Fear and greed fuel the growth of African churches

It’s a modern-day version of a long-running evil: children in Africa are being murdered in the name of God.

The nine-year-old boy lay on a bloodstained hospital sheet crawling with ants, staring blindly at the wall.

His family pastor had accused him of being a witch, and his father then tried to force acid down his throat as an exorcism. It spilled as he struggled, burning away his face and eyes. The emaciated boy barely had strength left to whisper the name of the church that had denounced him — Mount Zion Lighthouse.

A month later, he died.

Inciting violence against “witches” is only part of the recipe for religious success — that’s the fear part — with the rest of it coming from greed.

Church signs sprout around every twist of the road snaking through the jungle between Uyo, the capital of the southern Akwa Ibom state where Nwanaokwo lay, and Eket, home to many more rejected “witch children.” Churches outnumber schools, clinics and banks put together. Many promise to solve parishioner’s material worries as well as spiritual ones — eight out of ten Nigerians struggle by on less than $2 a day.

“Poverty must catch fire,” insists the Born 2 Rule Crusade on one of Uyo’s main streets.

“Where little shots become big shots in a short time,” promises the Winner’s Chapel down the road.

“Pray your way to riches,” advises Embassy of Christ a few blocks away.

It’s hard for churches to carve out a congregation with so much competition. So some pastors establish their credentials by accusing children of witchcraft.

So here we have a desperately poor region where the people need help…and instead, they get parasites who make promises of prosperity and blame failure on witches. Religion is the obstacle here, it doesn’t help.

We can’t be too smug here in comfortable America, though. Look inside Sarah Palin’s church, and you see exactly the same formula of fear and greed at work. Her church even supported the work of a Kenyan witch-hunter!

Texas has state-sanctioned murder

The story of Cameron Todd Willingham (via Digby) ought to be read by everyone. Willingham seems to have been a kind of Texan dumbass, an uneducated, wife-beating piece of work, but he was also the father of three children, who he, by all accounts, loved. Those kids died in a house fire. Forensic ‘experts’ declared the fire an arson, Willingham was arrested, tried, and convicted of murder, and was executed.

Only problem: he didn’t do it. The fire experts were good ol’ boys who were operating on folklore and fairy tales about how fires propagated; real experts have looked at the scene and since declared that it was an accidental fire. Nobody killed those little girls, but their father was killed for their deaths.

That’s not the most disturbing part of the story to me. You have to watch these videos of Judge John Jackson (he was prosecutor in the case, and is now a judge). He openly admits that the evidence for arson was weak, and that he looked at the circumstances to determine Willingham’s guilt. Those circumstances? Willingham was a low-class ruffian with tattoos of skulls who like heavy metal music. Therefore, he was probably a satanist. Therefore, he probably killed his children.

I’m not joking. That was the basis for this smug cracker’s determination of guilt, that led directly to his execution. Why not just criminalize tattoos and Metallica? It would make it easy to round up the riff-raff and exterminate them.

The state of Texas murdered an innocent man, and we can see the whole chain of incompetence, bigotry, and cowardice that led to the tragedy, from this ass of a prosecutor to Governor Perry, who refused to heed the evidence of malfeasance. Why aren’t all of them being impeached or fired, and facing criminal charges in a court of law? Is it because they don’t have any tattoos and listen to patriotic tripe from Lee Greenwood, Brooks & Dunn, and Tim McGraw?

End the death penalty everywhere. Drum the red-necked blundering boobs out of office, at the very least.

Barbarism in Poland

Pedophiles are wretched people who abuse the helpless, and they get no sympathy from me. However, they are still people — sick people, damaged people, often abused people, sometimes psychopathic people. They have to be treated with due process and concern — we want to end the behavior, not the individual. So now Poland has passed a law requiring mandatory chemical castration for pedophiles. That’s a frightening prospect, not just because it’s a punishment that can and will be abused — who judged Alan Turing but the state? — and the attitudes behind it are even worse.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk said late last year he wanted obligatory castration for pedophiles, whom he branded ‘degenerates’. Tusk said he did not believe “one can use the term ‘human’ for such individuals, such creatures.”

Not human? Wow. Forget castration, let’s just have summary executions. Perhaps we’ll soon see pedophile meat on sale in Polish markets? Wouldn’t want them to go to waste, after all!

Despite the temptation to go organic, though, I don’t think we want to have free-range pedophiles. Instead, we’ll have to go with battery ‘philes, raised in the cells of the local monasteries and churches. And if you find that offensive, I suggest you direct your complaints to the Polish government officials who have just branded a small portion of their citizenry as inhuman.

The curse of Eve

Fawziya Ammodi was 12 years old. She was a little girl in Yemen — she would still be in elementary school in the US, or would be just entering middle school. Twelve year old girls are still interested in dolls, and are maybe giggling over those gawky immature boys, and should be learning prior to the awkward business of growing up.

In Yemen, Fawziya was married to a 24 year old man.

She was pregnant.

She was in labor for 3 agonizing days — twelve year old girls usually aren’t physically developed enough to cope with childbirth, at least not with the relative (emphasis on that word, please, labor is rough enough on adults) ease of a grown-up.

She bled to death and died in pain. The baby died, too.

She was twelve years old, and won’t be getting any older.

The father, of course, experienced no discomfort, and is ready to receive consolation for his loss. He’s probably looking for a new wife, too. Maybe he’ll see the problem with child-raping, though, and will pick one who is a little mature.

Like a thirteen year old.

Religion as a refuge for the criminally insane

Phillip Garrido was a man of God with a joyful story to tell.

“If you take this a step at a time, you’re going to fall over backward and in the end you’re going to find the most powerful, heart-warming story,” he said.

“I tell you here’s the story of what took place at this house and you’re going to be absolutely impressed.

Oh, right. Here’s his heart-warming story: in 1991 he and his wife kidnapped an 11 year old girl; they imprisoned her in their backyard; he raped her repeatedly; and she eventually gave birth to two children, who are now 11 and 15, and who were also confined to that small yard for their entire lives.

I am not impressed. I presume that what he thinks makes this a happy tale is that he was an enthusiastic god-walloper who was caught while handing out religious tracts, but you can read his blog and see that he was just nuts.

Another mass murder

As I’m sure you’ve all heard by now, a deranged gunman went on a shooting spree in a fitness club in LA, killing 3 women and injuring 10 before blowing his own scabrous, rotting brains out. The guy was just plain nuts (in a fairly common sort of way, unfortunately), but he also left behind an online diary.

Maybe soon, I will see God and Jesus. At least that is what I was told. Eternal life does NOT depend on works. If it did, we will all be in hell. Christ paid for EVERY sin, so how can I or you be judged BY GOD for a sin when the penalty was ALREADY paid. People judge but that does not matter. I was reading the Bible and The Integrity of God beginning yesterday, because soon I will see them.

Say, that logic looks rather familiar, doesn’t it?

What to expect when you hire a Goon Squad

One of the many disgraceful acts of brigandage our country committed in Iraq was the hiring of mercenary thugs through a company called Blackwater. Unwilling to risk the political fallout from openly discussing and recruiting the number of soldiers necessary to actually carry out their grand plans for invading another country, the previous administration instead threw buckets of money at Halliburton-KBR and outsourced the military to profit-seeking, murderous killers-for-hire who did more to harm than help the war effort. As we ought to have expected, the Blackwater unsavoriness is getting even uglier.

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

These bastards fit right in with the Bush administration, didn’t they? These monsters need to be shut down now, and I hope the Obama administration has the steel to do it.

Briefed on the substance of these allegations by The Nation, Congressman Dennis Kucinich replied, “If these allegations are true, Blackwater has been a criminal enterprise defrauding taxpayers and murdering innocent civilians.” Kucinich is on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and has been investigating Prince and Blackwater since 2004.

“Blackwater is a law unto itself, both internationally and domestically. The question is why they operated with impunity. In addition to Blackwater, we should be questioning their patrons in the previous administration who funded and employed this organization. Blackwater wouldn’t exist without federal patronage; these allegations should be thoroughly investigated,” Kucinich said.

That inhuman monolith

Several months ago, we witnessed a tragic spectacle in the news: a nine-year old Brazilian girl was raped, became pregnant, and got an abortion…and the Brazilian Catholic church responded by excommunicating all the participants. One cleric in Rome, Monsignor Rino Fisichella, said the church had been insensitive, but no one in the hierarchy stepped forward to outright condemn the heartlessness of the church’s stance and the unfairness of the policy.

We now have an official document from the Catholic church clearly stating their position. Anyone involved in an abortion for any reason is to be automatically excommunicated, no exceptions. They’ve actually hardened their position.

That includes nine-year old children raped by their stepfather. It includes any doctors who act on sympathy for a maltreated child. Of course, all the rapist has to do is demand that his victim bear his child, and he will be welcomed in the bosom of the holy church. The church is standing firm on principle.

…there is a more important principle at stake. “We have laws, we have a discipline, we have a doctrine of the faith,” the official says. “This is not just theory. And you can’t start backpedaling just because the real-life situation carries a certain human weight.” Benedict makes it ever more clear that his strict approach to doctrine will remain a central pillar to his papacy, bad publicity be damned.

I see. Dogma is more important than reality, and most surprisingly for representatives of a religion that claims the moral high ground, it is more important than human needs.

Everyone should simply leave that evil institution — tell them they can keep their bricks and their real estate, their gold chalices and their gilt robes, their layered assemblage of celibate perverts, meddling old men, and fearful brides of Christ, and let that human element walk away, free of their superstitions. The church doesn’t want that human weight, anyway.

Give him a fair trial and then execute him!

The murder of George Tiller has brought some vile people creeping out from under the woodwork…especially the kinds of nasty minds that like to dress up in clerical collars. Looking for a good emetic? Look no further than this sermon by a Presbyterian minister for a great example of deploring a murder while praising the murderer’s motives.

A notorious murderer met what is certain to become a notorious end. By the goodness of God the witness of the Church was not entirely silenced in Dr. Tiller’s life. He had been excommunicated by his previous congregation, a church of the Missouri Synod Lutheran denomination. And so the judgment of God had been declared; not every watchman was silent, not every shepherd proved a hireling.

But the point was reached where a man despaired of change through government and took matters into his own hand. I do not view the actions of Dr. Tiller’s killer as defensible, but not for many of the easy and often self-serving reasons advanced with alarm and indignation even by many Christians in recent days.

  • Violence is not always wrong. Killing is not always forbidden. Opposition to abortion does not obligate us to oppose all forms of killing. In saying this I make a biblically defensible statement. God has given the power of the sword to the state so that it may judge and execute judgment. This is true internationally and locally. Condemnation of the vile sin of abortion, the murder of an infant, an innocent, in its mother’s womb is not the same as the death penalty, properly applied.

  • Nor do I believe that Dr. Tiller’s killer necessarily acted inappropriately as self-appointed judge, jury and executioner. Like the couple who boldly went into the tent before the congregation at Peor and were immediately killed by Phinehas, Dr. Tiller’s bold practice of the indefensible, his brazen boasting of his practice rendered judge and jury superfluous. He was self-accused and self-convicted.

But what Dr. Tiller’s killer did which Phinehas did not do was to kill against the will of the nation’s civil authority. It was an act of rebellion posing as an act of justice. The killer was an assassin who lacked the courage to attack the root of abortion, our national leaders, and so attacked the branch. His was not an act of saving babies or of executing justice. Other men will continue Dr. Tiller’s practice. A bucket of water taken from the sea will not create a hole in the ocean. Others will fill where Dr. Tiller left off. Abortion will proceed because, and this is vital to say, abortion is blessed by the law of the land. The logic of Dr. Tiller’s killer is the logic of John Brown, of Absalom, of Ehud.

Get that? It’s OK for anti-choicers to kill, and it is appropriate for them to execute abortion doctors, we just need to wait until the civil authorities declare it’s time to line them up against the wall. And Tiller’s murderer’s mistake was being insufficiently brave enough to attack the nation’s leaders.

I read the whole thing. Now I need to take a shower.

A heartbreaking absence of empathy

Cheyenne Cherry has a very pretty name. It’s too bad that the person isn’t quite so pretty a human being.

She and an unidentified juvenile allegedly broke into Valerie Hernandez’s Tinton Ave. apartment on May 6 and trashed the place.
Then in a shocking act of animal abuse, they tossed the woman’s kitten, Tiger Lily, into the stove and cranked up the temperature, ASPCA assistant director Joe Pentangelo said.

Cherry told authorities that she and her accomplice “thought we would play a joke on Valerie and mess up her apartment.”
The duo bolted from the apartment with DVDs and packages of noodles, Pentangelo said.

“She didn’t want to hear the cat crying and scratching at the oven door,” Pentangelo said.
Firefighters found the female cat’s remains smoldering in the oven after neighbors complained of smoke coming from Hernandez’s apartment.

I simply do not understand that kind of behavior at all. Why would anyone commit such a random act of unmitigated cruelty? A kitten is a small thing in the world…but it seems to me that how we treat the small and helpless is a measure of how we see ourselves.