Hard choices to make, (or just ignore ).

(CNN) — Authorities in Mississippi are holding a father of five in the deaths of his children, ages 1 to 8, the state’s Department of Public Safety said Tuesday evening.
“The seriousness of this violent crime is unconscionable,” said Albert Santa Cruz, Mississippi’s public safety commissioner.
Timothy Jones Jr., 32, is being held in Smith County on child endangerment charges and is awaiting extradition to South Carolina for prosecution.

Timothy Jones Jr., 32, had custody of his five children, ages 1 to 8.
The children, reported missing from South Carolina last week, were found dead in Alabama on Tuesday, authorities said.
Their remains were discovered off a dirt road in Wilcox County, said Sgt. Steve Jarrett of the Alabama Department of Public Safety.
Jones led law enforcement to the crime scene, Jarrett said. No other details were immediately available about how the children died.
A multi-state search for the children and their father involved the FBI and state law enforcement agencies. It was launched after the mother told Lexington County, South Carolina, sheriff’s investigators on September 3 that she has been unable to contact her former husband.
“Neighbors told deputies that the children’s father said he was moving with his children from his home near Lexington to another state,” said Lexington Sheriff Lewis McCarty.
Jones and the children’s mother were divorced. They shared custody of the children, according to the Lexington County, South Carolina, Sheriff’s office.
On Saturday, Jones was taken into custody in Mississippi on suspicion of driving under the influence. When his SUV was towed, authorities found evidence of a crime, the state’s Department of Public Safety said.
A check of the National Criminal Information Center found he was wanted in South Carolina.

-Yet another example of the fine work done by Social Services and the neighbors involved. The weak-kneed idiot neighbors sit by as the kids are being abused and do nothing, and Social Services is nowhere to be found, as usual for a bunch of useless assholes, (I have more stories about social workers than the GOP has lies, so please hold the sentiments about hard working over burdened CPS workers, I was one of those kids that they let slip thru obvious cracks). It makes me sick that social workers are rewarded for the number of families that they keep together at the expense of the children involved. If a child is taken from a useless drug addict, KEEP them away from the useless drug addict, don’t place the kid back with a newly recovering idiot that has demonstrated flagrant disregard for the life that they brought into the world! 

I understand the mentality of the addict, but the needs of the child trump the needs of the irresponsible parent and you will find no PC coddling here that you usually find with the ultra left set. I don’t give a rats ass about anyone but the innocent child here, the parent can take the Morning After pill before thinking that a baby will fit into her busy partying schedule. 

What I find funny is that when there are a few billion more mouths to feed on this planet then the feel-good people with be overridden on their bullshit and the choices of how to deal with overpopulation will be removed from their hands and placed in the government’s. No amount of pablum puked forth will stop the decisions made, because by this time it will be too late and starvation will be widespread. In other words, the consequences of inaction will certainly be worse than can be imagined. We seem to have too many freedoms and so every flophouse idiot who wants to feel loved can go ahead and bring a child into this world to later murder, and get the compassion card from the idiot liberal social worker who wants to heal the world without any tough decisive action.

What happened in the above story was totally preventable and a tragic consequence of the failings of our system. If a great number of people need to be retrained to understand how to exist in society, then maybe the answer doesn’t lie in just fucking caring them to death, or loving the fuck out of them, maybe it exists in forcing them to comply, ever thought of that? It’s certainly NOT a solution that the liberals would choose, and not one conservatives even CARE about, but us moderate, free thinking, skeptical critical thinkers are gravitating to more hands-on effective solutions that just might take away a drug addict/criminal/slacker’s Constitutional rights for awhile. They will probably thank you in the long run for helping to solve their problem in a year instead of twenty, and probably save hundreds of thousands of children from death! Do you get sick of hearing the tragic stories of murdered children? Then get off of your asses and make some tough choices!  

Getting back to GAWD isn’t gonna help either, prayer is as good as doing absolutely nothing. If the god Yaweh exists, then HE is a criminal bastard who should be BLAMED and not revered for HIS incredible incompetence. The lack of evidence suggests, nay proves, that we are in this alone and need to deal with this problem ourselves. The clergy has been almost as useles as Social Services, and the conservatives that mostly compose it only care about stealing everyone’s piece of the money pie. Good ‘ol fashioned critical logical thought is the only thing that is going to produce results. 

Attention to arms!!!!

Spreading the love to The Vatican

By Sam Harris

I confess that, as a critic of religion, I have paid too little attention to the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. Frankly, it always felt unsportsmanlike to shoot so large and languorous a fish in so tiny a barrel. This scandal was one of the most spectacular “own goals” in the history of religion, and there seemed to be no need to deride faith at its most vulnerable and self-abased. Even in retrospect, it is easy to understand the impulse to avert one’s eyes: Just imagine a pious mother and father sending their beloved child to the Church of a Thousand Hands for spiritual instruction, only to have him raped and terrified into silence by threats of hell. And then imagine this occurring to tens of thousands of children in our own time—and to children beyond reckoning for over a thousand years. The spectacle of faith so utterly misplaced, and so fully betrayed, is simply too depressing to think about.

But there was always more to this phenomenon that should have compelled my attention. Consider the ludicrous ideology that made it possible: The Catholic Church has spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution, declaring the most basic, healthy, mature, and consensual behaviors taboo. Indeed, this organization still opposes the use of contraception, preferring, instead, that the poorest people on earth be blessed with the largest families and the shortest lives. As a consequence of this hallowed and incorrigible stupidity, the Church has condemned generations of decent people to shame and hypocrisy—or to Neolithic fecundity, poverty, and death by AIDS. Add to this inhumanity the artifice of cloistered celibacy, and you now have an institution—one of the wealthiest on earth—that preferentially attracts pederasts, pedophiles, and sexual sadists into its ranks, promotes them to positions of authority, and grants them privileged access to children. Finally, consider that vast numbers of children will be born out of wedlock, and their unwed mothers vilified, wherever Church teaching holds sway—leading boys and girls by the thousands to be abandoned to Church-run orphanages only to be raped and terrorized by the clergy. Here, in this ghoulish machinery set to whirling through the ages by the opposing winds of shame and sadism, we mortals can finally glimpse how strangely perfect are the ways of the Lord.

In 2009, The Irish Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA) investigated such of these events as occurred on Irish soil. Their report runs to 2,600 pages. Having read only an oppressive fraction of this document, I can say that when thinking about the ecclesiastical abuse of children, it is best not to imagine shades of ancient Athens and the blandishments of a “love that dare not speak its name.” Yes, there have surely been polite pederasts in the priesthood, expressing anguished affection for boys who would turn 18 the next morning. But behind these indiscretions there is a continuum of abuse that terminates in utter evil. The scandal in the Catholic Church—one might now safely say the scandal that is the Catholic Church—includes the systematic rape and torture of orphaned and disabled children. Its victims attest to being whipped with belts and sodomized until bloody—sometimes by multiple attackers—and then whipped again and threatened with death and hell fire if they breathed a word about their abuse. And yes, many of the children who were desperate or courageous enough to report these crimes were accused of lying and returned to their tormentors to be raped and tortured again.

The evidence suggests that the misery of these children was facilitated and concealed by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church at every level, up to and including the prefrontal cortex of the current Pope. In his former capacity as Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict personally oversaw the Vatican’s response to reports of sexual abuse in the Church. What did this wise and compassionate man do upon learning that his employees were raping children by the thousands?  Did he immediately alert the police and ensure that the victims would be protected from further torments? One still dares to imagine such an effulgence of basic human sanity might have been possible, even within the Church. On the contrary, repeated and increasingly desperate complaints of abuse were set aside, witnesses were pressured into silence, bishops were praised for their defiance of secular authority, and offending priests were relocated only to destroy fresh lives in unsuspecting parishes. It is no exaggeration to say that for decades (if not centuries) the Vatican has met the formal definition of a criminal organization, devoted not to gambling, prostitution, drugs, or any other venial sin, but to the sexual enslavement of children.

Consider the following passages from the CICA report:

7.129 In relation to one School, four witnesses gave detailed accounts of sexual abuse, including rape in all instances, by two or more Brothers and on one occasion along with an older resident. A witness from the second School, from which there were several reports, described being raped by three Brothers: ‘I was brought to the infirmary…they held me over the bed, they were animals….They penetrated me, I was bleeding’. Another witness reported he was abused twice weekly on particular days by two Brothers in the toilets off the dormitory:

One Brother kept watch while the other abused me …(sexually)… then they changed over. Every time it ended with a severe beating. When I told the priest in Confession, he called me a liar. I never spoke about it again.

I would have to go into his …(Br X’s)… room every time he wanted. You’d get a hiding if you didn’t, and he’d make me do it …(masturbate)… to him. One night I didn’t …(masturbate him)… and there was another Brother there who held me down and they hit me with a hurley and they burst my fingers …displayed scar….

…

7.232 Witnesses reported being particularly fearful at night as they listened to residents screaming in cloakrooms, dormitories or in a staff member’s bedroom while they were being abused. Witnesses were conscious that co-residents whom they described as orphans had a particularly difficult time:

The orphan children, they had it bad. I knew …(who they were)… by the size of them, I’d ask them and they’d say they come from …named institution…. They were there from an early age. You’d hear the screams from the room where Br …X… would be abusing them.

There was one night, I wasn’t long there and I seen one of the Brothers on the bed with one of the young boys … and I heard the young lad screaming crying and Br …X… said to me “if you don’t mind your own business you’ll get the same”. … I heard kids screaming and you know they are getting abused and that’s a nightmare in anybody’s mind. You are going to try and break out. … So there was no way I was going to let that happen to me…. I remember one boy and he was bleeding from the back passage and I made up my mind, there was no way it …(anal rape)… was going to happen to me. … That used to play on my mind.

This is the kind of abuse that the Church has practiced and concealed since time out of memory. Even the CICA report declined to name the offending priests due to pressure from the Vatican. The cover-up of these atrocities continues.

I have been awakened from my unconscionable slumber on this issue by recent press reports (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6) and especially by the eloquence of my colleagues Christopher Hitchens (1, 2, 3, 4, & 5) and Richard Dawkins (1 & 2). Both have begun a public effort to make the Pope accountable for the Church’s complicity in these crimes. Here, I would like to announce that Project Reason, the foundation that my wife and I started to spread scientific thinking and secular values, has joined Hitchens and Dawkins (both of whom sit on our advisory board) in an effort to end the “diplomatic immunity” which the Vatican claims protects the Pope from any responsibility. We would greatly appreciate your support in this cause.  All donations are tax-deductible in the United States.

May 10, 2010

Update (August 7, 2011): Project Reason has sponsored Geoffrey Robertson’s, The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse.

Related Articles:

Eagleton, T. (2010). The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuses by Geoffrey Robertson The Guardian. (September 11).

Home, M. (2010). Author Sam Harris joins plot to have Pope arrested. The Sunday Times. (May 15).

 

– See more at: http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/brin#sthash.MjKR9Klf.dpuf

15 things to never ask an atheist.

A sensible look into some of the patently ridiculous things that Christians ask or assume regarding atheists.