Prayer doesn’t work. Enshrine it in the law — prayer is not a helpful action, but rather a neglectful one. Teach it in the schools — when the health class instructs students in how to make a tourniquet or do CPR, also explain that prayer is not an option. Faith in prayer kills people.
The Wisconsin parents who allowed their daughter to die in a diabetic coma because they believed prayer was sufficient aid have been charged with second degree reckless manslaughter. That seems about right to me.
Here’s the story of a young Yemeni lady filing for divorce from her abusive husband.
“My father beat me and told me that I must marry this man, and if I did not, I would be raped and no law and no sheikh in this country would help me. I refused but I couldn’t stop the marriage,” Nojoud Nasser told the Yemen Times. “I asked and begged my mother, father, and aunt to help me to get divorced. They answered, ‘We can do nothing. If you want you can go to court by yourself.’ So this is what I have done,” she said.
Here, let me ruin your morning, just in case you hadn’t already heard the story of this raid on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
A raid was finally triggered April 3, after a family violence shelter received a hushed phone call from a terrified 16-year-old girl saying her 50-year-old husband had beaten and raped her.
State troopers put into action the plan they had on the shelf to enter the compound, and 416 children, most of them girls, were swept into state custody on suspicions that they were being sexually and physically abused.
Doran said it was not until after the raid began that he learned that the sect was, in fact, marrying off underage girls at the compound and had a bed in its soaring limestone temple where the girls were required to immediately consummate their marriages. Also, investigators said a number of teenage girls there are pregnant.
I think “fundamentalist” has become a synonym for “misogynistic pedophile”.
I don’t have anything to add to the story of the lunatic who opened fire on a freshman science class, but here’s a place you can talk about it without the taint of piety that’s getting introduced into all the news stories right now.
The killers who have been executing these school shootings are all mentally ill, sick people. I suspect that the reason schools have been targets is that they are full of optimistic young people who are exercising their opportunity to learn and preparing for a productive place in society … and the hateful, petty pissants who believe guns and violence are the answer resent that. Let’s not see any more proposals that violence in reply is the answer, it isn’t — it’s an echo of the same problem.
John and Cynthia Burke have adopted two children. By all accounts so far, they were a decent couple of an appropriate age and financially able to take care of the kids. The first was from the Children’s Aid and Adoption Society in East Orange, New Jersey. They recently adopted a second child from the same agency — strangely, the article says their first son is now 31, which would put them in their mid-50s at the earliest, and I might see some grounds for objecting to the adoption on the basis of age…but no, a judge has ruled that they may not adopt on the basis of a rather interesting legal requirement.
In an extraordinary decision, Judge Camarata denied the Burkes’ right to the child because of their lack of belief in a Supreme Being. Despite the Burkes’ “high moral and ethical standards,” he said, the New Jersey state constitution declares that “no person shall be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshiping Almighty God in a manner agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience.” Despite Eleanor Katherine’s tender years, he continued, “the child should have the freedom to worship as she sees fit, and not be influenced by prospective parents who do not believe in a Supreme Being.”
Wow.
This is so revealing. I’ve mentioned that religious indoctrination is a kind of child abuse, as has Richard Dawkins even more notably, yet when you press us we are both are at a loss to what we can do about it; parents have rights, and this is a situation where there there are all kinds of conflicting interests. Neither of us have advocated taking children from parents, or punishing people for mentioning god to kids, or any other penalties, not even mild ones — all we’ve ever said is that this is a real problem, one with no clear solutions, but we shouldn’t hide away from it.
Of course, the typical reaction from Christians and creationists and wingnuts has been pure hysteria — the atheists want to snatch your children away if you take them to Sunday school! Now we can understand it all as a perfect example of projection: if you don’t take your children to Sunday school, the Christians will try to take your children away.
I hope all those good theists who rebuked Dawkins and other atheists for a false perception that they were out to dismantle their families or deny them the privilege of instructing their children in their religion are howling about this attack on the family right now. Perhaps some of them, especially the New Jersey residents, are writing their representatives right now and demanding that this intrusion on the rights of parents be removed from the New Jersey constitution immediately…and perhaps they should be suggesting that Judga Camarata’s high-handed personal bigotry warrants official censure.
And hey, all you conservatives out there, with all your lip service to “family” — what are you doing about this? James Dobson and Tony Perkins must be furious. I’ll be looking forward to their denunciations, and their cooperation with the ACLU to correct this injustice.
Yeesh — now I discover this is old news, from 1970. Why did so many people suddenly send this in to me, anyway?
Anyway, it’s still relevant — I hadn’t known that theists had in the past tried to remove children from atheists. No wonder some freaked out at Dawkins’ description of religious indoctrination as child abuse…again, it’s projection.
This is quite possibly the most depressing story of the year, because it says so much about the amoral nature of some people: A 48 year old woman named Lori Drew poses as a cute 16 year old boy on myspace, leads Megan Meier, a 13 year old neighbor, on, then turns on her and drives her to suicide. Then afterwards she pretends to be a good friend to the family for several weeks, until the charade is exposed. The LA Times has an editorial, and The Smoking Gun has the police documents.
What kind of psychopath would elect to hound children into suicide? And show no remorse at all afterwards?
I’m not cynical enough to be able to cope with this kind of evil.
There has been another tragic shooting at a school, this time at Jokela secondary school in Tuusula, Finland. It was a single gunman on a rampage, and at least seven people have been killed.
We’re going to hear much more about this because the murderer claims to have carried out this act in the name of natural selection. Some of the murderer’s files are available online (so far; that link may not function for long), and they portray a sick man with a distorted view of evolution that he used to justify his actions.
You’ve got to read this account of the intelligence that led to the Iraq war.
On April 23, 2006, CBS’s “60 Minutes” interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. “We continued to validate him the whole way through,” said Drumheller. “The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”
Now two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller’s account to me and provided the background to the story of how the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it. They described what Tenet said to Bush about the lack of WMD, and how Bush responded, and noted that Tenet never shared Sabri’s intelligence with then Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to the former officers, the intelligence was also never shared with the senior military planning the invasion, which required U.S. soldiers to receive medical shots against the ill effects of WMD and to wear protective uniforms in the desert.
Bush knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He was told that the source that claimed there were was not credible, and he was told that the information coming from a source close to Hussein had been validated.
Bush lied to drag us into a pointless, unjust war.
Bush must be impeached. It doesn’t matter how impractical the process seems to be, or how timid the Democrats are. This is an issue of the rule of law: are we to be governed by criminals? Is there to be no punishment for such hideous acts that lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people? These men are monsters.
All I’m asking is that Bush and Cheney be thrown out of office in disgrace. If justice were served, there’d also be a subsequent act of extraordinary rendition that delivered them into the hands of the government of Iraq.
Last summer, a lot of people hated this post where I advocated calling the apocalyptic cultists on their evil delusions. Then we had some prominent Christian leaders calling for war with Iran, and John Hagee gave a demented interview with Terry Gross, in which his rapture rubbish was used as an excuse to advocate hate and war and destruction, all because his “prophecies” said that’s what we need to do.
Want some more fun?
Watch this video from a Christians United For Israel conference. There’s Hagee promising unconditional support for Israel until the Messiah comes, and then standing up in a press conference to claim that their support has nothing to do with end times theology. Watch people cheer at the urging to have a preemptive military strike against Iran. Listen to the interviews with creepy “just folks.” See Tom DeLay and Rick Santorum as honored guests … and the hero of the whole show? Joe Lieberman. Our “moderate” religious former Democrat. A perfect example of a religious moderate happily and enthusiastically supporting unabashed evil and ignorance.
There’s always the quick and easy icepick lobotomy for rapid relief.
All joking aside, follow the link: it tells of the infamous Dr Walter Freeman, who lobotomized thousands of people in this horrific fad of irreversibly ripping up people’s brains to change their behavior. The story of poor Howard Dully, whose stepmother had him lobotomize at the age of 12, is particularly tragic.
