This question is and is not a laughing matter: “Are physicians’ primary obligations to their patients or their religious convictions?”

A laughing matter: The question’s secular-antireligious bias is blatant. Maturely religious physicians have so integrated their religious and occupational “professions” that what is good for their patients is understood within the particular physician’s way of seeing and living in the world. Further, the bias naively assumes that what is good for the patient can be objectively known, confining the religious factor to the inferior realm of subjectivity. The question does not occur where what is good for the patient -- for example, stopping the flow of blood from a wound -- can be objectively known.

NOT a laughing matter: Some religious traditions dogmatically exclude or severely restrict some generally accepted medical procedures. For example, Christian Science and Roman Catholicism. For the births of our children, my wife and I avoided Roman Catholic hospitals out of fear that she would die and I would leave the hospital with a neonate and no wife.

But more fundamental than the partly hypothetical question driving a wedge between medicine and religion is the fact that religion and medicine are only superficially and secondarily in conflict. They are siblings, born of the common human desire to improve the human condition. Of course siblings occasionally fuss at one another, but their dustups do not erode their sibling identity. Historically, an outstanding instance of their cooperatioin is the fact that Christianity has been the primary hospital-builder to the world.

Two practical matters:

1 Medical institutions should accommodate the consciences of particular physicians, for both medical efficiency and religious freedom.

2 As in America we have the mutual freedom of "church and state," we should have also the mutual freedom of medicine and law. Government should stay out of doctors' offices and operating rooms.