OVO

for Ira Cohen

I
off to the beiad what ho for the Fayyum & Egyptian solitude. This yearning for renunciation out-seduces other Lesser lusts & becomes our secret vice our coenobitic luxe. Our athletic asceticism is crypto-aestheticism

our grottos

coat our grotesque bodies in mother-of-pearl we grow a few herbs nudge nudge & every day wink wink a raven arrives with a loaf of “bread.” The desert so monochromous to jaded urbanites offers auras & auroras to the

anchroritic eye

Our nothingness is a giant suck-hole

that

re-appropriates the world & our friends the devils

Little Anthony & the Temptations we succumb to every one of them

especially

the succulent succubus of dolce far niente

which the worldly call prayer.

II
Juice for Jesus

You yourself are a kind of food of love & love a kind of spiritual cannibalism – & not so totally spiritual for those whose taste in love runs to precious bodily fluids. Jesus is the juice of your genitalia your tears your underarm sweat et cetera music at best the sauce High Church Victoriana pompous as beeswax & ammonia.

Appetite

would never feed on itself if it could lick the dirt from your shoes. Real food is based on you like distant emanations from the Platonic kitchen

caviare

champagne

& other disgusting sacraments of the Libertine Gnostics

They laughed at Yeats because he never missed the dinner bell at Colle no matter how

entranced

with swans. Fools

the food of love is actually food.

III
Everyone talks about negative capability but nobody ever does anything about it

Every day

we cram ourselves with juicy disasters

planning

later to dry out our heads with whiffs of some bodhisattva’s farts

or Art

or ideology or shopping

hoping

to forget what the wise old elves always stage-whispered to me on the most radical afternoons of unreconstructed Summer

Psst! hey kid

come & eat clouds like us eat emptiness & feel the scintillating buzz the enticing somethingness of a rich

long-ago nothing that can hover in mid-air like a

dragonfly

or Jesus the water-bug.

IV Twelve Steps to Hell

1.
Abraham & Eggs
vaudeville duo advocating
the meltdown of monotheism
in a maelstrom sweet as treacle
Breakfast of heretics shed for me
blackpudding mushrooms kippers
rashers of bacon & lashings of tea
because it’s not what enters the mouth
that pollutes as the Borborites say
or pale Carpucrateans with their sacrament
of precious bodily fluids
but what comes out of it
language as puke

2.
The Sevenheaded Cobra demands
immediate re-paganization of the Abrahamic Traditions
or hostages will be shot
out of circus cannons & bounce
like swans in widespread nets
with Theosophical warps
& polymorphous wefts
too complex for even the most advanced
generation of military computers
to map with any degree of inaccurate
inaccessible mountain somewhere
in the almost Martian landscape
of Waziristan.

3.
Why should the Right monopolize
mystic runes groovy grafitti
skull-&-crossbones or the color black
Ice shelves of Arctic unreason
are melting melting
leaving behind
only a pair of red shoes such as
vegetarian spirits like to sport
hobgoblins haunting Europe
with nastly recrudenscence
of funkadelic thaumaturgy &
illiterate syncretism
the snakes cult to end all snake cults
return of the never quite sufficiently
repressed
in the form of goat panic terror
& shameless idolatry.

(from OVO 16 ANTICHRIST January 2006)

magine that you meet someone who offered you a magic pony, a bag of candy, and to be your best friend forever. The generous stranger promised thirty times they would do these things for you within your lifetime, and then disappeared. They never came back in your life, or the lives of your children, or your children’s children, or any of your descendants for over two thousand years. Would it make sense to keep waiting for the generous stranger who made such amazing promises, or would you admit that he told a nice story but didn’t deliver the goods? Jesus said thirty times that He would establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth within the lifetime of those who saw Him speak. Two thousand years later, Christians are still making excuses for their lying Messiah.

• The great day of the LORD is near, it is near, and hasteth greatly, even the voice of the day of the LORD: the mighty man shall cry there bitterly. – Zephaniah 1:14
• For thus saith the LORD of hosts; Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land; And I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations shall come: and I will fill this house with glory, saith the LORD of hosts. – Haggai 2:6-8
• But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another: for verily I [Jesus] say unto you, Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come. – Matthew 10:23
• Verily I [Jesus] say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom. – Matthew 16:28
• Verily I [Jesus] say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation. – Matthew 23:36
• And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come. – Matthew 24:14 [Romans 10:18 states: But I say, Have they not heard? Yes verily, their sound went into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world.]
• Verily I [Jesus] say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled. – Matthew 24:34
• Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. – Matthew 26:64
• And he [Jesus] said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power. – Mark 9:1
• Verily I [Jesus] say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done. – Mark 13:30
• And Jesus said, I am: and ye [“the high priest”] shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. – Mark 14:62
• But I [Jesus] tell you of a truth, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God. – Luke 9:27
• Verily, verily, I [Jesus] say unto you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live. – John 5:25
• And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light. – Romans 13:11-12
• But this I say, brethren, the time is short: it remaineth, that both they that have wives be as though they had none. -  1 Corinthians 7:29
• Now all these things happened unto them for examples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come. – 1 Corinthians 10:11
• Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand. – Philippians 4:5
• For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. [...] Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. -  1 Thessalonians 4:15, 17
• That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand. -  2 Thessalonians 2:2
• God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds. – Hebrews 1:1,2
• For then must he [Jesus] often have suffered since the foundation of the world: but now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. – Hebrews 9:26
• For yet a little while, and he [Jesus] that shall come will come, and will not tarry. – Hebrews 10:37
• Be ye also patient; establish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh. – James 5:8
• Who [Jesus] verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you. – 1 Peter 1:20
• But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer. – 1 Peter 4:7
• Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that Antichrist shall come, even now are there many Antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time. – 1 John 2:18
• Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. – 1 John 3:2
• The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass; and he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John [...] Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand. – Revelation 1:1, 3
• Behold, I come quickly: hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown [...] Behold, I come quickly: blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book. – Revelation 3:11, 22:7, 12
• And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be. – Revelation 22:12

(from OVO 16 ANTICHRIST January 2006)

Yael Ruth Dragwyla is a writer; a ceremonial magickian, and sometimes editor of various alternative press publications.

OVO: What are some of the varieties of non-physical travel?

YRD: The two principal kinds are the out of body (OBE) stuff, where you literally leave your body and go elsewhere, and bilocation, where your mind is in two places at the same time whether or not you manifest physically in two places at the same time. I’ve found by experience and I’ve seen this reported in the literature that sometimes you’re thinking very hard about a place, you’ll be sitting in your living room thinking about a place and people will see you walking down the street in he place that you’re drinking about. They’ll say ‘Hi’ and you just disappear. You’ve bilocated into that city because you were thinking so hard about something.  You my actually have a physical appearance if you don’t have a physical weight or anything there. Your mind is definitely there as well as in your own body, so you’re not unconscious. With out of the body stuff, you actually leave your body. I bilocate routinely when I’m doing a magickal ritual.

OVO: Is this something that anyone could experience?

YRD: Anybody can experience it and I think at least a few times in your life everybody experiences it. If you’ve ever had a dream where you’re walking along an you suddenly stumble and there’s a bad jolt as if you’ve fallen on your face and you wake up, usually that means you’ve fallen back into your body after an OBE dream. Everybody’s had at least a couple of those. Everybody’s had an experience where you’re sitting in a chair and thinking about a place and suddenly it seems almost as if you were there. Everyone almost bilocates all the time but to do it effectively an exactly the way you want to without any hitches (or come close to go anyway), special training of stuff that is already in everybody is needed. People who have been in bad accidents or who were seriously traumatized on a chronic basis as children, a lot of the filters in their brain that are normally present for the rest of us aren’t there and they will tend to have these experiences more often. Therefore they’re the ones most likely to need the training. But this is something we all do at some point.

OVO: What does the training involve?

YRD: One of the things you can do is get the traditional crystal ball or bowl of water, and you gaze into it long enough that your mind gets bored with thinking about things and gives it up while you continue to stare into this thing. You start seeing pictures, pictures in your mind’s eye. When that starts happening you can train the pictures into being where you want them to be. If you keep doing this for quite a while you’ll find yourself projecting your mind at least partially to this other place. If you’re projecting into this bowl of water and you’re in, say, Los Angeles, and you’re thinking about London, you’ll start to bilocate into London. How far you’ll get with that I don’t know. There are all sorts of books on the subject. Another technique is to get a poster of a place you’d very much like to visit and you keep it on your wall. Five minutes a day you meditate on it and pretty soon you’ll be going there in your dreams.

OVO: What ls the relation between something like bllocatlon and modern electronic media, which has some of the same effects as those attributed to bilocation?

YRD: With modern electronic media you have to have all that junk, whereas with bilocation you can do that spontaneously and all you need is your own head. Bilocation can produce more real manifest effects and do it in a real world way than electronics. Electronics is always planted and less complex than real life is. You don’t get get to touch and smell things on TB, you just see them. With bilocation all sorts of real life things am come across. If you actually get an out of the body experience you can pick up everything from music to smells to the way something feels when you
rub your hand over it.

OVO:: What about the difference between out of the body experiences and bilocatlon and the like and psychosis or madness? How can you tell the difference?

YRD: Psychosis is when you loose control. If you can’t stop doing it its madness. It’s as if your body were in full panic mode and everything was frightening whether it should have been or not or your thoughts endlessly drift. The person who is psychotic is in bad shape, because they’re not fully in control of themselves, their thoughts run on in ways they can’t control. They can’t maintain control over their emotions so they drift in a psychological wind. But with these properties of bilocation and OBBs, when you do them spontaneously, if you’re sound and sane you get back home again without any problems. If on top of that you have training in how to utilize these things you get there and come back and you’ve achieved something along the way, you have control over this process.

OVO: What ls a way for someone to test the reality of it if someone thinks they can bilocate?

YRD: If you think you’re in a city and you’ve never been there before, try to go to a corner where there’s a street sign. Get the names of the streets, addresses, if possible names off mail boxes. When you’re awake again write all this down as quickly as possible so you don’t forget and go to a library and look it up on a map. If you can, stop and talk to somebody. Say ‘hello’ and engage them in a conversation, in which you ask them about their city. Say you’re a stranger. If they’re speaking in a foreign language that you don’t understand that’s a pretty good test of it.

OVO: Do you know of examples of that happening?

YRD: I’ve read of it in the literature. Beyond that it’s by guess and by god.

One of the things that is very hard to do in dreams and in astral projection is to look at your own hands. I’ve tried it. Raise your own hands in front of your face and look at them. If you can’t do that or if you have trouble even putting the thoughts together to do that, that may be something that tells you that you’re astral-traveling rather than in a normal waking state. If you can think about doing it you’re not in a normal dream. I’d like someday to found my own university of esoteric sciences – for real, such that eventually it would produce graduates who simultaneously have a degree in some esoteric field, like say alchemy, and at the same time in something that would get them a job, a top-level job, working, say, for the government, or cities, or environmental protection. In Kipling’s book Kim the main character says “I thank Allah for both sides of my head.” This culture does not educate both sides of the head as they did in medieval times when they had the Curriculum. The point of the Curriculum was the well-rounded man. We need to do that again but we can’t go back to the medieval way of looking at the world. We know better, so we have to go forward, to a spiritual literacy that is up-to-date with all our experiences, good and bad, in the twentieth century. That’s what I want to start some day, real education. Not new age bullshit but education for both sides of the head in a way that is appropriate to the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first.

(from OVO 13 TRAVEL January 1992)

The faith-healing parents of Alayna May Wyland are fighting to get custody of their daughter back, even as they face criminal charges for their neglect of her medical needs. [...] Their daughter was taken into custody by the state in early July and sent for immediate medical treatment. At that time, neither the name of their daughter nor her condition were available. The image above was taken by the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office. In it, Rebecca Wyland is holding Alayna, who has a massive growth completely covering her left eye. The growth, a hemangioma, is a mass of blood vessels. Some infants are born with them, and they are typically corrected while very small. In this case, the Wylands chose not to take their daughter to a doctor. Instead, Rebecca Wyland anointed her daughter with oil and wiped off the discharge from Alayna’s eye each time she changed the child’s diaper. At this point, the growth has begun to erode Alayna’s eye socket, and may have caused permanent damage to her eye. Both parents have been charged with first-degree criminal mistreatment, a Class C felony which may earn them each five years in prison.

Article continues.  See my previous essay Child Sacrifice in Oregon to learn more about the Followers of Christ Church in Oregon City, Oregon.  Of course every good Christian knows Christianity doesn’t say that you should pray for sick people and put oil on them instead of offer them medical care. Of course every good Christian knows that Psalms 103:2-3, Matthew 10:1, Matthew 10:8, Matthew 19:26, Mark 6:13, Mark 10:27, Luke 1:37, Luke 18:27, Acts 28:8-9, and James 5:14-15 don’t exist.  Because if those verses did exist, it might turn out that the parents of Alayna May Wyland were the real ‘good Christians’ and the rest were just picking up the bits they liked from the Jesus salad bar and leaving the rest.

NASA

On July 20, 1969, the human race accomplished its single greatest technological achievement of all time when a human first set foot on another celestial body. Six hours after landing at 4:17 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (with less than 30 seconds of fuel remaining), Neil A. Armstrong took the “Small Step” into our greater future when he stepped off the Lunar Module, named “Eagle,” onto the surface of the Moon, from which he could look up and see Earth in the heavens as no one had done before him. He was shortly joined by “Buzz” Aldrin, and the two astronauts spent 21 hours on the lunar surface and returned 46 pounds of lunar rocks. After their historic walks on the Moon, they successfully docked with the Command Module “Columbia,” in which Michael Collins was patiently orbiting the cold but no longer lifeless Moon.

The Guardian

South African wildlife experts are calling for urgent action against poachers after the last female rhinoceros in a popular game reserve near Johannesburg bled to death after having its horn hacked off. [...] The gang used tranquilliser guns and a helicopter to bring down the nine-year-old rhino cow. [...] Rhino horn consists of compressed keratin fibre – similar to hair – and in many Asian cultures it is a fundamental ingredient in traditional medicines.

So there you have it.  Two perspectives for what to do on 20 July.  In one, science and achievement land men on the moon.  In another, “traditional medicines” make it profitable to kill off the last female of an already endangered species.  For all the feel good grooviness of “traditional medicines,” my blood boils when I read articles like this.  There’s just no excuse to patronize “traditional medicines” any more.  We could be on our way to the stars, but instead we waste our world for super-spooky ghost cures.

Against all odds, people have found cures for some few illnesses in the ancient past.  The cures that work are very worth keeping, testing and improving upon.  But that never describes traditional medicine.  Traditional medicine has to be spoken of distinctly from medicine.  Medicine works because it works.  Traditional medicine is traditional, so it must be medicine, so it must work.  Yes, chamomile tea calms my upset tummy down almost right away.  No, rhino horns don’t do a thing for anybody.  When a cure doesn’t work, stop it.  No matter if it’s traditional, no matter if it’s a cultural, no matter if it’s a custom.  Some perspectives for what to do on 20 July are better than others.

Spitting contempt on “traditional medicines.”

“Would it not be… an anachronism to cultivate the taste for harbors, certitudes, systems?” – Jaston Bachelard

I consider the past ten years of my life to be a conscious process of experimentation – but not in the scientific sense. The scientific method is not merely to come up with an idea, test it and record the results; it is also creating a closed system in which to test the idea. This is necessary to test the certitude. In an open system certitude isn’t possible since you cannot know all the factors involved. Although I did do some experimentation of a more scientific method (dream work and magical studies), in general I have avoided this.

My avoidance of scientific method in my experimentation is due largely to the fact that my life experiment is aimed at a breaking out of character armor and social conditioning, to increasingly become my passions and desires – which is to say to become the marvelous breaking forth in the world. This process is a process of opening up and so I cannot help but outgrow a closed system.

Among specific aspects of exploration that I have done, I have attempted, with some success, to increase my sensual awareness, to truly experience consciously what I was seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling. I did this while living in an urban environment. My method was simple – to note every experience mentally and let myself fully feel what it made me feel.

Unfortunately, the very success of this experiment was disastrous, because it left me feeling very depressed and under constant sensory attack. I finally had to leave San Francisco for a less hectic place and recuperate.

It was about a year later that I began my experiments in dream work. These were truly scientific in method in that I was working through a specific system (one which combined Senoi dream work and modern psychological methods) and recording the details, using specific questions aimed toward making the dreams useful and giving the dreamer dream control. I had always been a fairly active, intense dreamer so this was not a difficult project for me. I tended, while conducting the experiment, to remember four to six dreams a night. Over the course of the experiment (which lasted about a month) two things happened to my dreams. First, I began to have more control, until I was able to always determine the outcome of the dream in my favor; and second, my dreams became increasingly mundane, reflecting fairly accurately problems I was dealing with in the immediate present. So this experiment was successful in terms of what it was supposed to do – it made my dreams useful and gave me control. But in the process, it took the adventure, excitement and wonder out of my dreams. So l stopped the experiment, eventually even ceasing to write down my dreams.

I still tend to have some control in my dreams, and an awareness that I am dreaming, but fortunately my dreams have largely lost their usefulness and the sense of wonder and adventure have increased. The most important lesson I feel I’ve learned (though only gradually) from this experiment is the very real opposition between utility and the marvelous.

My other major “scientific” experiment was my exploration into ritual magick. I had become involved in a relationship that was very unhealthy for me, and much of the headway I have made in throwing off character armor and conditioning seemed to have been lost. In my frustration, I turned to a system. Combining aspects of A. O. Spare, Crowley and some modern chaos magick, and using tarot and a few other tools – as well as a lot of my own imagination – I created my own version of chaos magick. My purpose was to call forth energy of chaos within me in order to break down my conditioning. Although in the midst of some rituals I would feel ecstatic and my one act of practical magick seemed to work, all in all, this experiment was a failure. I did not become more loose, more free or more happy. I was not more capable of living my desires. In general, the opposite happened. And I think this was inevitable. The ritual form is a closed system and a closed system ultimately becomes a prison. Ritual could only close me in more. A few years earlier, I had been involved with a series of group “rituals” which were, in act, not rituals at all but ecstatic free play encompassing improvisational music, dancing, howling and just plain fun. These free-form play times, which always ended in a feast, were where I truly experienced wonder and ecstasy and the energy of my wildness. During these play times, I experienced flight, lycanthropic changes and similar truly marvelous events. So it is clear to me now that open, free play, not closed systematic ritual, is the way to break down conditioning and open to the marvelous.

As to the act of practical magick that seemed to work, as I will show it manifests more the failure of my attempt at practical magick than its success. I was becoming increasingly aware that I was involved in an unhealthy relationship. Had my rituals been breaking down character armor as I wished, I would have easily been able to break off this relationship as a simple, direct act of will. But I wasn’t able to do this, so instead I did a ritual to an end. Within a month the relationship shattered with a vehemence that was truly shocking. Strangely enough, that split did more good for me than the rituals I had been doing.

I am still recovering from the steps backwards brought on by my unhealthy relationship and my failed experiment in ritual magick, but I continue to experiment non-scientifically. I have spent the last year wandering, seeking to break with attitudes that can develop when one gets too settled into a “normal” social existence. I am seeking to relate more freely – as a desiring, passionate being, a fluid, constantly changing being – rather than as a static set of social roles and habits. It’s hard, but I’ve learned that it doesn’t free me to replace one set of conditioning with another. So for me, no more scientific experiments, whose closed systems could never reflect real life, but rather the open experimentation aimed at the breaking down of all systems. No doubt it can lead to madness – I’ve felt close to that many times – but, to paraphrase Bachelard, “If, in any experiment, one does not risk one’s reason, that experiment is not worthwhile attempting.”

(from OVO 12 SCIENCE November 1991)

BBC: Pakistani Couple Charged with ‘Occult Killing’ of Baby

A couple in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi have been charged with murdering their baby daughter as part of an alleged “black magic” ritual. Officers found the body of the four-month-old girl buried in the couple’s house, a court heard. Doctors say it had been there for about four days. They believe the couple were planning to murder their second daughter, a girl of three, who police found tied up.

Telegraph: Saudi ‘Sorcerer’ Who Raped 100 Sentenced to Death

He first drew them in by saying he could cast love spells, but then surreptitiously filmed their meeting and used his work for extortion and to rape them

Sky News: Russian Orthodox Believers Hospitalised After Drinking Holy Water

Those affected, including 48 children, are being treated in hospital for acute intestinal pain after drinking water from wells around a local church last week.

Seattle Times: Accused Killer Scattered Body Parts, Prosecutors Say

Christensen told police the text message was evidence Harlan had broken a “Wiccan blood oath” she’d made to break off a relationship with the other man, prosecutors allege.

Yahoo! News: Motivational Speaker Charged in Sweat Lodge Deaths

About halfway through the two-hour ceremony, some began feeling ill, vomiting and collapsing inside the 415-square-foot structure. Despite that, Ray urged participants to push past their physical weaknesses and chided those who wanted to leave, authorities and participants have said. Two people – Kirby Brown, 38, of Westtown, N.Y., and James Shore, 40, of Milwaukee – passed out inside the sweat lodge and died that night at a hospital. Liz Neuman, 49, of Prior Lake, Minn., slipped into a coma and died a week later. Eighteen others were hospitalized.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Witch-Hunt Victim Recounts Torture Ordeal

Those who beat, punched and kicked Kalli Biswokarma, 47, accused her of casting evil spells on a schoolteacher who had fallen ill in the village of Pyutar, 40 kilometres south of Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu.

The Boston Globe: Haiti Calls Upon Voodoo Priests for Help

Beauvoir said the priests are counting among their own people, so they expect accurate numbers. He is confident the religious and scientific perspectives will not clash. In a nation where government barely functions, and where more than half the population of 9 million is believed to practice voodoo in some form, the assistance of these priests is considered critical to better assess the situation. The priests in Haiti dispense unofficial justice and cater to religious needs.

BBC: Voodoo Religion’s Role in Helping Haiti’s Quake Victims

“Some Christian communities do not want to give food to voodoo followers”

7online.com: Mom, Grandma Charged in Child Voodoo Burning

A mother and grandmother in Queens were charged Thursday with performing a voodoo ritual that left a 6-year-old girl – scarred for life. Queens District Attorney Richard Brown said 29-year-old Marie Lauradin and 70-year-old Sylvenie Thessier allegedly used an accelerant to set fire to the child, who suffered life-threatening injuries during the incident in February.

BBC: Child Sorcery in DR Congo

12 year-old, Henri, which is not his real name, points at a large fresh looking scar on his midriff. “People accused me of sorcery and my mother believed them,” he says. “Look, here on my stomach. She tried to kill me with a knife. It really hurt and I cannot understand why my mother did it.”

BBC: Indian Children ‘Sacrifice’ Probe

Five children poisoned to death in a village in India may have been “sacrificed”, police say. They say that the children were killed in Maharashtra state by a childless couple in a suspected black magic ritual to enable them to conceive.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation: 12 Children Die During Bad Luck Ceremony

Twenty-five children were rescued with minor injuries but 12 others – all below the age of 12 – were swept away in strong currents. The children were watching a ritual ceremony to dispel misfortune after a measles outbreak in the area. The adults were throwing offerings in the form of chickens into the river when the bridge collapsed, the official said.

All articles continue at links. Part three of a series, see also [1][2].  Magick is disappointing at best, murderous at worse.  No outcome can be known before an experiment is made.  Experiments that seem foolish may yield wonderful results.  But when outcomes are known then ignored in favor of conviction or passion (magick, religion, superstition) then the worst sort of outcomes will become normal.   For example, if one child sacrifice didn’t work then try two.  Meanwhile genuine solutions to problems (measles vaccines) or acceptance of situations that perhaps cannot be changed or are not so terrible (lack of love) are cast aside.  Magick might disappoint but make people feel better for trying.  Reason and compassion disappoint less and make people feel better for trying.  Where people are guided by reason and compassion, they do not elect for child sacrifice.  The number of people sacrificing children is small, but it would grow smaller still were the ‘nice’ magickians around them to be less satisfied with their disappointments in magick and turn to other pursuits.  Without the camouflage of the mean, the extreme withers.

Telegraph, Battle to save tigers intensifies with only 3,200 left on Earth:
The threat is compounded by the market for their body parts, which are deemed to hold medicinal properties in some cultures.

The Guardian, Martin Robbins on Christian and Islamist extremists in Nigeria:
On 29 July, Christian witch-hunters accused of torturing and killing local children attacked and beat campaigners for child protection at a public meeting in Calabar, Nigeria. The same week, hundreds of members of the Islamist group Boko Haram were killed in suicide attacks on police stations across the north of the country.

Gawker, Teabagger Worried His Magic Prayers Made God Kill Sen. Inhofe:
A panicked teabagger called up C-SPAN in tears today, worried that he accidentally killed Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe by praying for Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd to die.

BBC, Zulu king wins South Africa bull-killing case:
A bull-killing ritual can go ahead on Saturday after a court ruled against an animal rights group which tried to have the practice banned in South Africa. ARA claimed that the killing took some 40 minutes and involved dozens of men trampling on the beast as they tried to break its neck.

ESPN, Dominic Raynor: World Cup to be “blessed” with slaughtered cows:
“We must have a cultural ceremony of some sort, where we are going to slaughter a beast,” Trust chairman Zolani Mkiva said. “We sacrifice the cow for this great achievement and we call on our ancestors to bless, to grace, to ensure that all goes well.”

Yahoo! News, 10,000 E. African albinos in hiding after killings:
The mistaken belief that albino body parts have magical powers has driven thousands of Africa’s albinos into hiding, fearful of losing their lives and limbs to unscrupulous dealers who can make up to $75,000 selling a complete dismembered set.

BBC, Albino victim evicted from safe-house:
One year ago, Mariam Staford Bandaba, an albino woman living in Tanzania, was viciously attacked by a machete-wielding gang who tried to kill her and sell her remains for witchcraft. She escaped with her life, but only just. The attackers chopped off one of her hands – the other had to be amputated in hospital, where she spent weeks recovering from her horrific injuries.

LA Times, Churches involved in torture, murder of thousands of African children denounced as witches:
Nwanaokwo Edet was one of an increasing number of children in Africa accused of witchcraft by pastors and then tortured or killed, often by family members. Pastors were involved in half of 200 cases of “witch children” reviewed by the AP, and 13 churches were named in the case files. Some of the churches involved are renegade local branches of international franchises. Their parishioners take literally the Biblical exhortation, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

Guardian, Stepfather confesses to sticking 42 needles into boy’s body:
The stepfather of a two-year-old boy found with 42 needles in his body has confessed to jabbing them into him as part of a religious ritual, Brazilian police said today. Roberto Carlos Magalhaes claimed that a woman who went into a trance commanded him to stick the needles into the boy’s body, a police inspector, Helder Fernandes Santana, said.

All articles continue at links.  Superstition can be fun, and may be unavoidable.  But superstitions that lead to nonsense and brutality such as the above should have no sympathy from anyone.  It just does not matter if these are ancient traditions, or deeply-held convictions, or bring mental relief to practitioners.  These people should be shunned, at the very least.

For centuries Great Britain has served as a safe haven for refugees from political persecution. The reason Britain has been so attractive is its long tradition of political tolerance. This is history Britain ought to be proud of, even if it has been abused by people such as Karl Marx.  What made Britain unique was that the British public was tolerant of larger issues such as politics and religion while remaining decidedly intolerant of petty issues. The curtain-twitching disapproval of “alternative lifestyles” remained strong in Britain until the 60s generation rebelled against such moral sternness. While Britain in the 50s was a repressive society in many ways that many could not accept, just because Britain has a proud tradition of tolerance, it does not mean that intolerance does not have its own advantages.

To see what a society looks like when tolerance goes wild, observers only have to look at southern Europe or much of the third world. China shows what a socially tolerant society looks like. While China is not tolerant of political differences, the people are generally tolerant of behaviours that would not be acceptable in Britain. In China, smoking, talking loudly, using mobile phones in theatres or restaurants is perfectly normal behaviour. This is extended to a nearly complete indifference to public spaces and to other people that comes as a surprise to any newly arrived visitor to the People’s Republic. Driving in China is usually a shock even to those used to third world traffic as other drivers simply ignore anything not a direct danger to themselves.  As an example of the problems of excessive tolerance just compare the status of larger social issues such as crypto-science. While anyone in Britain who makes dubious claims for medical treatments can expect both the wrath of the authorities and public disapproval, in most of the rest of the world tolerance is extended to those claiming they can cure cancer or HIV with herbs.

In fact in China belief in the benefits of Chinese herbal medicines is extremely common, despite a noticeably lack of evidence to support such views. This extends up and down the social scale with the most educated Chinese often also being the most credulous towards such claims. Qian Xuesen, the American-educated founder of China’s rocket programme, for instance, was also a strong supporter of various Qigong groups, including Falun Gong before it was banned.  This tolerant attitude may well have played a part in China’s lack of an industrial revolution. For while British tolerance has not allowed the persecution of heretics in recent times, that has not been extended to their ideas. British scientists have inherited the Christian tradition of intolerance and that has driven technological progress. [...]

As the British have become more tolerant of petty transgressions it is no surprise that such behaviours have increased. Litter is much more common than it was 50 years ago, as is antisocial behaviour in general. However, this increasing tolerance extends from the housing estates to the Houses of Parliament. Behaviour that would have led to resignation half a century ago is now viewed with benign tolerance. Civil servants are not dismissed no matter how badly they manage public projects; politicians no longer resign no matter how badly they have behaved.

None of this is inevitable. Litter is not unavoidable and should not be tolerated. The waste of billions of pounds in badly designed IT projects is not a fact of nature but a blot on society we choose to accept rather than challenge. We can find our inner Inquisitor and we should express disapproval of behaviour that we do not need to tolerate. Britain can be the tidy, clean and safe place it was 50 years ago if only we, as a society, have the will to embrace intolerance for antisocial behaviour.

[Article continues.]

Two years ago (24 November 2007) I wrote about Mamie Manneh. Manneh was accused of illegally importing monkey meat “for religious ceremonies.”  Her lawyer wanted the charges dismissed “because they impinge on the importer’s right to freedom of religion,” that “bushmeat has spiritual significance and Ms. Manneh’s actions were protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.” “From her baptism in Liberia to Christmas years later in her adopted New York City, Mamie Manneh never lost the longing to celebrate religious rituals by eating monkey meat.”  Here is what I had to say about that…

Mamie Manneh is an attempted murderer who illegally imported the remains of endangered species into the USA for the purpose of eating them. Handling and consuming this animal can lead to some of the most nightmarish diseases known to humanity. Only spongiform encephalopathy and religion can soften the mind enough to cause a person to hold Mamie’s ‘culture’ or ‘sincere beliefs’ worthy of consideration in this regard. It’s easy to look around and see that no one around you is eating monkey and that almost anyone you ask would be horrified at the idea. It’s easy to not lie to customs. It’s easy to not run over people in cars. It’s easy to not have nine kids that you can’t take care of because you’re in prison for trying to kill a woman. I wish it was easy for judges to laugh and scowl and toss her superstitions out of the courtroom. But that would mean tossing out superstitions that are in better favor with the majority, such as Christianity and Judaism and Islam. How much better it would be if the Constitution of the United States were in effect, and there was no establishment of religion in America.

Time marches on.  In the past two years Manneh has had two more children, bringing the total to eleven.  And for her crime?  A crime Jane Goodall wrote could have “grave consequences on public health?”  A crime which could cause outbreaks of Ebola, measles, tuberculosis and retroviruses similar to HIV among even those who do not eat monkey meat as part of their superstition?  Probation.

Once again, religion is the get-out-of-jail free card.  You can chew off part of a baby’s penis, causing the baby to get herpes which leads to the baby’s death, then another, then another, and get… a warning.  You can neglect your child until they die of curable diseases… but if you are able to demonstrate you mumbled magic spells to an invisible monster that lives in the sky while you watched your child die and did nothing, you can get a reduced sentence.

Spitting contempt is all these morally retarded creeps deserve, and it’s all I have for them.  How much worse, though, that they are given leniency in court.

Olivia Lang, Hindu Sacrifice of 250,000 Animals Begins:

The government, which donated £36,500 to the event, has shown no sign of discontinuing the centuries-old tradition. An attempt by the previous government to cut the budget for animal sacrifice provoked street protests. Chandan Dev Chaudhary, a Hindu priest, said he was pleased with the festival’s high turnout and insisted tradition had to be kept. “The goddess needs blood,” he said. “Then that person can make his wishes come true.”

BBC, Taking the Global Pulse of Healthcare:

Rahul Bose, a community worker in West Bengal tells a story [...] “There was this lady who came to my house at eight in the morning,” he says. “She had been bitten by a snake at four in the morning, but since there were no male members in the house, she was not able to leave the house. When I took her to the hospital, the doctors delayed treatment for two hours and so she died in my car.” Cultural attitudes towards women in rural areas, as well as problems of distances from health centres both prove major challenges for improving health.

Robin Hanson, Social Science Cuts Religiosity:

A new NBER paper compares college majors for their effect on student religiosity. Majoring in biological sciences, engineering, or vocational areas all increase religiosity about the same relative to not going to college. Majoring in education encourages religion even more, while majoring in physical science has about the same effect as no college. Majoring in humanities reduces religiosity relative to no college, and majoring in social science reduces it the most.

Jeanna Bryner, Teen Birth Rates Higher in Highly Religious States:

U.S. states whose residents have more conservative religious beliefs on average tend to have higher rates of teenagers giving birth, a new study suggests. The relationship could be due to the fact that communities with such religious beliefs (a literal interpretation of the Bible, for instance) may frown upon contraception, researchers say. If that same culture isn’t successfully discouraging teen sex, the pregnancy and birth rates rise. Mississippi topped the list for conservative religious beliefs and teen birth rates, according to the study results, which will be detailed in a forthcoming issue of the journal Reproductive Health. However, the results don’t say anything about cause and effect, though study researcher Joseph Strayhorn of Drexel University College of Medicine and University of Pittsburgh offers a speculation of the most probable explanation: “We conjecture that religious communities in the U.S. are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself.”

Alex DeMetrick, Trial Postponed For Cult Members In Baby’s Death:

Home video of Javon Thompson and his mother Ria Ramkissoon doesn’t hint at the dark future awaiting them, when they became swept up in the religious cult of Queen Antoinettte. Authorities say cult members starved 1-year-old Javon Thompson because the boy did not say “Amen” after meals. His body was packed in a suitcase and taken to Philadelphia, where it was abandoned in a storage room.

Jennifer Viegas, Superstitious Beliefs Cemented Before Birth:

The propensity to believe in paranormal phenomena and superstitions appears to arise in the womb, suggests new research. The findings, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, further indicate that a reduced ability for analytical thinking may correspond with increased intuitive thinking, which has been associated with a belief in extrasensory perception (ESP), ghosts, telepathy and other paranormal phenomena. Author Martin Voracek claims his new study’s determinations “suggest (there are) biologically based, prenatally programmed influences on paranormal and superstitious beliefs.” [...] Prior research had determined that relative finger length, also known as digit ratio, can be a marker for individual differences affected by hormones. Men tend to have ring fingers that are slightly longer than their index fingers. In women, these fingers are usually about the same length, or the index digit is slightly longer. In some cases, however, women exhibit a digit ratio more associated with men, while men may exhibit the ratio associated more with women. The ratio is “a putative marker of prenatal androgen exposure, with paranormal as well as negative and positive superstitious beliefs,” Voracek explained, mentioning that exposure to testosterone and other male sex hormones in the womb are thought to underlie the observed differences. Voracek found that “higher feminized” digit ratio in men correlated with stronger paranormal and superstitious beliefs, “even when controlled for age, education, adult height and weight, and birth length and weight.” “Shorter feminized” digit ratios in women also correlated with a greater likelihood of superstitious beliefs, as did a woman’s lighter weight at birth. For both sexes, shorter body length at birth was associated with later beliefs in superstitions and the paranormal. The findings help to support the conclusions of Kia Aarnio and Marjaana Lindeman, both University of Helsinki psychologists who have extensively studied the propensity for paranormal and superstitious beliefs. They found that women are much more likely to have such beliefs, which the researchers attribute to “higher intuitiveness and lower analytical thinking.”

All articles continue at links. “The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous… Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame… True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force… But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them… He has no right to preach them without challenge.”- H. L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, September 14, 1925.

The 1st Session of the 111TH Congress has passed H. R. 3962 Affordable Health Care for America Act, or ‘A bill to provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending, and for other purposes.’  Earlier versions of this bill would have provided tax funding for magic spells (aka prayer).  Fortunately this section has been removed.  Prayer is a consistently dis-proven means of medical care and so to use tax funding in this way would have been a waste.  Further, to force all Americans (who may not be superstitious, or who may favor a different set of superstitions) to pay for the magic spells of some Americans is an establishment of religion, expressly forbidden by the United States Constitution.  My comments below are restricted to where superstition appears to remain in the bill.  It is entirely possible I do not correctly understand the bill, as I am not especially skilled at reading legal documents.  And this bill may not become law, or change in the process of becoming law.

from Abortion threatens House health care bill:

The issue of abortion threatened to derail House Democrats’ health care bill Friday unless staunchly anti-abortion Democrats and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops succeeded in their effort to get strict abortion limitations into the measure. [...] Now House leaders are not only negotiating with fellow lawmakers, but also with representatives from the bishops’ organization, Democratic sources said.  “It’s come to this,” said one bewildered senior Democratic lawmaker, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal deliberations.  [...] Several Democrats, including Rep. Jason Altmire, D-Pennsylvania, said they are in touch with their Catholic bishops back home. Altmire said he must have the approval of his bishop in Pittsburgh before he can vote yes.

Rep. Altmire, if he has been quoted accurately, has disqualified himself from further public service.  Those who elected him did not do so as a proxy for the Roman Catholic Church.  Rep. Altmire is free to consult anyone he wishes in his decision making process.  But to require the approval of representives of a foreign nation before proceeding is counter to the goals and responsibilities of his office.

H. R. 3962 includes the following:

Religious Conscience Exemption. (A) IN GENERAL. — Subsection (a) shall not apply to any individual (and any qualifying child residing with such individual) for any period if such individual has in effect an exemption which certifies that such individual is a member of a recognized religious sect or division thereof described in section 1402(g)(1) and an adherent of established tenets or teachings of such sect or division as described in such section.

It appears to read that a person can exempt themselves from mandatory insurance if that person “is a member of a recognized religious sect or division thereof.”  What, then, is a recognized religious sect?  What religious sects are not recognized?  Any decision by the State to answer these questions will be an establishment of religion, expressly forbidden by the United States Constitution.  I have been unable to locate section 1402(g)(1) referred to here.  And what is it that Religious Conscience Exemption makes a person exempt from? That would be Section 501…

Tax on Individuals Without Acceptable Health Care Coverage. In the case of any individualwho does not meet the requirements of subsection (d) at any time during the taxable year, there is hereby imposed a tax equal to 2.5 percent of the excess of — (1) the taxpayer’s modified adjusted gross income for the taxable year, over (2) the amount of gross income specified in section 6012(a)(1) with respect to the taxpayer.

Declare yourself a member of a state-established superstition and you can pay less taxes.  Who wouldn’t?  All it costs is the integrity of the United States Constitution.

H. R. 3962 also includes the following:

Training Models — In carrying out the education and training programs required by this section, the Secretary, in consultation with Indian Tribes, Tribal Organizations, Indian behavioral health experts, and Indian alcohol and substance abuse prevention experts, shall develop and provide community-based training models. Such models shall address — (1) the elevated risk of alcohol and behavioral health problems faced by children of alcoholics; (2) the cultural, spiritual, and multigenerational aspects of behavioral health problem prevention and recovery; and (3) community-based and multidisciplinary strategies, including Systems of Care, for preventing and treating behavioral health problems.

United States tax dollars should not pay for the ‘spiritual’ care of any nation.

There are at least two laws being discussed to change health care and insurance in the United States.

S.1679 Affordable Health Choices Act (Placed on Calendar in Senate) reads in part:

The essential benefits provided for in subparagraph (A) shall include a requirement that there be non-discrimination in health care in a manner that, with respect to an individual who is eligible for medical or surgical care under a qualified health plan offered through a Gateway, prohibits the Administrator of the Gateway, or a qualified health plan offered through the Gateway, from denying such individual benefits for religious or spiritual health care, except that such religious or spiritual health care shall be an expense eligible for deduction as a medical care expense as determined by Internal Revenue Service Rulings interpreting section 213(d) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 as of January 1, 2009.

H.R.3200 – America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 reads in part:

Sec. 125. Prohibition of discrimination in health care services based on religious or spiritual content.

Alternative medicine, Christian Science, the healing powers of prayer, Scientology auditing, exorcisms and more will get federal funding if these proposals become law.  If any kind of medical care gets federal funding I’d prefer it be evidence-based.  When you have to pay taxes and the taxes pay for this kind of nonsense, it isn’t alternative medicine any more.

Followup:
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger, Healthcare provision seeks to embrace prayer treatments [November 3, 2009]

Katharine Houreld, Churches involved in torture, murder of thousands of African children denounced as witches:

Nwanaokwo Edet was one of an increasing number of children in Africa accused of witchcraft by pastors and then tortured or killed, often by family members. Pastors were involved in half of 200 cases of “witch children” reviewed by the AP, and 13 churches were named in the case files. Some of the churches involved are renegade local branches of international franchises. Their parishioners take literally the Biblical exhortation, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” [...] The idea of witchcraft is hardly new, but it has taken on new life recently partly because of a rapid growth in evangelical Christianity. Campaigners against the practice say around 15,000 children have been accused in two of Nigeria’s 36 states over the past decade and around 1,000 have been murdered. In the past month alone, three Nigerian children accused of witchcraft were killed and another three were set on fire. Nigeria is one of the heartlands of abuse, but hardly the only one: the United Nations Children’s Fund says tens of thousands of children have been targeted throughout Africa. Church signs sprout around every twist of the road snaking through the jungle between Uyo, the capital of the southern Akwa Ibom state where Nwanaokwo lay, and Eket, home to many more rejected “witch children.” Churches outnumber schools, clinics and banks put together. Many promise to solve parishioner’s material worries as well as spiritual ones — eight out of ten Nigerians struggle by on less than $2 a day. “Poverty must catch fire,” insists the Born 2 Rule Crusade on one of Uyo’s main streets. “Where little shots become big shots in a short time,” promises the Winner’s Chapel down the road. “Pray your way to riches,” advises Embassy of Christ a few blocks away.

BBC, Vicar who raped young boys jailed:

A West Yorkshire vicar has been jailed for 14 years after being found guilty of raping two young boys and sexually attacking others. The Reverend Peter Hedge, 47, from Holy Trinity Church at Queensbury, near Bradford, had denied the attacks, which happened between the 1990s and 2000. A jury at Bradford Crown Court found him guilty of more than 30 indecent assaults as well as the rapes. A judge said he was a “dreadful disgrace” to the church. Hedge was also found guilty of another serious sexual assault. The court heard the vicar abused his position of trust to gratify himself sexually with six boys and then paid them to keep silent. The judge described Hedge’s actions as “calculated and systematic abuse”.

Greg Risling, Prosecutors brought fraud charges Thursday against a family doctor accused of promising terminally ill cancer patients in their darkest hours that they would be cured with an herbal treatment:

Using her influence as an ordained Pentecostal minister, Dr. Christine Daniel tapped into the vessel of faith to entice people from across the nation to try her regimen. She even appeared on cable’s Trinity Broadcasting Network in 2002 touting her cancer cure and its 60 percent success rate, according to federal investigators. Authorities arrested Daniel, 55, at her San Fernando Valley home Thursday and charged her with two counts each of wire and mail fraud. If convicted, she faces up to 80 years in prison.

John Christoffersen, Court won’t block release of sex abuse papers:

The Supreme Court refused on Monday to block the release of documents generated by lawsuits against priests in Connecticut for alleged sexual abuse. The justices turned down a request by the Roman Catholic diocese in Bridgeport. Several newspapers are seeking the release of more than 12,000 pages from 23 lawsuits against six priests. The records have been under seal since the diocese settled the cases in 2001. Courts in Connecticut have ruled that the papers should be made public. The decision ends a legal battle that dragged on for years and could shed light on how recently retired New York Cardinal Edward Egan handled the allegations when he was Bridgeport bishop.

Mark Mcgivern, College Reverend found dead faced investigation over child indecency:

A Cambridge University churchman who was found dead in his home faced child sex allegations in Scotland. Police were investigating indecency claims against the Rev Ian Thompson, 50, who is thought to have killed himself. Thompson, the dean of chapel at King’s College, died of asphyxiation at his house in Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire, on Thursday. The Glasgow-born cleric had already been reported to the procurator fiscal by Strathclyde Police over indecency allegations in Kilmarnock. His widow, Ann, said: “He was a wonderful man who was well-loved by people of all walks of life.” A university spokesman said: “We are neither confirming or denying any of the allegations.”

Nick Pisa, Vatican priest caught in red light district after police chase:

A Vatican priest led police on a high speed car chase leaving three officers injured after being caught in a red light zone, a court has heard. Father Cesare Burgazzi, 51, said he ‘floored’ his Ford Focus car after he mistook the plain clothes officers who tried to flag him down during a spot check as robbers. During the twenty minute early hours chase – which was described in court as “like something from a Hollywood movie” two police cars crashed and three police left injured. The court in Rome heard that Father Burgazzi was a priest who worked at the Vatican’s State Department and was also a master of ceremonies at St Peter’s Basilica.

Philadelphia Inquirer, Church court rejects Pa. ex-bishop’s new trial bid:

An Episcopal Church court has rejected a defrocked Pennsylvania bishop’s bid for a new church trial based on a recently discovered cache of letters related to his case. Charles E. Bennison Jr. was removed from his post last year after a church trial in Philadelphia found he covered up his brother’s sexual assaults of a teenage girl in the 1970s. Bennison’s lawyers argued that more than 200 letters recently found contradict witness testimony and show the victim tried to hide the relationship, hampering any intervention by the bishop.

Riazat Butt and Anushka Asthana, Sex abuse rife in other religions, says Vatican:

The Vatican has lashed out at criticism over its handling of its paedophilia crisis by saying the Catholic church was “busy cleaning its own house” and that the problems with clerical sex abuse in other churches were as big, if not bigger. In a defiant and provocative statement, issued following a meeting of the UN human rights council in Geneva, the Holy See said the majority of Catholic clergy who committed such acts were not paedophiles but homosexuals attracted to sex with adolescent males. The statement, read out by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s permanent observer to the UN, defended its record by claiming that “available research” showed that only 1.5%-5% of Catholic clergy were involved in child sex abuse.

Jennifer Dobner, Woman in Smart case competent for trial:

A state court judge said Friday the Utah State Hospital has determined that the woman charged in the 2002 kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart is competent for trial. [...] Barzee, 63, and her estranged husband, Brian David Mitchell, 55, face charges of aggravated kidnapping, aggravated sexual assault and aggravated burglary for the June 2002 kidnapping of Smart in Salt Lake City. [...] Barzee had long refused medication for religious reasons. In 2006, Atherton ruled Barzee should be forcibly medicated, and the Utah Supreme Court upheld the ruling in late 2007. Attorneys for Barzee appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court but were denied a review in May 2008 and Utah State Hospital doctors began forced treatment. [...] A self-proclaimed religious prophet, Mitchell also has been ruled incompetent for trial. Last year, Atherton refused to order forced medication, saying she was not convinced that anti-psychotic medications would restore Mitchell’s competency. Mitchell faces a Nov. 30 competency hearing in the federal case. Smart was 14 in 2002 when she was taken from her bedroom at knifepoint. In federal court testimony Oct. 1, Smart said Mitchell raped her daily and forced her to use drugs and alcohol. She also said Mitchell used religion as a ruse to get what he wanted, but never appeared to be spiritual or close to God.

Press Association, Priest jailed for child sex attacks:

A Roman Catholic priest referred to as the “devil in a dog collar” has been jailed for eight years over a string of sex attacks on young boys. Father David Pearce, of Ealing Abbey, Charlbury Grove, Ealing, used his “undoubtable charm and guile to bamboozle these boys and put them in a state of mind control”, Isleworth Crown Court heard.

Mike Ference, Let’s make a deal – let’s finally protect children instead of dysfunctional sex freaks:

My last examiner article was not meant to be prophetic. I guess after almost 20 years of investigating dysfunctional sex freaks like Raymond Lahey, a 69-year-old Roman Catholic Bishop who was recently released on $9,000 bail, charged with possessing and importing child pornography, maybe it just comes with the territory. [...] CBS News quoted from an email Earle had sent to his brother Billy: “During the investigation in 1989 I did reveal to police that during a visit to Father Raymond Lahey’s house in Mount Pearl, I found catalogs of child pornography addressed to Ray Lehay. The pictures were of teen boys sexually aroused.” If the report is accurate, did Lehay play let’s make a deal with the Canadian court system to keep the information hushed up? Was Lehay rewarded with a bishop post because of his skills in parleying deals with government officials to cover up sex abuse crimes against innocent children? Did Lehay help Catholic hierarchy cover-up other clergy abuse crimes? If so, how many other victims went without help? How many resorted to drugs or alcohol? How many victims committed suicide? We have to ask these questions. Catholic church hierarchy have had decades – if not centuries – to fess up to dysfunctional sex freaks parading around as priests, bishops, cardinals -  and yes, even popes. Instead, God’s most precious commodity – innocent children – are nothing more than bargaining chips for whatever prizes the Catholic church doles out to protect dysfunctional sex freaks. Contestants can win cash and other prizes; scholarships to Catholic universities and colleges for sons and daughters; lucrative distribution contracts with Catholic institutions; career advancement and job placement with corrupt political cronies; the list goes on and on. And so do the crimes and the cover-ups.

Tanya Gold, Ignore the bells and the smells and the lovely Raphaels, the Pope’s visit to Britain is nothing to celebrate:

In his actions on child abuse and Aids, Joseph Ratzinger has colluded in the protection of paedophiles and the deaths of millions of Africans. As Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Pope John Paul II’s chief enforcer), it was Ratzinger’s job to investigate the child abuse scandal that plagued the Catholic church for decades. And how did he do it? In May 2001 he wrote a confidential letter to Catholic bishops, ordering them not to notify the police – or anyone else – about the allegations, on pain of excommunication. He referred to a previous (confidential) Vatican document that ordered that investigations should be handled “in the most secretive way . . . restrained by a perpetual silence”. Excommunication is a joke to me, perhaps to you, but to a Catholic it means exclusion and perhaps hellfire – for trying to protect a child. Well, God is love. He also waved aside calls to discipline Marcial Maciel Degollado, the Mexican founder of the global Legion of Christ movement. Allegations of child abuse have stalked Maciel since the 1970s. His victims petitioned Ratzinger, only for his secretary to inform them the matter was closed. “One can’t put on trial such a close friend of the Pope as Marcial Maciel,” Ratzinger said. Two abuse victims sued him personally for obstruction of justice, but he claimed diplomatic immunity.

All articles continue at links.  Part of a series that never ends [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] and etc.

It is one thing, I am told, to defend the free speech rights of Holocaust deniers; but to engage and defend the content of their views, however cautiously – well, that’s another matter. Smoky’s over the line, says the one consumed with electric suspicion. And questions must follow. What are your motives? Do you hate Jews? Do you still beat your wife? Of course, the abstract argument is fine as far as it goes. It’s just that it doesn’t go very far. If we are serious, the next question must, at some point, intrude. Put another way, if people are being sent to jail for expressing ideas and writing words – and they are – it is only natural and fair to ask: what are those ideas? What are those words? When does a thought expressed become a crime? When it is incitement? When it is a lie? Could it be more complicated? Or less? My position is simple. I believe that you absolutely have to get your fucking hands dirty. I am convinced this is ultimately a matter of decency, and I mean this without irony. [...]

Decades ago, when the works of Henry Miller and William Burroughs and Hubert Selby and Jean Genet and other “literary outlaws” were at issue, expert witnesses lined up to testify as to the redeeming merit of every presumed obscenity. Sometimes the good guys won, and sometimes they lost. But such recourse is largely denied to today’s class of thought criminal. When Ernst Zundel’s lawyer attempted to defend the credibility of her client’s presumptively criminal views, they locked her up. Thus a game is rigged. Grove Press isn’t going to step up this time. It’s easier to sign the petition and shrug. If the lying fuckers should’ve known better, if they’re as bad as CP traders, if they only stoke the embers of a special hate – then a problem may filed away with an asterisk, that might as well be a swastika.  A subject has become inseparable from the stigma that latches. In lieu of discourse, one finds crass signage and deflective satire. A genuine controversy is held hostage by the nuanced strictures of dinner-party form, by the huff and heat of the latest never forget editorial. Yet the noise can only mask a familiar authoritarian gesture. The greatest taboo of our age is sustained in the synchronized cultural choreography of finger-wagging, sometimes from the professoriate, sometimes from the judge’s bench. You are being admonished. You are being told not to consider that there could be a second possibility. You are being told, in so many ways, not to look. And it’s only too easy to abide. All you have to do is read from the script you’ve been handed. Tell yourself it’s of a class with snuff porn or whatever agreed-to boundary. Console yourself with anti-hate sugarplums and bubbles and Frankfurt-schooled excuses. Play it safe. You will have their blessing. Yet something is wrong. Because people are in prison for writing and selling books. Once again, the public library etagerie is arranged for your edification. Construction paper letters stapled to the tackboard. Mark Twain and D.H Lawrence chain-locked in the display case. Harry Potter facing off against familiar cartoon christian enemies. Newsclips about southern school-board busybodies wringing hands over Heather’s two mommies. Banned Books Week as nostalgia, as distraction. As crude extortion, really – once you know what’s missing. And you don’t even feel the chill.

People are in prison for writing and selling books.

Article continues at link.

As if the issues surrounding socialized medical care weren’t complex enough… should the United States expand its tax-supported medical care programs to cover all tax payers, here are some of the issues that will have to be addressed:

U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Puerto Rico’s Largest Medical Facility Unlawfully Fired Nurse Because He Refused to Disobey His Religion:

Puerto Rico’s largest medical center violated federal law when it refused to accommodate a male nurse’s religious beliefs, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) charged in a lawsuit it filed yesterday. Further, the EEOC said, Hospital Auxilio Mutuo unlawfully suspended and fired the employee because of his religion. According to the EEOC’s suit, EEOC v. Hospital Auxilio Mutuo, Case No. 3:09-cv-1797, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Puerto Rico, a male registered nurse told the hospital he could not cut his hair short as an observance of his religion, Santeria. Nevertheless, the man was suspended after he explained his religious beliefs to the hospital and asked for an accommodation. Further, the EEOC said, the hospital retaliated against the nurse by firing him after he complained about the discrimination. The hospital’s policy allows female employees, but not males, to wear their hair any length, the EEOC said.

Barbara Anderson, Hmong shamans help at Valley hospitals:

Staff at most hosptials would be baffled by an instruction like this on a bedside chart: to prepare patient for surgery, provide 15 minutes of soft chanting and tie a red string around the neck. It’s different at Mercy Medical Center in Merced. There, nurses know they must call a shaman. Mercy is the nation’s first hospital with a formal policy for Hmong shamans, allowing the traditional healers, working alongside doctors, to help patients recover. Hospitals across the country are paying attention as they seek to accommodate cultural beliefs of diverse patient populations. In the San Joaquin Valley, the Hmong are one of a few ethnic groups — including some indigenous Mexican cultures — that practice shamanism. For those with traditional beliefs, calling on a spiritual healer is as important to good health as making an appointment with a doctor. They may go without care if they can’t have a shaman nearby, sometimes with devastating consequences.

American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, Understanding Satisfaction with Shamanic Practices among the Hmong in Rural California:

The Hmong are a group of people from Southern China, Laos, Northern Vietnam, and Thailand who have immigrated to the US and who have settled in rural counties in Central California. The literature suggests, the Hmong routinely use the services of shamans as part of their health care services. The purpose of this study was to determine the difference in the levels of satisfaction among Hmong clients who use shamans and their services in Fresno County with regard to factors associated with animal sacrifice, gender of the shaman and the practices inside or outside of the client’s home. Data were collected from 115 study participants in a rural California county. Findings from this study suggest that clients who had shamans conduct the rituals at their own homes and those who used live animals were significantly more satisfied than those had to travel to meet the shaman and those whose shamans’ use dead animals.

If the State must offer medical care, and if the State is forbidden from establishing one religion over another, and if medical care and religion are considered one in hospitals, then the State is forced into the position of paying for religious services – all religious services – if they are claimed to be “medical” or “traditional” or “healing.”  Is there anything that religion can’t make more complex and oppressive and harmful?  The alternative is for the State to insist only on secular medicine, leaving “alternative” services to the patient in question.  That seems reasonable to me.  Will that happen?  Is that happening now?

The following is an excerpt from Max Blumenthal’s new book, Republican Gommorah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, published by Nation Books.

A few miles down the road from Colorado Springs [a home to James Dobson's Focus on the Family], in the quiet bedroom community of Eldredge, a deeply disturbed young man named Matthew Murray followed the unfolding debacle at New Life Church [once under the stewardship of Pastor Ted Haggard] with an interest that bordered on obsession. Murray, a sallow-faced, bespectacled 24-year-old, had been indelibly scarred by a lifetime of psychological abuse at the hands of his charismatic Pentecostal parents. Murray’s mind became crowded with thoughts of death, destruction, and the killings he would soon carry out in the name of avenging what he called his “nightmare of Christianity.” On an online chat room for former Pentecostals, Murray heaped contempt on his mother, Loretta, a physical therapist who homeschooled him to ensure that his contact with the outside world was severely limited. [...] An authoritarian Christian-right self-help guru named Bill Gothard created the home-schooling regimen implemented by Murray’s parents. Like his ally James Dobson, Gothard first grew popular during the 1960s by marketing his program to worried evangelical parents as anti-hippie insurance for adolescent children. Based on the theocratic teachings of R. J. Rushdoony, who devised Christian schools and home-schooling as the foundation of his Dominionist empire, Gothard’s Basic Life Principles outlined an all-consuming environment that followers could embrace for the whole of their lives. [...]

At the Charter School for Excellence, a school in South Florida inspired by Gothard’s draconian principles that receives $800,000 in state funds each year, children are indoctrinated into a culture of absolute submission to authority almost as soon as they learn to speak. [...] After graduating from Gothard’s home-schooling seminars, which constituted the bulk of his education (Colorado has no educational records for Murray after third grade), he was presented by his parents with two options for higher education. The first choice was Haggard’s alma mater, Oral Roberts University. [...] Murray’s second option was the “Discipleship Training School” of Youth with a Mission (YWAM), a Christian Reconstructionist-inspired missionary group that trained bright-eyed youngsters to spread the gospel of Colorado Springs to under-evangelized Third World nations. Desperate to escape his parents’ rigid order, Murray joined YWAM. But as soon as Murray enrolled at YWAM’s training center in nearby Arvada in 2002, he found himself trapped in an authoritarian culture even more restrictive than home. He realized that, as another student of YWAM bluntly put it, the school’s training methods resembled “cult mind-controlling techniques.” [...] Murray lurched to the polar opposite edge of his parents’ fanatical faith, replacing their Bible as his inspiration with the writings of Aleister Crowley, a flamboyant, self-proclaimed Satanist. [...] Murray had been indoctrinated so thoroughly into charismatic Pentecostal culture, however, that even while he railed against his religious upbringing, he could not abandon his ingrained attraction to religiosity. So instead of fleeing hardcore Christian culture for secular humanism, a natural position for jaded skeptics like him, he traded his former faith for Crowley’s occultism. [...] Now he practiced Crowley’s faux faith as fervently as his parents wished he had worshipped their neo-evangelical macho Christ. But the occult only led Murray into a confusing new world of cheap thrills. By his own account, he engaged in “every sort of sexual pervrsion [sic]…that’s legal,” from anonymous gay sex to bestiality. He boasted of his proclivity for binge drinking, his love for death metal bands, and his penchant for spewing “blasphemy.” He envisioned his new experiences as positively transcendent. “In a way it’s like I’m just about completely rebelling against christianity [sic] in any way that I can,” the enragé mused, “but this is a little different of a rebellion.”

Article continues.  There’s no one solution that can make every young man and confused parent live happy lives.  But refraining from introducing the problems of superstition in the first place might be helpful.

EsoZone is a mutant unconference, Portland Oregon USA, October 9 and 10 2009.  See you there!

The Internet Archive suggests that The Raving Atheist started some time in 2002.  By September 2002 the site described itself as “an atheistic examination of the culture of belief: how religious devotion trivializes American law and politics.”  The site and its author have had a curious history.

The Raving Atheist (TRA) was influential on me in three ways when I found it in 2004.  First, TRA’s essays clarified for me the importance of distinguishing between religious belief and theocracy.  TRA wrote (quote): “any person asserting a special individual right or attempting to dictate social policy based about a belief in god must first 1) define the god, 2) prove that the god exists and 3) demonstrate how the right or policy follows from the belief in god.” Religious belief can be foolish, harmful and sad (or clever, helpful and joyous) but it is largely a matter of personal choice.  The trouble for all of us starts when religion is enfranchised into law.  The Raving Atheist helped me understand theocracy is where my criticism should primarily be addressed, with criticism of religion in general coming behind.  I often fail, but I’ve tried to criticize theocracy more harshly than religion or any particular religion.

Second, TRA reminded me that no set of beliefs is a package deal.  Just because a person is an atheist does not mean they are necessarily also a capitalist or a communist, although some capitalists and some communists would like to claim otherwise.  In this case, the reminder came in the form of TRA being strongly in favor of atheism and strongly against abortion.  That’s a combination I’d never seen before, TRA himself said it was rare and which remains a minority view.  TRA was banned from anti-abortion Christian sites for being an atheist, and looked at askance for being anti-abortion by atheists.  This rare combination of beliefs was helpful to me, whether or not I shared them.  Just as the Dalai Lama is not a vegetarian, The Raving Atheist and you and I pick and choose and invent our beliefs from a variety of inspirations.  Sometimes they seem to go together, sometimes we find others that share our beliefs and they appear to form a self-consistent ideology.  But it is just as likely we’re dressing up our preferences in fine justifications.

Third, for better and for worse The Raving Atheist influenced my writing style.  He didn’t just use reasoned criticism to address his concern.  He also heaped scorn and mockery on those he opposed.  TRA took news stories about theocracy and changed the wording so their absurdity and cruelty was emphasized.  I do these things as well.  If you like my work in this style, thank TRA.  If you don’t, blame me.

The better influences that TRA has given me remain, I hope, as I’ve changed in being an atheist and a writer.  TRA has also changed. There were few posts to the blog between 2006 and 2009.  Among them was a June 2006 post stating TRA “will never write another bad word about Jesus or Christianity on The Raving Atheist.” TRA also wrote:

“Neither Christ nor Christianity shall ever again be maligned on this site, I have vowed. In contemporary America continuing this blog under such constraints might appear to rival the composition of a thousand-page novel without the letter ‘e.’ Or perhaps without the alphabet, given that Christianity equates Christ with God, and that the denial of His existence could be fairly construed as an insult. The seeming impossibility of the challenge might suggest an abandonment of disbelief. Consequently charges of atheist heresy, of conversion to theism, have now been lodged against me. With such conversions I am well familiar. Often I have questioned whether a committed, well-read atheist has ever come to faith. No one is better able to recognize the symptoms of a religious transformation than I. But my own diagnosis I will not disclose. [...] I can only assure you that I will not be acting indifferently or agnostically. What has led me to this point, whatever this point is, is a firm conviction that I must go beyond words and set an example. I will not say whether what lies behind that conviction is God or not. You will have to content yourselves with the understanding that the truth of His existence, whether founded in fact, logic, or a combination of both could not possibly vary with what my words might command you to believe. But I will not tell you what I believe. And I will not tell you why I will not, and you will never trick it out of me.”

Reading that I wondered if I could write in favor of atheism without criticizing religion. I haven’t done so online, but I do have a book manuscript that attempts to do just that. Perhaps someday it will get that last bit of editing and see print.

On December 22, 2008, TRA wrote: “Three years ago, I promoted and appeared in the atheist documentary The God Who Wasn’t There, dedicated to the proposition that Jesus never existed. TODAY I DEDICATE THIS SITE AND MY LIFE TO THE WORSHIP AND SERVICE OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOR, JESUS CHRIST.”  Is this evidence that some beliefs are package deals, that it’s impossible to stay atheist if you’re against abortion?  Some say yes.  But I’m going to stick with no.  Just because you’re a vegetarian or a nature-worshiper or an occultist doesn’t mean you’re also a fascist.  Just because you’re an homosexual it doesn’t mean you’re gay.  You are what you are by choice and by chance, and political correctness of every stripe be damned. I am still puzzled when friends have a mix of heresies that don’t match my own.  But it doesn’t threaten me like it used to.

As of September 2009 a Google search for “Raving Atheist” returns his blog as the first match, with the byline “Atheistic examination of American law and politics.”  The site‘s own byline is “Dedicated to Jesus Christ, Now and Forever.”  The back content is mostly there, and what isn’t there is usually at the Internet Archive. TRA’s site isn’t as funny or inspirational to me as it used to be.  But the number of anti-abortion atheists was small, and the number of atheists-turned-Christian is also small.  TRA’s site is worth reading at minimum for its rarity.

hidden knowledge. witches & sigils.

fuck yeah occultism