Monday, January 14, 2013

The Power of Religion

In Ghana, religion can influence every aspect of life, including health and disabilities. People believe that evil behaviors cause illness. They think disability is a disease and a punishment, even disabilities themselves also think they are cursed. They think they should not exist, everyone should be healthy. Their bias are not only on the physical level e.g., think they are useless, consider them as burden because they need others' help and cannot do a lot of things, but emphasize more on the spiritual level, they are cursed, even after the physical handicaps are removed or fixed. They might be hidden in the closet or killed at young age.

Although the directer said that changing belief is hard, I think reversing the negative attitude is still possible. Using the power of religion, let religion leaders or authorities affect the followers. In the movie "Emmanuel's gift", The king in Ghana did change people's attitude to disabilities. I am not religious, I do not know why do people believe in religion, but I think everyone want a high quality of life and no one want to kill their babies under any circumstance. They did that because they did not know what else they could do and others were doing the same thing.

God should bless everyone.

No comments:

Post a Comment