When I was a kid I had this very dear friend.  She was beautiful, and stunningly brilliant.  She excelled in science, particularly biology.  She sailed through college, and was offered a full ride to medical school.  Her focus was going to be on research.  But she had come from a troubled home, and at some point in her senior year she got hooked up with this fundamentalist, “every word in the bible is literal truth” Christian church.  Upshot — she didn’t go to medical school because her pastor told her that god’s path for a woman was marriage and children and that god did not approve of woman having careers.  For a few years she kept coming by to visit and try to convert me, and save my soul from hell.  I finally had to get harsh to make her go away.  It pained me because we had been very close, but she had become unrecognizable.  She was the one who was agonizing over genetic research because it’s not mentioned in the bible.  I rather acidly pointed out that the bible also doesn’t mention zippers, but she used them.  That was about the time she gave up on my soul.

Fast forward to today.  I have good friend who is a professor of parasitology.  He had an absolutely brilliant Navajo woman student who was going for her PhD.  But she’s quit, and now she may bo to law school instead.  Why?  Because the old medicine men were angry at the research she was doing, and told her that the “sea people” were unhappy with her because she was killing specimens to do her research, and she had to stop.  Now first of all we’re in the middle of the fricken New Mexico desert.  What sea people?

So my friend gave her tasks that didn’t require her to kill anything so the sea people could just calm the hell down.  He asked her to collect specimens on the reservation, research that could help people.  But the medicine men said no to that too.  Apparently when she collected samples it pissed off the canyon spirits.  Then brow beat her to the point that she finally just quit the program.

Another mind lost to us.  And what if she doesn’t get into law school?  Clearly she’s very smart, but her heart probably won’t be in this new career path.

So, yeah, I get really hostile when I see religion used as a bludgeon to kill peoples goals and dreams.