The Religious Aspect
The conviction that man is a supremely rational being is one more delusion in which the majority please to bask, even though it is a human idiosyncracy to be more susceptible to demagoguery than logic, more fascinated by fiction than facts, trusting more the occult than the visible.
The soap operas on TV command more devoted mass audiences than the goings-on on the Senate floor, even though the lawmakers' antics will affect the citizens' lives more substantially than the capers of the screen characters ever will. More people carry life-long memories of the fairytales heard in childhood than the works of Marx and Einstein, which most of them haven't read - no matter how deeply they have transformed the world's social and political structure. And in 1988 the press announced, pretending surprise, that the world's most powerful individual had been looking to the stars for guidance, to the point that the intrusions of the astronomer "began to interfere with the normal conduct of the Presidency", as one of Ronald Reagan's former aids (Don Regan) revealed. However, there was nothing surprising in this. Rulers and conquerers through the ages have been afflicted by the very same magical dependency, from Adolph Hitler all the way back to the Babylonians and Assyrians.
Some great men have used this human peculiarity for noble purposes, as have the prophets and founders of the great religions - Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed. Many have exploited it to their own advantage.
Banking on magic rather than logic, Modern Medicine, organized by industry-beholden health authorities along strictly commercial lines, in collusion with the tax-squeezing governments, has managed to take over the role that formerly belonged to the Church. The licensed doctors are this new religion's ordained priests, in whose hands the diffident patients are requested to place their full purse and blind trust, asking no questions. This has been obtained by blending facts so skillfully with fiction that not only the lay public but also many of the participants themselves are unable to discern between the two.
Most people today deliberately ignore, or tolerate with an intimate feeling of reassurance, the incredible tortures to which animals are subjected in the laboratories of official science. But in the past, the great majority also regarded witch-burning as a humanitarian activity that only the ignorant would oppose, because it was not only assured to protect mankind from the devil, but also to benefit the victim, whose soul was purged and thus saved by the fire.
In the same vein, the most cruel experiments on animals are foisted off today on a credulous public as not only a blessing for humanity but also for the animals themselves. And this, because the belief in the benefit of vivisection as a corollary to the excellence of modern medicine has been inculcated into the dense minds of the population like a religious dogma, and with the same methods religions use to proselytize: continuous, systematic repetition of dogmatic claims unburdened by proof, beginning in infancy, to the accompaniment of dark threats to any unbeliever, until the belief becomes a deeply radicated conviction - a blind faith, unfettered by thought. Freedom from thought is indeed the inderogable requisite of any faith. Once a faith has been implanted without the aid of reason, it is very difficult to eradicate it by reasoning: it has become a superstition.
The Britannica gives the following definition of Superstition - "A belief founded on irrational feeings, especially of fear, and marked by credulity; also, any rite or practise inspired by that belief. Specifically, a belief in a religious system regarded (by others than the believer) as without reasonable support. Credulity regarding, or reverence for, the occult or supernatural.
It will be noted that this definition of superstition applies equally to religion as well as to the belief in the excellence of modern medicine.
Thus, when we speak of the religion of modern medicine, we also mean to say the superstition of modern medicine, and the various rites this medicine performs are closely connected to the financial gain - and power - of its white-robed priests, and more so of the heads of the syndicates, who make up the real power and take the lion's share of the gains. (See NAKED EMPRESS or The Drug Story)
The vaccination myth is the most wide-spread superstition modern medicine has managed to impose, but, being also the most profitable, it will prove also to be the most enduring, though there never was a shred of evidence upholding it.
Suffice it to say now that the various epidemics have experienced in all countries the same natural evolution of growth, decline, and eventual disappearance, whether vaccination or other therapies had been introduced or not. The only demonstrable effects were the wide-spread damages caused by the various vaccinations, none excluded.
Most pediatricians we know in Italy and France do not vaccinate their own children, although they cannot refuse to vaccinate their clients' children, if they want to retain their union licence to practice. In (the former) West Germany, Medizinaldirektor Dr.med.Gerhard Buchwald had first to be shocked into awareness by seeing his own son reduced to a vegetative state as a consequence of smallpox vaccination, before embarking upon a world-wide study that eventually led to the abolition of compulsory vaccination in his country, after he had shown that there hadn't been a death from smallpox for years, but hundreds of people had died from the inoculation.
In the USA, several lawyers have published guidelines for parents on how to legally avoid vaccination, and several others have been seeking out vaccination-damaged patients and suing the manufacturers of the killer medicament, with such success that many manufacturers refuse to produce vaccines unless the government that imposes vaccination also insures the manufacturers against any damage suits; which many governments do.
These examples, added to many similar experineces by other doctors in other lands, are rational arguments, but they only very slowly succeed in changing minds that have blindly adopted irrational irrational dogmas, unburdened by proof, as is the case with all religious dogmas.
So it can safely be predicted that the advertised belief in the alleged blessings of vaccination will be among the last of the deadly rites of Modern Medicine to go, because it is far too profitable to the medical combine to be allowed to go without a bitter struggle, of which the beginnings can increasingly be seen today, but which will certainly drag out into the next century. It is indeed so profitable - to industry and State - that it it is incentivated by being offered up, or imposed, free of charge.
But in truth, who gets the bill? The taxpayer, of course.
That Modern Medicine can more rightly be defined as a religion than a science is demonstrated by the following:
An enlightened young patient at Zurich Cantonal Hospital had his torn Achilles tendon sewn together again and was ordered to take some pills for several days. "Why take pills for a sewn-up tendon? Won't they affect my whole body? --- "Oh, no!" was the white-coated priest's cheerful reply. "Those pills have a selective effect - only on your tendon!"
That a doctor in a leading hospital can make such a statement without fearing to be laughed at demonstrates to what extent Modern Medicine has succeeded in passing itself off as a religion, in which the faithful are expected to have blind faith, rather than a science, which solicits discussions, debates and evidence.