Superstition Plus Sweatbox Equals Death

While I have authored many a blog post criticizing the afterlife beliefs of Abrahamic religion, it is well known that there are many other varieties of afterlife belief and hocus pocus nonsense. Logically, these other flavors of superstition (which include their own versions of a mind-body disconnection doctrine) should be just as hazardous to your health as the mainstream beliefs.

And they are.

Case in point: Rowan Douglas Cooke, a voodoo-schmoodoo hokey-pokey new ager from Australia, died a horrible death back in 2004 because of his belief in a not as popular - but just as deadly - afterlife/spiritual belief. But to be more technical, it wasn't his belief in this bullshit that got him killed so much as the fact that the people around him also believed in this crap, and didn't take the right actions when warning signs appeared.

News.com.au has more:

Rowan Douglas Cooke, from Melbourne, died on November 3, 2004, hours after he was dragged unconscious from a makeshift sweat lodge constructed on a creekbed in the Gammon Ranges in South Australia's far north.

Mr Cooke had been camping with 10 other Victorians on Yankaninna Station, 325km north of Port Augusta, for a "vision quest", where people fast, meditate and purify themselves in an attempt to see visions.

He had entered the 1.2m high dome - made of 16 bent poles, covered in blankets and heated by hot volcanic rocks - about midnight to meditate but collapsed some hours later.

In evidence before the inquest into Mr Cooke's death this week, South Australian deputy coroner Anthony Schapel heard that as the 37-year-old lay dying from extreme dehydration his fellow campers began to chant and play drums to revive him, believing he was astral-traveling.

This is the perfect example of superstitious morons seeing shit that isn't there. Their friend is having a serious medical episode, and these bozos think that he's simply having a spiritual experience! They can't tell the difference between a meditative trance and massive dehydration! They confuse comas and seizures for astral projection!

In his finding today Mr Schapel referred to the foolhardiness of conducting a ritual of this nature in the manner and circumstances employed.

He was critical of the time it took for those involved to get help for the dying man and said it had not occurred to anyone that emergency assistance might be required, given the intrinsic dangers of the sweat lodge ceremony.

But he said the "critical factor" was the extreme beliefs of the group.

"It has to be placed on the public record that the extreme nature of some of those beliefs, as revealed by the evidence that I heard, played a significant role in the failure to secure timely and appropriate medical attention for the deceased," Mr Schapel said.

...

"However, much of the above tends to pale somewhat when it is remembered that the one thing that really stood in the way of the deceased obtaining timely medical help was the belief system entertained by the group that held the deceased was simply experiencing some kind of detachment from his physical being."

Astral projection, spirits, ghosts, angels, demons, pixie dust, faeries, witchcraft, amulets, blessings, curses, God, and especially the afterlife ARE ALL BULLSHIT!

Kill The Afterlife, not Australians.

The Only Moral Abortion is a Christian Abortion

Equine Shine has a jaw dropping blog post about the hypocrisy of the anti-choice movement. Equine Shine highlights some of the best testimonies from Joyce Arthur's article "The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion" of doctors who provide abortion services and some of the strange encounters they have had.

Feast on the craziness:

“I have done several abortions on women who have regularly picketed my clinics, including a 16 year old schoolgirl who came back to picket the day after her abortion, about three years ago... Next morning she was with her mother and several school mates in front of the clinic with the usual anti posters and chants. It appears that she got the abortion she needed and still displayed the appropriate anti views expected of her by her parents, teachers, and peers.”

"...She told me that she had been offended by the other women in the abortion clinic waiting room because they were using abortion as a form of birth control, but her condom had broken so she had no choice! I had real difficulty not pointing out that she did have a choice, and she had made it! Just like the other women in the waiting room.”

“I once had a German client who greatly thanked me at the door, leaving after a difficult 22-week abortion. With a gleaming smile, she added: ‘Und doch sind Sie ein Mörderer.’ (‘And you’re still a murderer.’)”

Absolutely unbelievable!

Why is it that when I read these stories of anti-choice women getting abortions, I get the feeling that, fundamentally, they are following the same self-hating and hypocritical pattern of those male Christians who rail against gays, then turn around and pay to suck dick?

Horribly Awkward First Sexual Encounter 'Worth The Wait' For Christian Newlyweds

This is why waiting until marriage before sex sucks. From TheOnion.com:

"I'm so glad we waited until we got married—it made it so much more special," said the 26-year-old Linda, who is "pretty sure" John's penis penetrated her vaginal opening during the brief, fumbling lovemaking session. "I can't imagine what a letdown our first sexual experience would have been if we'd done it at some point during our five years of dating."

...

After an estimated 45 minutes spent in prayer and devotionals to ensure the smoothest possible act of coitus, John made sure the windows and doors were all securely locked, and that all windowshades and blinds were closed. He then reached to his nightstand to turn out the lights "to contribute to the feeling of romance" and "because Linda refused to let me touch her nightgown until the room was completely dark."

It only gets funnier (and possibly more pathetic). You gotta go read the whole thing.

Christopher Hitchens in Los Angeles

I've been rather busy this week, and unfortunately don't have much time to post. But I can at least share with you a recent interview with the "so hot right now" Christopher Hitchens, conducted by the LA Weekly:

I would think it was a bad thing if the species was destroyed by an apocalyptic weapon, but I can’t see how any religious believer would think it was such a bad thing. To them it’s not a tragedy — it can’t be. They’ve repeatedly said so.

Christ Permanente

While the good old days of letting Jesus fix what ails you are long gone, there is potential for the emergence of a new kind of faith-based healing! You see, not only do I blog against God and the afterlife, but I also happen to work in the health insurance industry, so the concept of praying away the costs of scientific and materialistic healthcare rather than praying away the sickness itself (we all know how well that works, am I right?) is very interesting to me.

Gladys S Parker of The Onion proudly leads the charge for faith based insurance:

Why, just the other day I went to County General because my legs were giving me awful pains, and this nurse starting asking me questions about providers and what was my health care plan and wanting my insurance card so she could copy it. I said, "Child, I don't need all that fancy paperwork—not as long as I have Jesus in my heart."

No matter what sorts of hardships and illnesses life throws my way, I always count on the Lord to oversee my managed care. So I told that nurse to send my bills right up to heaven. Send them right on up, because Jesus is my preferred provider and He always grants me full coverage. After all, Jesus believed in healing the sick and helping the poor, so He most definitely believes in paying my doctor bills on time.

The Son of God doesn't screen for pre- existing conditions, and the only requirement for coverage is that you accept Him into your life. There is no deductible with the Lord, and every doctor, clinic, and hospital is in His network. As long as I get down on my knees and submit my claims every night, Jesus will accept them. Even though Peter denied Him three times in a single night, He never denies me, no matter how many ovarian cysts and respiratory infections I might develop.

Set the Microwave to Exorcise

Really, I am tired of blogging about Christian-inspired infanticide attempts, but I just can't stop because every time I am ready to change the topic, another nutjob nukes their baby:

GALVESTON, Texas (AP) -- A woman blames the devil, and not her husband, for severely burning their infant daughter in a microwave, a Texas television station reported.

Eva Marie Mauldin said Satan compelled her 19-year-old husband, Joshua Royce Mauldin, to microwave their daughter May 10 because the devil disapproved of Joshua's efforts to become a preacher.

"Satan saw my husband as a threat," Eva Mauldin told Houston television station KHOU-TV.

A grand jury indicted Joshua Mauldin last week on child injury charges after hearing evidence that he placed the two-month-old in a motel microwave for 10 to 20 seconds.

The infant, Ana Marie, remains hospitalized. She suffered burns on the left side of her face and to her left hand, police said.

I'm sorry to report that this couple does not qualify for membership in the Offspring Murder Club, but they do get an honorable mention for their efforts.

On another note, this mother must really be dense. Why is she blaming Satan, even if she does sincerely believe it? Is she really so stupid as to think that this would serve as some kind of legal defense?

I think that both of these parents should be stuffed into adult size microwaves and each be given a one minute run on the "poultry" setting. And then they should be sterilized, if the 650 watt nuking didn't accomplish this already.

And while they serve their jail time, each of these parents should be forced to write, "Satan is imaginary and he didn't make daddy nuke the baby," ten thousand times.

Atheists Pwn The Argument From Effect

Theism does not a better person make.

Spankings, Sex, and Salvation

UPDATE: Why is it that Christians are so obsessed with spankings anyway?

It seems that the Rev. Sherman C. Gee Allen of the Fort Worth based Church of God in Christ has allegedly been creatively putting some extra God into his flock:

A Fort Worth pastor accused of paddling and raping women under the guise of scriptural teaching has been suspended by the national body of the Church of God in Christ.

The suspension comes more than three months after a Fort Worth woman sued the Rev. Sherman C. Gee Allen of the Shiloh Institutional Church of God in Christ, contending that he repeatedly beat her with a paddle from 2001 to 2005 and forced her to have sex with him.

Since then, eight more women have come forward with similar stories, according to the woman's lawyers.

...

Ms. Kelly, a 34-year-old mother of three, said Mr. Allen then gave her a Bible and asked her to turn to passages such as the one that yielded the phrase "spare the rod, spoil the child."

"It ended up being a lot of Scripture on spanking for the most part – parents disciplining their children," she said in a February interview. "When he had me read them, it became obvious he meant for it to be spanking me."

...

After the third meeting, she said, Mr. Allen told her to grab her ankles and swatted her once with a green wooden paddle.

"I felt a bit confused," she said. "Afterward, he hugged me, told me he loved me. He just wanted me to obey."

The paddling escalated from there, she said, with Mr. Allen ordering her to pull down her jeans and then her underwear. Ms. Kelly said she was hesitant but believed so devoutly in Mr. Allen's power that she viewed it as a spiritual father/daughter relationship.

"I looked at him as a man of God, my pastor," she said. "I just revered him. I always thought he was hearing from God."

...

Around March or April 2005, Mr. Allen made sexual advances and eventually added sex as part of her punishment, she said.

Ms. Kelly eventually sought help and left the church in September 2005. But she said she didn't call police because she was afraid.

"He had literally put his hand around my throat and said that if I ever told anybody, he would hurt me," she said.

Ms. Kelly isn't alone in making the allegations.

According to a 1983 Fort Worth police report, a 21-year-old woman said she had contacted Mr. Allen about voodoo and he had promised to bring her an antidote that she could use while bathing.

But after he came to her house to talk to her one day, she blacked out, and she believed she had either been hypnotized or drugged, the report said. The woman alleged that Mr. Allen paddled her, sodomized her with a club and raped her.

Surely, many rapes and sexual assaults take place that have nothing to do with religion. But this is one of those special religious-based instances where the injection of religious dogma into the situation allows for a sexual assault that otherwise might not have occurred.

Read carefully the words of Ms. Kelly, who said, "I looked at him as a man of God, my pastor... I just revered him. I always thought he was hearing from God."

Yet again, we see that the religion - the afterlife belief - served as a catalyst for the assault. The religion served as a tool to control the women into doing things they otherwise would not have done. Additionally, the religion served as an excuse or justification for the preacher to do things that otherwise would have not been acceptable.

I'm also curious as to how ignorant this preacher was. Rev. Allen was committing these offenses as recently as 2005, which was long after the child sex scandal broke out in churches across the US. Didn't this preacher get the memo, and decide that maybe he should lay low until the sex scandal blew over? I suppose he wasn't thinking with his right head.

Rational Response Squad vs Way of the Master

RRS totally won. Go Brian and Kelly!

Snowball Rolling Down The Hill

From Germany to Delaware, churches are losing members and closing doors. It would appear that the atheist snowball is gaining speed and mass as it continues to roll down the mountain of the elite to the valley of popularity. Oh my God that was a lame metaphor!

Germany's Church:

Beer looked around. Her bed is in the choir loft and there's an espresso machine where the hymnals used to be; the arched windows are clear but they rattle; cobwebs shimmy on fading whitewashed walls.

"Jesus is gone," she said. "I'd like to turn it into a studio for artists."

The village church is struggling for relevance in modern Europe. The continent is rooted in Christianity, but devotion is ebbing and church attendance has dropped steadily for years. In Germany and other nations, Protestant and Roman Catholic churches are selling properties or leasing them to other religious groups, especially in cities and villages where structures are left vacant as shrinking congregations merge.

Secular conversions

Churches have been reinvented as restaurants, coffee houses, clubs, apartments and music halls. Some have kept their frescoes and stained glass; others have been de-sanctified, yet their unmistakable facades and architecture leave an imprint of the holy on even the most capitalist of endeavors.

America's Church:

On Sunday morning the empty pews and gray heads in Delaware's mainline churches are making some pastors a little anxious.

They want to fill the pews but don't know how, said the Rev. Greg Brown of Milton, a clergy coach who works with pastors.

Mainline denominations -- such as Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and Episcopalians -- have declined in Delaware by 2 percent to 3 percent from 1990 to 2000, the latest statistics available.

...

Question of survival

Yet if people lose the habit of finding meaning in worship, will all of the state's churches survive?

This is a question mainline denominations have been asking for about 40 years as they've seen their memberships decline, said the Rev. Mark Pruett-Barnett, chaplain at Wesley College.

In fact, most of the more than 300,000 U.S. congregations are not growing.

Could it be that people find superior happiness in real-world activities and interests rather than praying to and worshipping something that you can't see, hear, or otherwise directly experience? Recently, I saw a Simpsons episode where Marge was babysitting Ned Flanders’ sons. Rod (or Todd, I can't remember) relays to his father what he thought of his time spent with Marge by saying, "She made us happy. For real happy, not church happy."

And the statistics seem to agree with the Flanders' assessment of happiness. Church attendance and violent crime correlate, where less of one tends to go along with less of another, at least nationwide. This applies to both America and Germany. The high crime areas of Germany are where there is a high theist (Muslim) population, and the lower crime areas of Germany are the unchurched areas.

Now of course, I am not implying causation between the two. No, I believe its more complex than that. I believe that secularism and good social behavior are both caused by education and prosperity. More education and prosperity = more happiness, which leads to less crime and less church attendance. Basically, if you find real happiness through self-awareness and accomplishment, you won't try to find it in crappy places, like in crime sprees and worship services.

The Afterlife Cheapens Both Life and Death

When shit like this happens, do assurances of eternal happiness in another dimension provide genuine comfort? Do promises of another, better existence pay proper respect to a tragedy such as this? Can a family grieve appropriately when this kind of disaster is watered down by predictions of infinite bliss via an oxymoronic "life after death"?

No.

Kill the afterlife. Spare the troops.

God Made Him Rape Her

This is absolutely unbelievable:

A GOLD Coast man who claimed his body was regularly taken over by an ancient Egyptian sex god appeared in court yesterday charged with sexually assaulting his teenage stepdaughter.

The 29-year-old man and his 40-year-old wife, an erotic masseuse and "spiritual healer", allegedly had sex with and in front of the 14-year-old girl. The mother also allegedly had sex with the daughter's boyfriend.

Both pleaded not guilty in Southport District Court to nine charges including rape, carnal knowledge and maintaining a sexual relationship with a child.

Opening what he described as a "bizarre" case, Crown prosecutor Peter Nolan said the man claimed to take on the persona of Min, the ancient Egyptian god of sexuality and fertility.

"Min" went into a trance-like state and took commands to perform sex acts on his stepdaughter from the accused woman, who was known as "master" and who called her daughter "the entity", the court was told.

...

In a statement read to the court, the victim said she was convinced that Min was an "unlimited god" with "special powers" that would make her forget she had been molested as a child, cure her of a cyst and teach her how to have multiple orgasms.

This is yet another example of an adult doing something horrible to a child while citing some religious/afterlife based pseudo-justification.

I find it disgusting that religious people constantly push the false idea that only God can give one a moral foundation, but then they get caught doing something awful and use their God and His associated dogma to deflect blame and absolve themselves of responsibility for their crime. Where's your morality now, you bastards?

I've been blogging about god/afterlife related sex crimes so much lately because of all the new cases that keep popping up in the news. When the Catholic Priest gay pedophilia scandal burst open a few years ago, I assumed that it would have been a sign for other religiously motivated perverts to watch their behavior. It seems that I was wrong.

By the way, I've also been looking all over the Internet for "adult rapes child in the name of atheism" articles, but I just can't find any.