Tag Archives: crime

Dentist called pastor instead of 911 during botched procedure

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Going to the dentist is never pleasant. The needles they put in your mouth, or the high pitch drill they use to remove parts of your teeth, ranks pretty high up there in terms of nightmare fuel. However, for a 4 year old little girl, it was far worse than simply having a bit of pain. It basically ruined her life forever.

During a routine procedure back in 2016, Nevaeh Hall began to have seizures as soon as she was administered a sedative. Rather than call emergency services, Bathaniel Jefferson telephoned both her pastor and a pharmacist instead, and for several hours, the lack of oxygen to Nevaeh wrecked havoc on her brain and nervous system. She is confined to a wheelchair, is now blind and deaf, and will never fully recover from this dentist’s negligence.

A jury has found her guilty of one count of recklessly causing body injury to a child. The prosecution wanted 20 years. The sentence itself is only worth probation, so anyone hoping for more was greatly disappointed.

A civil trial soon followed, with the family being awarded a 95.5 million dollar lawsuit. Unfortunately, it is unlikely the family will ever see this money, as Jefferson’s insurance is unable to cover such a large amount.

Why the hell would anyone call a pastor in a time like that? Was she hoping for some magic prayers to fix he fuckup or something? Bizarre.

The Salvation Army exec who stole Christmas

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I hate the Salvation Army. First off, they aren’t a charitable organization. They are registered as a church, which means while some of the money and goods people give to them do go to the needy, they still run it like it is a business, buying expensive real estate, and more importantly, being exempt from needing to show where it uses its money and for what. Don’t believe me? Take a look at their mission statement:

“the advancement of the Christian religion… of education, the relief of poverty, and other charitable objects beneficial to society or the community of mankind as a whole.”

It’s that “and other charitable objects” which make us think these guys are a charity, but while they do offer some helpful services, it’s more of combination of a church/business than anything else. For instance, did you know they own a real estate portfolio worth in excess of 4 billion dollars? It’s difficult to know how much of their money goes to charity, since as a registered church, they’re exempt from financial scrutiny. Basically, the Salvation Army is like a gigantic mystery box filled with money, goods, and massive financing from the government.

If you were still thinking of donating money or goods after having been told how shitty they are, consider what happened in Toronto recently. Former CEO of the Toronto branch, David Rennie, recently surrendered to police after investigators found 2 million dollars in stolen merchandise he was hoarding in a warehouse. The search began after an anonymous tipster noticed there were over 100k in toys missing from inventory over the period of two years (I ran a warehouse, and I have to tell you, that’s a ridiculous amount of time for things to go missing, and a ridiculous amount of goods to go unnoticed).

The organization now claims it will work to avoid any further problems with the help of accounting firm KPMG. You might remember them for the brilliant audit they did of Bernie Maddoff’s ponzi scheme. Perhaps the Olympic bribery scandal is more familiar to you. How about something more recent, like their failed due diligence in the Hewlett Packard / Autonomy that cost the company 5 billion dollars in losses?

Yeah, I’m sure they’ll do a fantastic job of ensuring an organization that has no real accountability is doing right by us…

Teen sentenced to 10 years of hard church

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f there’s a time in one’s life fraught with tragedy, it’s probably the hormone saturated period in our lives known as our ‘teen years’. How many of us have done something so incredibly stupid it still haunts us today? Tyler Alred will need to live with the fact his drunk driving took the life of his friend and passenger, 16-year-old John Luke Dum. He’ll also need to spend the next decade going to church regularly, lest he break the conditions of his sentence:

An Oklahoma teen convicted of manslaughter has sentenced to 10 years of probation, with requirements that include regularly attending church….In deferring the sentence, the judge not only ordered Alred to a decade of church attendance, but also required him to finish high school and welding school.

Alred’s attorney and the victim’s family agreed to the terms of the sentence.

Now I know the family has actually agreed to it (mostly because it seems to oblige their son NOT to become a high school dropout loser), but it doesn’t change the fact even the judge realized how unconstitutional the whole thing was. Nevertheless, he thought it wise to include a sentence forcing the young man to attend church services for at least 10 years of his life. This sentence is obviously meant to give him structure and discipline, but it’s frustrating people still think religion helps you act more moral. It’s simply not true. In fact, religious can often make you act totally immoral, with the added ‘bonus’ of feeling simultaneously morally superior and thinking your invisible friend is on your side (killing others in his supposed name comes to mind). If anything, he should have ordered the kid to read The God Delusion, since the atheist prison population is disproportionately small. Could you imagine the outrage if he did? Fox News would have a fucking meltdown.

Religious whacko stabs husband because Jesus told her to

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A few days ago, I debated two religious dudes on a show called “Faith and Skepticism” (they might as well call the show oil and water considering how incompatible those two things are), and the one thing they couldn’t seem to grasp is the idea that “hearing the voice of God” is usually a sign of insanity. Obviously, the degree of this insanity can be measured by analyzing what is being communicated. If the little voice inside your head is telling you that you’re a good person and need to donate more money to whatever religious institution you’re part of, we would rank this as fairly low on the nut-job scale (though medical treatment should still be sought). If the voice tells you to stab your husband because Jesus and Mary told you he’s Satan spawn, you’ve probably reached the point where serious medication is your only “salvation”

A woman who allegedly stabbed her husband said she did it after, “Jesus and Mary told me to kill him because he is Satan’s spawn!” according to a police report… Horry County Police deputies were called to [Tammy] Estep’s residence at approximately 6:45 a.m. on the day of the incident. When they arrived, Estep told officers that “She was sent to save the world,” according to a police report.

What better way to save the world than by stabbing your partner repeatedly? My question is how long had she been over the deep end, and were there any other signs people ignored up until that point, convinced that her scary nonsense was just religious fervor. It’s kind of hard to tell sometimes, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s not a coincidence…

Pope’s butler gets 18 months in jail for leaked memos

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So, what do you get for exposing the corruption of an organization like the Vatican? Well, how about an 18 month prison term handed down by the very institution you were trying to expose? Oh, and you can add the cost of the trial to the list of his expenses:

The pope’s former butler, Paolo Gabriele, was convicted Saturday of aggravated theft for leaking confidential papal documents and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

He was also ordered to pay the costs of the trial at the Vatican City courthouse.

Well, he could have spent a full three years in jail, but the judge felt there were ‘extenuating circumstances’. Like what, the fact that your organization is so corrupt it would rather jail tattle-tales than actual child rapists? Or how about the fact you aren’t legally your own state, having achieved ‘independence’ from Italian fascists in the 1920′s?

I suppose you could argue that it’s Paolo’s fault for getting involved in a creepy cult that seems to be able to create its own laws, jail its own adherents for daring to expose corruption, and do so as the rest of the world watches on.

The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 264

This week, Carisa joins me as we talk about global warming, Curiosity rover landing on Mars, and the shooting at a Sikh temple by a white supremacist.

The Good Atheist
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The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 264
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Where was God at the Aurora shooting?

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There’s a predictable pattern to the way religious people deal with tragedy. Undoubtedly, this kind of horrific thing makes them question the dogma they’ve been spoon fed their entire life – that an omnipotent being cares for their well being, especially when it seems so senseless; the evils of the world throw this ‘loving god’ thing back in their face, and they don’t like it.

Then come the rationalizations:

Let’s be clear: there are no easy answers to the deepest questions of suffering. Libraries overflow with the volumes that have been written to address these questions. Centuries of philosophers, pundits and preachers have reflected on the existence of evil, the meaning of pain and the role of God in suffering.

Centuries? More like millennia. In fact, some 300 years before the supposed birth of Jesus, a Greek philosopher by the name of Epicurus essentially laid out the most compelling argument regarding the notion of God’s relationship to evil ever made. His argument has yet to be refuted:

Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?

Your answer, sir?

The capacity to choose God and goodness came with the commensurate ability to choose evil. Is it loving to force his creation to follow his order, or to teach it and leave the creature to choose? It would seem that God came to the same conclusion that America’s founders did many millennia later: compulsory virtue is no virtue at all.

Ah yes, the old free will argument. God could eliminate all evil, but in doing so he would be subjugating us, and we wouldn’t have the ‘option’ to turn away from him. That’s all fine and good for the god of the Old Testament, who simply obliterates the unbeliever’s soul. The Christian god, unfortunately, has a rather unpleasant fate for anyone who exercises their own free will and chooses not to love an invisible tyrant. In his view, it is more moral to allow a person the right to choose their actions for a lifetime (however brief) than to torture that person forever for making the wrong ones. Sorry, your god sucks.

Let me suggest simply that God, in his sovereignty, has chosen to make our decisions meaningful. Consequently, much of what happens on earth neither conforms to, nor results from, his preference. There are at least four influences on human events: God’s will, to be sure; but also the will of Satan, our adversary; peoples’ choices, for better or for worse; and natural law (gravity, collision, combustion, and the like).

What a confusing mess of influences here. Why does Satan even exist? Sure, we make him out to be the bad guy, but it seems to me he’s simply the ‘bad cop’ to God’s ‘good cop’ routine. Without Satan there to look like the bad guy, you realize that by failing to rid the universe of this loathsome entity, he is in fact endorsing evil. Like Epicurus pointed out: if God is all powerful, and there is still evil, it is by his choice alone. One cannot condone evil without being part of it.

You don’t get nearly the same consternation in Burundi or Burma, because suffering is normal to them. God and hard times coexist intuitively there.

God likes to be where the action is, and there’s no greater place of suffering than Africa. And because tragedies are a regular occurrence there, Aurora isn’t a big deal. See, isn’t that a satisfying answer to the problem of evil? It isn’t?

The God of the Bible promises no exemption from suffering. In fact, he all but promises suffering. He does not suggest that his followers won’t go through fire, but rather that we won’t burn up.

What a deal! Sign me up for this omnipotent god who spends his time ‘grieving’ with me when my infant son dies of a highly treatable illness. Hopefully I got him baptized in time, or he’ll burn in hell!

Where was God in Aurora? He was on the lawn in front of the Civic Building as thousands gathered in solidarity, hope, and love at a packed prayer vigil last Sunday.

God was with those people who, powerless as they are, could do nothing but grieve. Sounds like the all powerful creator of the universe, doesn’t it?

Redemption has only begun in Aurora, and already God is everywhere. There will be beauty once this story is written that overshadows and transcends the ashes.

It’s doubtful any of this supposed beauty would make up for the innocent lives lost at something as peaceful and enjoyable as a movie. I would rather none of this happened rather than see an opportunity for human solidarity in the face of tragedy.

Woman’s punishment for DUI is reading the Bible

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So you fucked up. You drove drunk, smashed into another car, and injured the passengers. Now you’re part of the legal system, and at the mercy of very human, and very flawed human beings who have a very tenuous grasp on the separation of church and state. The result is probation, and an odd book report on the book of Job.

Such is the fate of Cassandra Tolley, who wound up agreeing to this strange request from Judge Michael Nettles (which appears to be the only reason this hasn’t caused more uproar). He wants her to read the book of Job, which has a certain tinge of cruel irony to it. You see, Tolley is apparently a victim of abuse, which would certainly make her feel some sympathy with poor Job, who is tortured by God in order to win a bet with Satan.

The story is said to have a happy ending, but considering his entire family was annihilated, I’m not entirely sure having twice the livestock makes up for it. In any case, I hold to my statement that reading the Bible is the fastest path to atheism. What else are you supposed to conclude from the story other than God considers humanity no better than toys, to be used, abused, and discarded as he deems fit? What a swell guy! Can he have all my money?

The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 255

This week, Carisa joins me as we discuss the recent obsession with zombies, both in movies and in real life, plus a new designer drug nicknamed ‘bath salts’ that a big part of the focus seems to be on. If it all sounds like a shitty “Tek-War” plot line, then you aren’t too far from the mark.

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The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 255
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Church stages kidnapping, facing charges

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When your main weapon in the war of ideas is fairy-tale nonsense, I can see how some religionists might feel a little intimidated with reality. Unlike those ‘heady’ days in the past when any old idea passed muster so long as a man of the cloth gave it a thumbs up (like the 17th century edict that declared the beaver a fish), our modern understanding of the natural world has only served to further marginalize faith. As church attendance continues to fall throughout the Western World (32% of us are faithless, according to this recent Gallop poll), desperation is beginning to set in. How else can you explain this story: a Church in Pennsylvania, called ‘Glad Tidings Assembly of God Church’, is facing charges after members staged an elaborate kidnapping hoax in an effort to ‘inform’ kids of the dangers of ‘religious persecution’.

Adults, including an off-duty cop, brandished weapons and put bags over the heads of the children, ages 13 through 18, and forced them into a church van. The group was driven to the home of an assistant pastor, who was presented before the group with a seemingly bloodied and bruised face, according to Dauphin County District Attorney Fran Chardo.

One of the adults used a real AK-47, though the gun was unloaded, Chardo said.

One of the teens, who can’t be identified, seems to be genuinely messed up from the experience (that’s religion for you). If you’re wondering exactly what these morons hoped to accomplish by brandishing weapons and threatening physical harm to children, the explanation from the pastor Pastor John Lanza won’t do much to enlighten you. He tries to justify it by claiming this staged kidnapping would…

secure the shock value of it and to make it much more real because those who are threatened don’t have a warning. It was a youth event to illustrate what others have encountered on a regular basis.”

Well, considering that holding a minor without their consent is a crime punishable by 10 years in jail, perhaps these adults should be given a taste of things to come by staging an elaborate ‘prison’ scenario so they can benefit from illustrating what they can expect on a regular basis in the big house.

Christians use data-mining to rally voters

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Are you starting to feel as though we’re losing this war of ideas? Sure, we keep growing day by day, but when push comes to shove, we can’t hold a candle to our religious counterparts when it comes to getting organized. Take, Bill Dallas for example. After spending half of his 5 year sentence for embezzlement, Bill was “born-again” while in prison. Rather than try and defraud people out of their money through real-estate, Bill has decided instead to get into politics (next logical step, right?) He managed to convince a bunch of rich Silicon Valley executives to fund a company that data-mines the internet looking for unregistered voters with a religious bent. The company, called “United In Purpose“, awards “points” for individuals in their massive database which strongly indicate conservative values. If you’ve ever watched Nascar, gone fishing, or subscribed to any anti-abortion newsletter, odds are you’ve scored high on their system, and you might just get a call.

The company buys lists to build a profile of each citizen, and then assigns points for certain characteristics. You get points if you’re on an anti-abortion list or a traditional marriage list. You get a point if you regularly attend church or home-school your kids. You get points if you like NASCAR or fishing.

So far, UIP claims their database comprises some 180 million adults, and that number continues to grow as UIP keeps buying up mailing lists from anyone willing to sell information. They then compare anyone with high scores on their close-minded scale and then attempt to get these people to register to vote, sometimes even showing up at their door.

Can you even imagine something of that scope happening on our side? How are we supposed to compete with companies who get set up specifically to find morons and get them to vote ultra-conservative on everything? How can we hope to win this war if we’re still acting like a bunch of unherdable cats? Fuck me these guys are organized…

Judge dismisses sectarian assault on Atheist, blames him instead

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Imagine you get physically assaulted for speaking your mind, and when it was time for your attacker to face justice, he’s sent merrily on his way by a Judge who shares his specific religious convictions. Would you not regard this as a gross miscarriage of justice?

Well, that’s exactly what happened to fellow non-believer Ernest Perce, who was assaulted last October during a parade. Representing the Pennsylvania Non-Believers, Perce donned a zombie Mohammed costume intent on making a statement about Islam. Talaag Elbayomy (a recent immigrant to the US) saw Perce and immediately began attacking him, convinced that this blasphemy was actually a crime. The incident was caught on tape, and the police officer at the scene reported that Elbayomy had indeed admitted to the assaults. Perce pressed charges, and what should have been an open and shut case instead turned into a farce when the judge threw the case out. District Judge Mark Martin, a Lutheran, refused to allow the video as evidence. He even had the audacity of lecturing the plaintiff on what constitutes an appropriate use of his First Amendment Rights:

Here in our society, we have a constitution that gives us many rights, specifically, First Amendment rights. It’s unfortunate that some people use the First Amendment to deliberately provoke others. I don’t think that’s what our forefathers really intended. I think our forefathers intended that we use the First Amendment so that we can speak our mind, not to piss off other people and other cultures, which is what you did.

I’m sure the Founding Fathers, a bunch of rebellious intellectuals who decided to overthrow their government to form their own, didn’t intend for people to be offended by free speech. The only form of effective revolution is to politely keep your opinions to yourself, right?

Some of the more dramatic headlines suggested that the Martin had used “Sharia Law” to reach a verdict. I wouldn’t go that far, although I am glad that other serious professionals are calling out this moron for showing a complete lack of understanding of basic principles of free speech. I think this clown allowed his religion to cloud his already shitty judgement, and I believe that despite a miscarriage of justice, we’ve at least succeeded in showcasing how disturbing it is when sectarianism creeps its way into the courts. Thanks for taking one for the team, Ernest!

NOTE: The judge is in fact a Lutheran. The statement he made in court saying “I am a Muslim” was not meant to be taken literally. Thanks Alex for pointing that out.

The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 211

This week, Ryan joins me as we talk about drug prohibitionism, and the religious connection.

The Good Atheist
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The Good Atheist Podcast: EP 211
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Kelowna atheist bus ads get stolen

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So, even though we expected this kind of juvenile behavior from some of our neighbors down south, Kelwona BC has the distinction of not only being the first city to have atheist ads stolen; they also failed to report the theft, so there’s no way to know when it actually disappeared. All in all, it’s pretty fucked up.

Lame Pastor lies about being in Navy SEALS

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After being interviewed for a piece on the armed forces by the Patriot-News – a scrappy little Pennsylvania Newspaper that despite its small readership still manages to win accolades – it was discovered that Rev. Jim Moats was not in fact a Navy Seal, and that he had fabricated a story based on the movie “Under Siege”.

“We deal with these guys all the time, especially the clergy. It’s amazing how many of the clergy are involved in those lies to build that flock up,” Shipley said.

I guess when you’re trying to impress your new flock, you’re bound to embellish things a little. In Moats’ case, he had his two sons make him a fake Navy Seals plaque and simply didn’t correct people who assumed that he must have fought in Vietnam as a special op. He didn’t, and when a real newspaper actually bothered to check up on the story, they found out that they had been duped. So they went back, confronted this lying moron, and got him to confess he’s been pretending all this time to be a hot shot when he’s merely a cowardly liar. Do you expect anything else from guys who make their living spewing nonsense professionally?