Hemant Mehta's Blog, page 1904

So Far This Year in London, There Have Been 27 Cases of “Witchcraft”-Related Child Abuse

Fourteen years ago, London’s Metropolitan Police recorded its first case of abuse stemming from accusations of witchcraft against a child. This year so far, it has recorded 27.

The majority of these cases spring from a fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity, blended with other supernatural concepts. NBC News reports:

Most of the cases involve pastors or religious leaders in African communities who have incorporated elements of witchcraft or spirit possession into their version of fundamentalist Christianity. These beliefs are widely held in countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo…

This particular commingling of religious traditions has a wide reach and seems to be expanding. Authorities had previously discovered a number of instances of this abuse that are linked to “Christian groups with roots in Western and Sub-Saharan Africa,” but…

… cases involving other faiths, such as Islam and Hinduism, have emerged more recently as authorities have delved deeper.

Activist Kevani Kanda, who explored these types of accusations in the BBC program Branded a Witch, was herself a victim of such abuse. Her own ordeal started at the age of six…

… when her family accused her of being a witch. She was being molested by a relative and the trauma made her wet the bed and sleepwalk.

But instead of trying to find out what was wrong, Kanda’s family were convinced she was possessed by an evil spirit. For the next five years, she was starved, forced to eat her own vomit, beaten repeatedly and given suppositories containing spices to “get rid of the evil spirits.” And the torture occurred in a London suburb.

Kanda’s abuse in London was kept under the radar, but as part of the work for her documentary,

Kanda returned to the Congo… last year and was shocked by what was considered acceptable in mainstream society. Asked how far the abuse went, she said: “How far can your imagination go? I witnessed a four-year-old old boy brought to the church by his mother because he was playing too rough with his brother. The pastor told her [the behavior] was the result of him being possessed and that he was a witch.”

The boy endured a four-day “deliverance,” Kanda said, in which he was starved, forced to drink hot palm oil and prevented from using the bathroom. “The adults were actually laughing,” Kanda said. “They were stepping on his little body, his stomach, saying they were stepping on the spirits.”

Some 20,000 young people live on the streets in the capital of the Congo, Kinshasa; many of these homeless youth were rejected by their family because of witchcraft accusations. And these beliefs have taken root in communities in London, furthered by pastors or other religious leaders who, Kanda says, prey on “vulnerable” people who “are looking for something to hold onto.” The results are brutal and sometimes fatal, such as

… 8-year-old Victoria Climbié, whose guardians tortured and killed her in 2010 after claiming she was possessed by a demon. The Ivory Coast-born girl was burned with cigarettes and forced to sleep in a sealed garbage bag in the bath until she eventually died.

Police have been slow to pick up on these abuse charges. This has been partly due to incredulity: abuse related to witchcraft accusations seemed too outlandish to be countenanced. But, says Detective Superintendent Terry Sharpe,

… the more you come to learn about the cultures and beliefs of other communities, particularly as now they’re moving all around the world, the more people learn about it and have the confidence to report it.”

An additional factor has been sensitivity due to an uneasy relationship between police and minority communities as well as a “sensitivity in confronting various faiths.”

“To a certain extent professionals are quite scared to address these issues within their practical work,” said Mor Dioum, director of the Victoria Climbié Foundation [named for the murdered 8 year old victim mentioned above]. “Often it’s a fear of being accused of being racist or being ignorant of this type of abuse. But the approach must be this, and this is the VCF’s position, no culture or religion must be allowed to override the protection of that child.

Sharpe agreed, saying, “As far as I’m concerned we must not hide behind [fears of racism accusations] — child abuse is child abuse.” And while police are determined to move past these issues to act before another murder occurs, from all indications, they will have their work cut out for them.

Kevani Kanda notes, “it’s a problem that can be dealt with, but it’s not a solution that’s going to come today or tomorrow.” I hope she is right, and that this solution is found sooner rather than later. It’s about time we stop prioritizing beliefs over actual people, especially children.

(Image via Shutterstock)

One of the Best College Football Players in the Country is an Atheist… Maybe

The blogger at Reason Reaction recently began chatting with a college football player who happens to be a starter at a major school (in that they’re constantly mentioned in discussions about the best teams in the country).

It turns out this player is an atheist. Because of that, he didn’t reveal his identity or school, but he agreed to do an interview:

Q: … Why did you request for your identity and your team’s identity to remain anonymous?

A: I requested my identity to be anonymous because the sad truth is that I cannot share it with the public on the stage that I am on. If I were to publically “come out” as an atheist, fans and the media would have frenzy. The idea of atheism in the south is a taboo in itself, and we as student athletes are not supposed to bring attention to ourselves through anything other than football.

…

Q: … during the team prayer, do you die inside a little?

A: To be honest, yes. I never bow my head and usually try to get out of it. I will for no reason pretend to pray to anyone’s god.

It’s a fascinating conversation.

Obviously, take it all with a grain of salt. We don’t know who this player is or whether he’s telling the truth (though maybe some of his responses offer enough clues for people to figure it out). But there are undoubtedly more non-religious athletes in professional (and college) sports than we know about. If only more of them would talk about it…

(Image via Shutterstock)

Mike Huckabee: If the GOP Gives Up Fighting Marriage Equality and Abortion Rights, I’ll Leave the Party

Mike Huckabee has terrible news for Republicans: If they accept the legal reality of marriage equality, the former Arkansas governor and 2008 Republican presidential hopeful will be done with them. Not just a little done, but completely done.

Huckabee was on the American Family Association’s radio broadcast this week discussing the Supreme Court’s decision not to take up the same-sex marriage cases before them — leaving in place lower court rulings that declared those bans unconstitutional — when he made the comments in question:

“If the Republicans want to lose guys like me — and a whole bunch of still God-fearing Bible-believing people — go ahead and just abdicate on this issue, and while you’re at it, go ahead and say abortion doesn’t matter, either. Because at that point, you lose me. I’m gone. I’ll become an independent. I’ll start finding people that have guts to stand. I’m tired of this.”

This might sound like good news for the Republican party — sure, they’d lose the hardcore “God-fearing Bible-believing” voters, but they’d also be back in step with a majority of Americans on both same-sex marriage and abortion rights. But Huckabee doubts that very much.

As far as he is concerned, continuing to fight for increasingly unpopular laws will help the Republican party, whereas moving forward with a legally compliant platform will lead to defeat. Presumably, he divines this from the same source that assures him holy war with Islam is guaranteed victory

Depriving other people of their civil rights might be important to the religious and theocratically-inclined wing of the Republican party, but not to the majority of Americans.

As we saw in the last presidential election, women’s rights and gay rights played a substantial role in how voters perceived the parties — and how they voted as a result. Aiming to deprive Americans of those rights has harmed the Republican party’s ambitions, now and in the foreseeable future. Even among those Republicans who support a blurring of the lines between church and state, there are some who have acknowledged this.

Huckabee’s guarantees, then, fall rather short, and it sounds more like typical fear-mongering than anything else: If you don’t do what (I say) God wants you to do, you’re going to pay!

Personally, I would love to see the Republican party shed its hardcore religious baggage and stop defining itself by religious ideas about who to hate, who to deprive of rights, etc. If abiding by the Constitution is all that it takes to do that… well, hallelujah! (Now if only Huckabee could promise to take Santorum with him…)

Egged On By Her Ex-Pastor Husband, Mom Attempts to Poison and Stab Three Daughters to Bring Them to Jesus

Christ is a great pal, now and forever. Wouldn’t you like to meet him?

Police say that was the basic motivation behind the crime committed the other day by Pamela Christensen, an Illinois mother with end-times delusions who confessed that she had attempted to murder her three daughters.

After 911 dispatchers received two hang-up calls from the Montgomery home, officers went there and found the girls upstairs. Two of them had been stabbed in the chest by their God-besotted mom.

[P]olice said Christensen told officers that she was sending the girls home to “meet Jesus Christ.” The three girls, ages 12, 16 and 19, told police that their mother held a knife to them and asked them if they accepted Jesus Christ as their savior. Two of the girls were stabbed. Police recovered a poisonous liquid in the home’s kitchen, which Christensen said she had concocted out of dishwashing detergent in an attempt to subdue her children. She told police she had hoped they would fall asleep so she could stab them. Police said the children refused to ingest the poison…

The woman told officers that her husband, Vaughn Christensen, had left messages on the phone telling his wife that the world was ending, and that she needed to prepare the family to meet Jesus. Vaughn Christensen is a former pastor at a Sugar Grove church.

The three girls, who have non-life-threatening injuries, were released from a local hospital and are now reportedly staying with a grandparent.

Their parents had been going through a contentious divorce, during which Pamela Christensen accused her husband of having become increasingly “violent” and “erratic” toward her and their daughters.

Sounds like she wasn’t entirely free of violent and erratic behavior herself.

Ms. Christensen, who is being held on bail of one million dollars, is due in court on Friday.

(Image via Montgomery Police Department)

China Sentences Two Cult Members to Death After They Fatally Beat a “Possessed” Would-Be Convert

Back in May, five members of a strange Chinese cult called Eastern Lightning — a.k.a. the Church of the Almighty God — walked into a McDonald’s restaurant in Zhaoyuan and harassed one of the customers, trying to recruit her into the cult. When the woman, Wu Shuoyan, declined to hand over her phone number, the five decided that she deserved to die “because she’s a monster, she’s an evil spirit,” explained Zhang Lidong (55), an unemployed pharmaceutical salesman who led the attack.

So he and his fellow cult members beat her to death with mops and chairs before the eyes of horrified onlookers. The attack was caught on video. Lidong never showed remorse, prosecutors said, instead maintaining that the victim had to be destroyed and that

“We are not afraid of the law. We have faith in God.”

During the trial, the defendants (who believe that Jesus is back and living among us as a Chinese woman who happens to be the cult founder’s wife) testified that

… they had acted in self-defense after they were attacked by the “demon’s supernatural powers”.

The court dismissed that assertion. It called the murder “extremely cruel” and on Saturday handed down the death sentence to two of the attackers: Zhang Lidon and his daughter Zhang Fan, 29. The others’ lives were spared.

Lu Yingchun, 39, another member of the murderous gang, was handed a life sentence while two others, Zhang Hang and Zhang Qiaolian, received 10 and seven years respectively. All three also faced cult-related charges.

The Chinese government (which, it must be noted, is not above exaggerating domestic threats and putting on show trials) says the Church of the Almighty God is responsible for a string of violence, including murders, mutilations, stabbings, riots, kidnappings, and torture. Authorities have dubbed the group, along with 13 other religious organizations including the much more peaceful Falun Gong, “evil cults.”

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

If This Iranian-Born Atheist Doesn’t Get Asylum in Scotland, He Could Be Killed Back Home

Ramin Forghani wears a lot of important hats. He’s the Vice Chair of the Scottish Secular Society, founder of the Iranian Atheists Association, and chairman of Ex-Muslims Scotland.

However, the 25-year-old Forghani (below) is only in Scotland temporarily, studying at the University of Strathclyde… and if he’s forced to go back to his home country of Iran after obtaining his masters degree, there’s no telling what will happen to the now-apostate:

… I am afraid to go home to my country of Iran. 30-year-old Soheil Arabi, a man described in a ‘poor psychological condition’, has been sentenced to death after being found guilty of insulting the Prophet Mohammad on Facebook.

…

I lived and grew up in the Iran ruled by an Islamic regime. After moving to Scotland to continue my education I find myself free, enjoying my life in a multicultural and tolerant society. I am an atheist and the Vice-Chair of the Scottish Secular Society and Chair of Ex-Muslims Scotland. I want to challenge Islam before it tightens its grip on the world around me and silences us all.

Despite his request, Scotland’s Court of Session did not grant him asylum, effectively handing Forghani a death sentence. His last hope is appealing to the UK Home Office, but they haven’t done anything yet. Even though Forghani’s uncle has political connections, his criticism of Islam may be too much of a threat for the theocrats in charge.

Brittany Maynard Will End Her Life in a Few Weeks and, Despite What Some Christians Say, It’s a Very Brave Decision

On New Year’s Day, 29-year-old Brittany Maynard (below), a newlywed planning to start her family, got some awful news: she had brain cancer. After months of treatment and doctor’s visits, she received even worse news: her tumor had not only come back, but grown larger.

She wrote in an essay for CNN:

Doctors gave me a prognosis of six months to live.

Because my tumor is so large, doctors prescribed full brain radiation. I read about the side effects: The hair on my scalp would have been singed off. My scalp would be left covered with first-degree burns. My quality of life, as I knew it, would be gone.

After months of research, my family and I reached a heartbreaking conclusion: There is no treatment that would save my life, and the recommended treatments would have destroyed the time I had left.

I considered passing away in hospice care at my San Francisco Bay-area home. But even with palliative medication, I could develop potentially morphine-resistant pain and suffer personality changes and verbal, cognitive and motor loss of virtually any kind.

Because the rest of my body is young and healthy, I am likely to physically hang on for a long time even though cancer is eating my mind. I probably would have suffered in hospice care for weeks or even months. And my family would have had to watch that.

Ultimately, Maynard decided to choose death with dignity. Since physician-assisted suicide is only legal in five states, Brittany and her family uprooted to one of them: Oregon.

Maynard is using the time she has left to advocate for death-with-dignity protections. She and her family have gone public with her story and set up a website. This was, undoubtedly, an agonizing choice, but Maynard says that choice must be the patient’s.

I do not want to die. But I am dying. And I want to die on my own terms.

I would not tell anyone else that he or she should choose death with dignity. My question is: Who has the right to tell me that I don’t deserve this choice? That I deserve to suffer for weeks or months in tremendous amounts of physical and emotional pain? Why should anyone have the right to make that choice for me?

Unfortunately, there are quite a few people who feel they have exactly that right, saying that Maynard must let nature take its course. Or follow through with God’s plan. Conservative Christian blogger Matt Walsh, guest posting at The Blaze, goes so far as to declare her choice “the exact opposite of courage.” He can’t quite bring himself to utter the word “coward,” but he does everything short of it throughout his piece:

We are given life, we take part in life, we participate in life, but we do not own our lives. We can’t take possession of our lives like a two-year-old grabbing a toy from his friend and shouting ‘Mine!’ Our lives are bigger than that, thank God.

Walsh bemoans people’s support for Maynard and her decision, calling her a “martyr for the cause of self-destruction [in] our modern enlightened society.” He is “terrified to think that [his] children will grow up in a culture that openly venerates suicide with this much unyielding passion.” He also believes that anyone who says Maynard is brave is implying that those who choose otherwise are not.

Walsh sees no possibility that there is bravery in both scenarios: giving up your final weeks to spare your family the agony of seeing you die horribly and fighting through that agony to spend as much time with them as you can. In his eyes, if it is brave to fight it out, it must be cowardly to choose assisted-suicide, and vice versa.

In real life, however, people do very different things with the same motivations all the time. A reasonable person ought to be able to find courage in both scenarios.

While Walsh acknowledges that he is “sad for Brittany,” he sees her advocacy as “wrong. It’s all wrong. The public reaction to her choice is even worse. Delusional, disappointing, horrifying.”

Why? Because God, of course.

So if God reached out from the depths of eternity to hand us this life of ours, how can we think it acceptable — or worse, meritable — to throw it out before our time is finished?

Naturally, no evidence that God did any of these things is forthcoming; but, even so, he doesn’t explain why his God demands suffering. He just moves on to more questions… and bizarre answers:

Inevitably, that’s what this conversation comes down to. The old questions. The oldest questions. What is life? Why are we here? What’s the point of it all?

If you celebrate suicide, then you have answered these questions: life is nothingness, we are here for no reasons, and there is no point.

Again, these answers don’t follow from the questions. The answer “there is no point” is not, for instance, implied by saying, “I support a person’s right to end their life 3 months early, if those 3 months are going to be spent slowly dying, in excruciating agony.” In fact, many Christians who believe that there is a God-ordained purpose to every life support end-of-life rights. Walsh simply dismisses them:

[Those who "celebrate suicide"] scratch their heads and wonder why some of us kooky Christians get so upset about things like abortion, euthanasia, and embryonic stem cell research. For some reason they won’t listen when we try to tell them: life has value. It is a thing of value. It is worth something. It is worth something beyond our feelings about it, beyond circumstance, beyond context, beyond sickness, beyond development, beyond age. LIFE HAS VALUE.

Brittany Maynard, and those who love and support her, do not believe her life has no value. On the contrary, she has fought hard to preserve it because she values it. However, she acknowledges that it is almost over and that its final moments are either going to be peaceful or wracked with agony.

She argues not that her life has no value, but that, in these inevitable last days, she should be the one making the choice about how it ends. Walsh argues that she should not; that because her life has value, she should have to suffer through to death, that her final days should be as miserable as the brain cancer makes her; because to sidestep that miserable decline is to declare that her life was meaningless.

This is nonsense.

The idea that value is derived only by virtue of existence, regardless of the state of that existence, is not only foolish, but cruel. It’s the thinking that leads people to campaign against condom use in areas where AIDS is widespread or to allow women to die rather than let them terminate a pregnancy that may kill them. But you can appreciate human life as a whole and when there’s at least some quality to it. At least, most people can.

Walsh, on the other hand, says that he understands that Brittany’s life…

… is a likely short life of intense pain and inconceivable suffering. I understand the desire to avoid such a fate, but we should not act upon that desire. Life is to be lived like a cup we drink until the last drop.

He is welcome to his opinion, of course, but he does not make a compelling case for it. He claims that to factor in quality of life in a discussion about life is to uproot everything western civilization is founded on (no, I’m not exaggerating). Yet, Brittany Maynard very much values her life, as do her family, friends, and supporters. That value doesn’t necessarily hinge on surviving for the longest possible amount of time.

End-of-life decisions are difficult, and the highest ethical standards surrounding them should always be maintained and demanded. People can and do disagree on potential conflicts inherent in a physician’s involvement in life-ending decisions. But calling someone like Maynard a coward — or strongly implying it — for choosing to end her life before her brain is destroyed is despicable.

No matter how “sad” Walsh claims to be for Maynard, this is, and must be, her choice to make. And she deserves the utmost compassion and respect for facing these terrible circumstances bravely, thoughtfully, and with concern for others.

Maynard plans to end her life on November 1. It will be on her own terms.

Reza Aslan Scoffs That You Can Only Be a Credible Public Atheist If You’re a Religious Scholar With a Degree

Salon interviewed Reza Aslan (below) about the contentious exchange on Islam that Ben Affleck and Sam Harris had on Bill Maher‘s HBO show recently.

Whatever else you may think of Aslan’s positions, here‘s one that deserves a little pushback, if not an outright fisking:

“Sam Harris, to me, gives atheism a bad name because he comes from a tradition of atheism that is really disconnected from the titans of intellectual, philosophical atheism who gave birth to the modern world. These were experts in religion who, from a position of expertise, criticized religion. Sam Harris is a neuroscientist; he knows as much about religion as I do about neuroscience. The difference is that I don’t go around writing books about neuroscience.”

This is rich for various reasons.

Let’s start here: Last year, a profile of Aslan in the Washington Post described him as

… [a] man who boasts of academic laurels he does not have. Aslan, 41, has variously claimed to hold a doctorate in “the history of religions” or a doctorate in “the sociology of religions,” though no such degrees exist at the university he attended. His doctorate is in sociology, according to the registrar’s office at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Aslan, who has an undergraduate degree in religious studies and a master’s in theological studies, is not currently a professor of religion or history. He is an associate professor in the creative writing department of the University of California at Riverside.

Interesting. But there’s more:

He has asserted a present-day toehold in the field of religion by saying he is “a cooperative faculty member” in Riverside’s Department of Religious Studies. Yet this is not so, according to Vivian-Lee Nyitray, the just-retired chair of the department. Nyitray says she discussed the possibility last year with Aslan but that he has not been invited to become a cooperative faculty member, a status that would allow him to chair dissertations in her former department.

Creative writing, indeed — mostly in the CV department.

Aslan’s slam on Harris, in Salon, recalls the Post‘s assessment that Aslan is

… eager — perhaps overeager — to present himself as a formidable academic with special bona fides in religion and history.

His comically snobbish take on who should be allowed to write serious books about religion is a classic case of the Courtier’s Reply fallacy. Look: For my money, Aslan is well qualified to discuss religion. He’s clearly applied himself to the topic in a scholarly fashion – and even if he hadn’t, he’d still be more than welcome to think and agitate and write about the field, letting the strength of his reasoning carry him through the marketplace of ideas.

And the same is true for everyone else. Very much including Harris.

By Aslan’s clannish, exclusionary standards, the likes of Jerry Coyne (biology) and Richard Dawkins (evolutionary biology) should probably also bow humbly to his and his religiously-educated peers’ superior standing; and we can only imagine how much Aslan would sniff at Christopher Hitchens‘ presumed husk of an academic record (philosophy, politics, and economics).

Aslan seems to suffer from a mix of neediness (brought on by insecurity) and outright hubris. It might be a defect of his imagination that he can’t see, or won’t acknowledge, how neuroscience (a branch of biology, after all) might well set a lifelong student of it on a path along subjects like consciousness, evolution, conscience, spirituality, and so on… all of which are completely relevant to religion.

But even if Harris were a mere armchair scholar whose day job was carpentry or teaching high-school English, the only thing that would matter is how solid his ideas are, and how appealing his writing.

Everything else is vanity and churlishness.

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P.S.: In the real world, who do you suppose is best at absorbing and demonstrating knowledge of religion — believers or non-believers? Funny thing: Atheists and agnostics are, and not by a small margin. The question was raised, and answered, in a 2010 Pew survey. You can take the Pew quiz here. Challenge a few of your religious friends or relatives to do the same; the results might be interesting!

Pastor Jim Garlow Endorses Political Candidate at Church, Then Tells IRS, “Sue Me”

Last week, I posted about “Pulpit Freedom Sunday,” an event where church pastors defy the law by endorsing political candidates from the pulpits of their tax-exempt churches. (The law basically says that non-profit groups, including churches, don’t have to pay taxes — in exchange, though, they can’t endorse or campaign against specific candidates.)

The IRS ignored pastors participating in this event for years due to (what they say were) bureaucratic reasons, but they recently settled a lawsuit brought about by the Freedom From Religion Foundation and promised they would prosecute pastors who violated the law.

So what does it look like when a pastor endorses a candidate? CNN’s Sara Grossman tells us:

On Sunday, pastor Jim Garlow of Skyline Church in California stood before his congregation of more than 2,000 and told them he would be making an unusual announcement.

The pastor proceeded to warn his audience against voting for a candidate in the upcoming midterm elections who supports gay marriage and abortion, even if that candidate, Carl DeMaio, is a Republican.

… Garlow told his followers he would be endorsing DeMaio’s rival, Democratic incumbent Scott Peters, representative for California’s 52nd District, to send a scathing message to Republican leadership that candidates who back abortion and gay rights are unacceptable to the party’s Christian base.

You can watch the video below. It was part of a sermon series called “Brave” (sure…) and featured an in-person message from Rick Santorum. The fun begins around the 53:00 mark:

This is the choice we have before us and I urge you to do what’s right in this [election]: Either abstain or to vote for the lesser of two evils. And if, by chance, a member of the IRS gets this sermon and is listening, sue me.

Hear that, IRS? He’s begging for you to come after him.

WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED?!

It’s irrelevant that Garlow is promoting a Democrat over a Republican or telling his congregation to stay home. What matters is that he believes his faith puts him above the law, not to mention the rules all other non-profits have to follow.

This didn’t happen in secrecy. The video’s right there. And Garlow was only one of about 1,800 pastors who told their congregations how to vote last weekend, according to the group sponsoring the event.

It’s time for the IRS to take action and force these churches to pay taxes since that’s clearly what their leaders want.

This is the Conversation Noah Should Have Had with God

Simon Whitaker, like most of us, knows that the story of Noah’s Ark makes no sense at all.

That’s why he decided to tell the story a little more realistically in The Almost Flood:

It’s a cute book with a twist ending — and it’s free on Amazon right now. Check it out!