Now I’m aware reading the news can give you a false perspective about the world, since they typically report unusual and shocking news. With that in mind, it’s hard to not feel like you’re surrounded by religious nutjobs when one of them kills her son by asphyxiating him because she thought he was possessed. It kind of makes you feel like the whole world is a little messed up.

Prosecutors formally filed charges Tuesday against 31-year-old Latisha Lawson including two counts of battery and three counts of neglecting a dependent for the alleged abuse of her two children in November 2009…

On December 21, authorities interviewed Lawson’s daughter, who confirmed she and her brother had been given the olive oil and vinegar because their mother thought they were possessed. The 10-year-old reportedly said that she immediately vomited afterward but that Jeziah King died as he was spitting out the mixture. She also alleged that Lawson put his body on a bed and had her pray over him before moving the body to a closet. According to her, Lawson placed the body in a plastic tote when they moved out of that apartment and kept him with them.

How do some people get this creepy? Moving your decomposing dead 3 year old son around in a plastic tote bag has got to be one of the most gruesome moves in the history of bad moves.

I’ve got 10 bucks that says that no one was quite aware of just how crazy and demented this woman was specifically because of how devoted and religious she appeared to be. I’ve lost count of how many times mental illness has been covered up by religion. If believing in an invisible imaginary friend isn’t considered insanity, what hope do we have to properly identify it?

I’ve said many times I think the word “fundamentalist” is misplaced; not because it’s inaccurate, but because it misses the point when talking about adherents. The word “originalist” seems more apt, since the people who qualify as fundamentalists are merely those who have taken the old school approach to their religion. The rest of the world behaves in a sane matter because they have ignored passages of their holy books generally regarded as unacceptable or down-right insane.

Take the obsession of “Originalist” Mormons when it comes to the fear of God. They believe submission to God begins with mental conditioning including torturing babies to get them to fear authority. I wish I was making this shit up:

Water torture of babies is one way some members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints instill fear of authority, a former member testified Wednesday.

“It’s quite common,” Carolyn Blackmore Jessop said. She was a witness for the B.C. government in the constitutional reference case to determine whether Canada’s polygamy law is valid.

“They spank the baby and when it cries, they hold the baby face up under the tap with running water. When they stop crying, they spank it again and the cycle is repeated until they are exhausted.”

It’s typically done by fathers and it’s called “breaking in.”

Yes, you read right: these religious nutbags are using waterboarding on babies. Babies for fuck sakes!

The story came out during a trial to determine the legal status of polygamy in Canada. Now I’m actually of the opinion it should be legal (why the fuck should the government decides what constitutes marriage anyway), but it’s tricky when you’re taking about Fundamentalist Mormons who force young women to marry older men against their will. The truth is for the most part, polygamy is used by members of the FLDS churches as a way of controlling and subjugating women.

Don’t you just love religion?

A Portland, Oregon man identified only as G.B. has yet to see a penny of the $900,000 suit he won for being molested by Rev. Thomas Laughlin. The Church isn’t actually to blame for this: his lawyer charged him over 870k for his services, and G.B. hasn’t even received the remaining $23,000 that was left over. So basically, while this poor man tries to survive off $400 dollars a month from his disability payments, his piece of shit lawyers got away with robbing him blind.

The story of what happened is fairly complicated (so I won’t go into it), and is a testament to the fact there are blood sucking lawyers (no offense to fans who do this as a profession) out there, often with far too much leeway into what they can charge and how they control settlement monies.

Some local attorneys are upset because this story will only hurt their reputation. Considering how bad it is now, I’m not sure there is anything they can do to convince us they are anything but parasites on our society, exploiting naïve or powerless individuals who don’t have the same understanding of the law they do.

It seems no one cared the entire reason for the suit was for G.B. to benefit from at least some financial compensation for his terrible ordeal. Everyone was too busy trying to “get paid”. Can you have a bigger ethical “fail” moment (apart from the actual molestation, that is)?

Need further proof human beings use religions to justify their own sick desires and fantasies? Take Simon Antony Jacobs, in North Sydney, who was recently arrested after it became known he sexually assaulted 2 boys repeatedly during the 1970′s and 80′s. One of the victims, 11 years of age at the time, confronted Jacobs during the abuse, saying the Bible seemed to take offense with the whole “man lying with another man” passage (that’s the “hate gays” one). Jacobs assured him since they weren’t trying to make babies, it was all good in the hood.

Were there any signs Jacobs may have been acting inappropriately? Well, his church shuffled him around a few times, which makes me think they knew exactly what was going on:

A spokesman for the Anglican Church said Jacobs had worked as a CEBS leader at Christ Church, St Ives, ”in various roles” from 1971 to 1981. In 1982 he moved to CEBS at St Swithuns in Pymble but left in 1984.

”The record is unclear, but at some point, possibly after leaving Pymble, a note was made that he was not to be issued with a leaders warrant, which he would have required in order to move to leadership in any CEBS group in another parish,” the spokesman said.

That doesn’t sound suspicious at all, does it? Yes, religion is truly the moral framework of society, don’t you agree?

NOTE: It says in the article that he’s being accused of “buggery“. Is that just simply sodomy? Can any of you Aussie fans clarify this for me?

You know the tired argument that without religion, human beings are incapable of making proper moral judgements? Here’s another great example of just how stupid and wrong this belief is: A New Zealand man was given a 3 year jail sentence for sexually abusing his daughter from the ages of 5 to 11. The really fucked up thing (beyond him not getting a jail sentence at least as long as the abuse) is he would make her pray for forgiveness every time he sexually abused her.

His daughter said she lost all respect for the church, God and the Bible as a result of her father’s offending.

“He was supposed to be Christian but look at all the evil he was doing.” She said he looked like a monster to her. He would make her pray with him for forgiveness after the sexual abuse, but she knew she had not done anything wrong.

“I wanted Dad to say what he had done but he just lied and never took responsibility.” She told the court how her life had deteriorated.

If he did something fucked-up because of religion, then trust me girl, he IS a Christian. They have a long and colored history of abusing women; it was called the Inquisition, and it’s still a gigantic shit-stain on their history they would rather gloss over (it’s not likely to show up in Sunday School discussions). It’s just unfortunate for them the whole thing lasted over 4 centuries. Kinda makes hiding it a bit “tricky”.

What really scares me about religious rubes is how they tend to justify improper or evil actions through their religious convictions. Because he was convinced a God spoke directly to him, who knows what kind of crazy reasoning this man was allowed to conjure up in his own mind. And what’s up with him making his daughter pray for forgiveness? Did he blame her for his temptation, or did he think this was a test from God? Just more proof belief in a higher power has no bearing on morality. Will our sectarian counterparts ever “get it”?

I don’t want to sound overly dramatic and suddenly declare Baptisms are unsafe, but when a baby drowns from this pointless ceremony, you have to wonder what kind of safety precautions people take when doing this, especially when it’s not the first time people drown from this nonsense.

The baby’s dad Dumitru Gaidau, 36, said: “We all saw it, the priest didn’t put his hand over the baby’s mouth to stop water going in as he should have done and as they do at every other baptism.

“We couldn’t believe it that he just put his hand over his belly and over the head and submerged him three times in the water.”
The baby’s godmother Aliona Vacarciuc, 32, said: “The baby was crying as he went into the water.

The worst part about this whole story is everyone around the priest knew things weren’t going as planned, but Father Valentin assured them he knew what he was doing…even while the baby was turning blue and gasping for air. Nice job, everybody! Sure, they arrested this worthless idiot, but I’m sure it’s small comfort for the grieving family.

Hey, here’s an idea; if some guy wearing a fancy dress tells you he’s specially ordained by an invisible man in the sky to dunk your newborn in water a bunch of times, why don’t you think twice about handing him over?

Every so often, you read a story about someone in desperate need of a blood transfusion refusing the life giving procedure because of their religious beliefs. The latest story comes from Smethwick, England where a 15 year old boy died after succumbing to his injuries following a tragic car crash in a store (yeah, you heard right). Joshua McAuley is dead now because his beliefs (or more accurately, the beliefs his parents indoctrinated him with).

It seems hospital officials are on the defensive, tripping over themselves claiming the issue of overriding the wishes of parents and minors in similar cases has to be handled delicately on an individual basis (as in, there’s no official policy). No one seems to quite know what to do about situations like this;  the Friendly Atheist seems a little confused about what the right move is, and Unreasonable Faith just asks his sizable audience to discuss the matter.

I have a solution I think would work out quite nicely: if a minor wants to forgo receiving a blood transfusion due to his religious convictions, he should be able to explain exactly WHY he believes such a thing is wrong (try to avoid pointing out the flaws with the idea of a person with severe blood loss trying to explain anything at all and just humor me, alright?). You see, the real problem is kids like Joshua may think they have acquired their beliefs through their own personal research and introspection, but like every other religious convert, he was conditioned into believing things that were quite obviously untrue. The reason Witnesses refuse blood is because their interpretation of the Bible specifies blood is only to be used in the atonement of sin, and that’s it. The fact  it actually does something much more useful in your body (oh, like carrying oxygen to your cells for instance) is just an inconvenient detail they can’t be bothered to learn. Because Joshua was too ignorant of reality to see the benefit in actually bothering to learn real facts about the natural world, he thought his eternal soul would be in jeopardy if he tried to save his own life with the blood of others. Now he’s just another sad statistic about the dangers of faith.

Probably one of the scariest and most disturbing stories in the Bible (yeah, I know it’s hard to find one which isn’t fucked up) is of Abraham and Isaac. Commanded by God to kill his son, Abraham ties up the boy and is about to plunge his dagger in his chest when he is stopped at the last minute by Metatron (that’s a real angel name) and instead sacrifices an innocent animal in his stead. It’s some dark shit, people.

This story is generally debated as to it’s relative allegorical meaning, but I don’t think you have to look too hard to figure out what’s going on here: it’s not uncommon for jealous and ancient Gods to demand human sacrifice to appease their “anger” . In modern, civilized society this kind of act is exceedingly rare, but thanks to the delusion of religion, every so often, religious nutjobs kill their own children thinking God commanded them to do so. The latest case of religious infanticide comes all the way from Kitale, Kenya, where a father, convinced God was speaking directly to him, killed his own son as a blood sacrifice. He then sprinkled his blood around the house in some ludicrous and macabre ceremony. Your “what-the-fuck-o-meter” should be going off right about now.

He’s being held in custody and the locals have asked the “Ingrafted Fellowship Church”, which he’s been a member of for less than a month, be investigated to see if they are a cult (newsflash guys: all religions are cults, although admittedly, some are crazier than others).

Another sad tale of woe and misery brought to you by the “power” of religion! Isn’t it grand?