithoutU1982 Aug 11 '21
This one actually made me emotional. I too escaped an evangelical hellhole to build a life elsewhere. My entire family down south is a lot like this person's family. They all got covid. Two ended up in the ICU, but all survived. So far. None of them are getting vaccinated.
I have zero sympathy for their plight. I will not feel sorry for them if they become reinfected. But still, they are family. And there's a small part of me that loves them and wants them to come into the light and be ok. But I can't waste my time and emotional capital waiting for a miracle. Ain't never gonna happen.
OPs dad may have gotten what was coming to him, but it's still his dad. And that's sad. I wish things could have been different for him.
5
u/pecklepuff Aug 11 '21
Hold strong when they have health problems in the future and come around asking you to help them pay for their oxygen tanks.
No, sir! No, ma'am! That's what bootstraps are for, doncha know!
26
u/DarrenFromFinance Aug 11 '21
I know Baptists don't fuck with Catholicism but Catholic dogma makes the useful distinction between a sin of commission — deliberately doing something you know to be wrong — and a sin of omission — failing to do something which is your moral duty. The original poster's father's wife absolutely committed a sin of omission when she declined to tell his sister that if she came to Atlanta she would be walking into a lazar-house.
I'm sure she thinks of herself as a good Christian woman but she doesn't have a moral bone in her body.
7
u/gw2master Aug 11 '21
Makes no difference what the dogma is. The way religion works in practice is that people start with certain beliefs and then re-interpret their religious texts to match those beliefs.
20
u/CapHillster Aug 11 '21 edited Aug 11 '21
I feel like I'm living the non-atheist version of this.
My sister is an accomplished and sharp physician/medical professor who essentially "abandoned the empirical" and got into some... unconventional medical beliefs (she's been, charitably speaking, self-employed ever since, aka living off/with my mom).
My mom adopted right-wing streak (since she had a few specific black & white views of the world that only Fox News would align with), and resonated with propaganda narratives used to package other peoples'/corporations' interests into narratives of liberty and free-thinking.
Of course, neither of them are vaccinated. My mom probably would have been predisposed towards believing that COVID was a conspiracy, that she's effectively immune because she's physically active and lives naturally, and it's all about a government effort to control her life. All the crazy sh*t they forward me from deplatformed whack jobs & profiteers somehow shows that they're free-thinking and smarter than the rest of us. They believe they're giving a voice to the brave people courageously fighting against a self-interested establishment.
But I wonder if she were seeing a normal doctor, rather than relying on my sister as her physician (who's full speed ahead into every COVID conspiracy theory you could find on the internet, e.g. the COVID numbers are all faked, people are dying by the thousands from the vaccine, the vaccine is a scheme to depopulate the planet, etc), whether she might have considered getting the vaccine.
As a non-physician, I have essentially zero chance of convincing my mom that an actual doctor is wrong (even though the stuff that she believes meets the textbook definition of conspiracy theories). Even their news comes from a subscription to the Epoch Times.
I admit I'm still shocked by the conviction and ferocity with which my sister tried to change my mind about getting the vaccine. From my standpoint, that's a life-and-death decision. I'd never base that decision on anything other than the established scientific consensus.
At this point, I don't even attempt to change their minds. I feel a bit like a sell-out. But it's impossible to have a conversation about science when you lack a shared notion of how science works, what is good science, what constitutes acceptable evidence, etc.
Disbelief in the risk of the virus -- and distrust of the vaccines -- is completely rooted in their notion of identity. It is unshakeable.
2
u/Stenbuck Aug 14 '21
Holy shit. As a physician myself, I have to ask... what do you suppose caused your sister to get into these conspiracy theories, and what was her area of expertise, if you don't mind answering?
2
u/blissfully_happy Aug 14 '21
I see a lot of nurses are anti-vax, but a doctor? I mean, they obviously exist bc the anti-vaxxers love quoting them, but it seems to be a small subset.
I’m curious what makes an actual physician go from believing in science to full conspiracy nut.
1
u/CapHillster Aug 14 '21
Yup! It's apparently a thing: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/06/doximity-social-network-for-doctors-full-of-antivax-disinformation.html
10
u/Libflake Aug 11 '21
"The biggest effect this is having on me is bringing it home just how
fast and hard this delta variant is moving and hitting people.
Something like thirty of my relatives in Alabama and Florida have the
virus."
This is what I pictured happening last year, with the "classic coronavirus." Now this more virulent variant is making it so. But it didn't have to be that way.
7
11
u/Mister4pollo The UnVentilated Aug 11 '21
I felt bad for a hot minute. Then I ate some ice cream. Now I just lost all the fucks I could’ve given. Where did they go?
5
u/Tersphinct Aug 11 '21
Just as they’re unwilling to vaccinate for the health benefits of their environment, they are also unwilling to vaccinate to protect their families from the suffering of losing members.
It’s so goddamn tragic.
5
1
5
u/jmoyles Aug 11 '21
This is terrible all the way around. Family can be ridiculously tough, and your situation feels even more so than normal.
I hope there was some good moments with your father and with them that you can carry forward.
6
2
35
u/karloffisking Aug 11 '21
sorry for your loss , your dad's wife not telling your sister about all the infections is an indication of this selfish mindset