#victims of religion

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

“You don’t get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.”

-- Daniel Dennett

[charlesoberonn]

The more I learn about Mormonism, the more I hate it and the more I need everyone (especially Americans) to know about Mormonism so they could hate it too.

[balkanradfem]

religion will be like, it's because women talk to animals and eat fruit that childbirth is so painful, and the soil so hard to work! Not because we took away all of the midwives and created horrendous agriculture practices

[scarlethood]

crazy to me that a large portion of the Bat fandom HATES jason todd for 'taking female plot lines and characteristics' but the same portion loves to reimagine tim drake as Oracle or Batgirl as if taking a female character's entire identity to push a disabled woman out of the narrative is okay if you put your rich white boy pookie bear there instead with absolutely no critical thinking

[moghedien]

I feel so bad for all the christians that think the olympics opening ceremony was anti-christian. wait until they learn that the olympics is a pagan religious festival that honors gods older than their religion by thousands of years

[isthehorsevideocute]

Yeah sure let's just call humane population control of an invasive species "genocide" might as well throw that word out while its being bounced around social media

[blueskittlesart]

Religion is just mind control no matter how you try to fucking frame it. All it ever has been, all it ever will be. If you need fucking religion to know what is good or evil. Then you are fucked in the head and shouldn't be near kids, you stupid fuck.

genuinely are you fucking insane

[selfishpresley]

I neeeeeed to slob on his knob

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Wilson Criscione

Published: Mar 13, 2022

[ Graves of children are scattered throughout Peaceful Valley Cemetery outside of Boise. The cemetery is used by Followers of Christ, a sect of Christians who reject medicine and instead rely on prayer to heal the sick. ]

For years, Linda Martin has kept a stack of files describing the deaths of children in Idaho.

Each death is a child of the Followers of Christ, a sect of Christians who reject medicine and instead rely on prayer to heal the sick. Martin was raised in the church but now is among the strongest advocates of making faith healing in lieu of necessary medical care illegal in Idaho.

But each year, Martin’s stack of coroner reports keeps growing.

“These never get any easier to read,” she says.

There’s a 2-year-old whose feet swelled as a fever burned for six weeks before she died of strep pneumonia. There’s a baby who died in its mother’s arms due to a disease in the colon that could have been treated with surgery. There’s stillbirth after stillbirth after stillbirth, reports obtained by InvestigateWest show. And because of Idaho’s religious exemption for so-called “faith healers,” all of it is perfectly legal.

Many states, including Washington, have some kind of legal protections for parents who refuse medical treatment for religious reasons. But due to Idaho’s extraordinary leniency for faith-healing parents and the number of deaths at Followers of Christ, Idaho’s has drawn the most attention, including a 2018 Emmy-nominated documentary called “No Greater Law.” It’s one of only a handful of states that shields faith-healing parents from felony charges such as manslaughter even if their children die of treatable illnesses.

Attempts to remove the faith-healing exemption have been blocked repeatedly by Idaho legislators trumpeting religious freedom and parental rights. And while the pandemic has pushed public health into the headlines, it’s done little to take politics out of the discussion. In many ways — especially when it comes to parents’ decisions for their children — it seems to have had the opposite effect.

Far from trying to remove Idaho’s faith-healing exemption, Idaho lawmakers introduced a bill in November that would have strengthened it, though it stalled in the Senate.

[ Attempts to remove Idaho’s faith-healing exemption have been blocked repeatedly by Idaho legislators trumpeting religious freedom of groups like the Followers of Christ. ]

Even in Washington, proponents of removing the state’s religious exemption for abuse or neglect — which, somewhat uniquely, only applies to Christian Scientists — are finding the task more difficult than they’d anticipated. In the last decade, several attempts to do so have failed.

A new Washington proposal, House Bill 1048, had some advocates optimistic until the legislation stalled in the Senate in late February. Lawmakers who supported it had been skeptical it would get through, given how the pandemic has stoked concerns over parental rights and medical decisions.

“I view that as an obstacle, not a tail wind,” says Sen. Mark Mullet, D-Issaquah, who spon.sored a similar bill two years ago. “You can’t do public policy in a logical way when things are super emotional.”

Stalled in Olympia

Rita Swan, who founded an organization working to repeal faith-healing exemptions across the country, says that Idaho’s exemption is particularly egregious, but Washington’s is problematic, too.

Washington first added a Christian Science exemption for medical neglect as part of an education bill in 1969. Then in 1997, the state expanded the exemption so that parents using Christian Science treatments can’t be criminally prosecuted for withholding medical care. That change was part of an amended bill adopted pro forma, meaning it was voted on with no opportunity to make changes.

Today, Washington is one of three states — the other two being Arizona and Connecticut — to have exemptions mentioning Christian Science directly. Children or vulnerable adults receiving Christian Science treatment are not considered abused or neglected in Washington, even if it leads to a high probability of death.

Proponents of the exemption argue that it allows Christian Scientists to treat children according to their religious beliefs, claiming there have been thousands of healings due to Christian Science prayer treatments. The Christian Science church says members are not forbidden to go to doctors.

But with the way the law is written, Swan says, it’s possible to claim a religious defense to a second-degree murder charge when a child dies of abuse or neglect.

“I think it’s so foreign to Washington’s values,” Swan says.

Swan is a former Christian Scientist herself. In 1977, she was living in Michigan when her 16-month-old son, Matthew, became ill with a fever. She called a Christian Science practitioner for treatment, which amounted to praying for the child.

When the fever wouldn’t go away, Swan wanted to take him to the doctor. But she was torn: If she sought medical care, the Christian Science practitioner said she’d no longer give Matthew prayer treatments. To the church, Swan’s doubts about the prayer treatment were the reason they weren’t working.

On the 12th day of Matthew’s fever, Swan took him to the hospital.

“Immediately six nurses surrounded him,” Sway says. “I thought, ‘These are the people that care about children.’”

But it was too late. Within days, Matthew died of meningitis.

Swan, ridden with guilt, left Christian Science and devoted her life to removing exemptions allowing faith healing in lieu of medical care. She began tracking related deaths in each state. So far, she’s identified 10 children since the 1970s who’ve died in Washington from treatable diseases, and nearly 200 in Idaho.

In Washington, bills to change the exemption in the last decade have failed to gain traction. Oregon, meanwhile, ended its religious defense for faith healers in 2011 for cases of homicide and criminal mistreatment of children. Since then, several Followers of Christ parents in Oregon have been convicted of not seeking medical care for their children.

[ The Peaceful Valley Cemetery outside of Boise is used by Followers of Christ, a sect of Christians who reject medicine and instead rely on prayer to heal the sick. ]

Mullet, the Washington state senator, grew frustrated that multiple bills he spon.sored to remove the exemption never passed. At first, he could blame the Republican-controlled Senate, but once Democrats gained control several years ago, the bills still didn’t pass. “At the end of the day, they were like, ‘This isn’t a top priority that we have to pass this session so it can wait until next year.’ And that was just the story over and over,” Mullet says.

This year, Rep. Emily Wicks, D-Everett, spon.sored a bill that would have removed the reference to Christian Science practitioners in the state’s criminal mistreatment law and clarified that faith-based practices constitute negligent treatment or maltreatment if they pose a clear and present danger to the child.

The Christian Science church in Washington took a neutral stance, but said they’re generally supportive of the change.

“We recognize the responsibility and ethic that must especially extend to the care of children and vulnerable adults who depend upon others for their proper care,” says spokesperson Lance Matteson. “We feel this bill achieves that proper balancing of interests that promotes health and fairness for all Washingtonians, including our most vulnerable.”

The bill overwhelmingly passed through the House on Feb. 14 with bipartisan support. But again, it died in the Senate at the end of the month.

Caroline Fraser, an author who was raised a Christian Scientist in Washington, supported the law change but says the root of the problem goes deeper than the current state law. If the Christian Science exemption were removed, Fraser remains skeptical the law would be followed. Christian Scientists may not see that a child has a disease, she says, because their “entire life is based on denying the existence of those diseases.”

“If you’re a believer, you cannot evaluate whether a child is suffering,” Fraser says. “They won’t report because they don’t believe what’s in front of their eyes.”

‘These kids were dying’

As her stack of death reports continued to grow, Martin turned her attention in 2017 to the coroner in Idaho’s Canyon County, where gravestone after gravestone marks the deaths of young Followers of Christ children in the church-affiliated Peaceful Valley Cemetery near Boise.

[ The Peaceful Valley Cemetery is located about 30 miles outside of Boise and is used by Followers of Christ, a sect of Christians who reject medicine. ]

She filed a complaint with state Attorney General Lawrence Wasden, alleging that the coroner at the time repeatedly failed to refer children’s deaths to law enforcement as required by state law. Martin provided more than a dozen coroner reports backing up the allegation.

But the attorney general’s office declined to look into the complaint at all. Instead, in the office’s response to Martin obtained by InvestigateWest, they quibbled with the language of the law. The law requires a referral to law enforcement if a death occurs that is not attended by a physician “and the cause of death cannot be certified by a physician.”

While the deaths in Martin’s complaint were clearly not attended by a physician, the attorney general’s office said Martin’s complaint failed to allege that they could not have been certified by one.

For that reason, the attorney general’s office said the complaint didn’t establish even “potential” violations of the law, so they did not have authority to investigate. The office declined to comment for this article.

Martin calls it a “phony excuse” that illustrates how committed Idaho remains to protecting Followers of Christ, a small church with members scattered around the state and in Oregon.

“I really thought people would care more. You think that when you put so much out there, and with the horrific way these kids were dying, that people would care enough to help,” Martin says.

Idaho’s religious exemption dates back to 1972. Soon after, religious exemptions for medical neglect became much more common. In 1974, Richard Nixon signed the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which carved out a faith-healing exemption and required states to pass similar exemptions in order to access federal funds.

That federal requirement was later rolled back, and many states subsequently repealed religious exemptions.

In the last decade, Martin has tried everything she could to remove Idaho’s exemption. She told them about her nephew Steven who died of untreated pneumonia just before he turned 3 because Martin’s brother was a member of Followers of Christ and refused to get him medical care, Martin says. She showed reporters graves of children scattered throughout Peaceful Valley Cemetery.

In 2015, a task force put together by then-Gov. Butch Otter estimated that 31 percent of the gravestones at the Peaceful Valley cemetery belonged to children, 10 times higher than child deaths in the rest of the state.

[ In 2015, a task force compared the child deaths in Idaho overall with the gravestones at Peaceful Valley Cemetery. The task force estimated that 31 percent of the gravestones at the cemetery belonged to children, 10 times higher than child deaths in the rest of the state. ]

But bills to change the law were scuttled. State Sen. Patti Anne Lodge emerged as a major obstacle for child advocates, arguing — like many Idaho lawmakers — that faith healers have a right to practice their religion, even when there are deadly consequences.

Lodge, who lives in Canyon County, is not a member of Followers of Christ but has spoken openly in favor of the church. Its most publicly seen member, Dan Sevy, who featured heavily in the “No Greater Law” documentary, reportedly played music for one of Lodge’s fundraisers in 2016. Sevy declined to comment for this article. In the past, he’s argued to state legislators that Western medicine comes from “Satan” and that the reason more Followers of Christ children die is because the members have larger families.

In January, child advocates and law enforcement officials held a panel again calling for a change to the faith-healing exemption, but no legislation was introduced. One advocate, Protect Idaho Kids founder Bruce Wingate, says if a bill overturning Idaho’s exemption didn’t pass before, it certainly would have a hard time passing in 2022.

The pandemic has only amplified fears from Idaho’s conservatives that their religious freedom and parental rights are under attack.

“But with or without a pandemic, parental rights don’t trump a right to life,” Wingate says. “These kids don’t know what constitutional freedom or religious freedom is. They’re 1 or 2 years old.”

==

Faith-healing exemptions need to end.

[innocha-childa]

trend that sorta spoke to me (alternate target in cut below)

aforementioned alternate target

[monkiekidtwt]

still ignoring the racism in the fandom okay i see you!!!!

Okay, let’s talk about the racism that went down regarding Erlang fans. For example, a minor was accused of sexualizing their own religion, and people who hate Erlang called him (a literal deity) “unseasoned chicken”. People mocking and harassing children who grew up with that religion for being attached to their deities, and-

… Oh wait, you just want me to talk about it when it specifically makes the people on the side of Erlang fans look bad? Because you don’t really give a fuck about racism OR the misogyny you used as an excuse to harass them (harassment you were doing BEFORE anyone was racist, by the way, so you can’t use that as a “but the other side is just as bad!” argument)? And you only PRETEND to give a fuck about marginalized groups when it’s out of spite, or when you can use it to excuse yourself of horrid actions?? Okay I see you!!!

Now take SEVERAL. Seats.

[corvid-corvette-coven]

The Modern Messiah

Christ would be crucified again if He returned for us in the modern day.

There is no seat at the table for a Man who loves despite gender, queer identity, race, religion, creed, occupation, or sins today.

There is no pew to sit upon, nor bread broken, nor wine poured for such a Man who stands before us and calls Himself the Son of God once more.

He could not be reconciled with the Messiah we know.

The modern Messiah is alabaster white, painted drops of bright red mark Him 5 times across the arms legs and ribs, and He is carved upon a cross, nailed proudly above the priest like a prized Fish, or Lamb, slaughtered and stuffed and pacified so He may not defy the teachings of religion once more.

The modern Messiah is offered no seat at the table, for the safety of sin, He is kept a spears length away, and remains upon the wall.

If a man is born once more as Jesus Christ, He would loathe the priest and cry out against the churchmen who preach violence and know only hate in their hearts.

We will seize Him with such violence just as before, we will bolt Him upon a crucifix of steel, guild Him in a crown of barbed wire, and the Son of God will die again as a bullet pierces His ribs.

Those who pray to the marble Man chained in churches dread the day those stone still eyes and lips turn upon them, to pray back.

[the-lady-maddy]

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[counter-culture-christian]

When I read about religious trauma, specifically concerning Christianity and tags such as ex Christian, ex evangelical etc. It's mostly stories about people who have been hurt by Christians, or rather professing Christians (who themselves didn't know, nor practice/aren't doers of God's Word, those who didn't know Christ Himself or else they would've embodied Him and what He represented) or the Church that hurt them in some way. When I see such posts (and this might sound harsh towards them) but if you left Christianity you weren't a Christian to begin with, I doubt you even had a relationship with Christ Jesus Himself nor understood the power of His healing that comes through the Holy Spirit. When Jesus calls you where you are, He already knew where you were, what you were going through and He called you because He has a plan and purpose for you and has the capability to redeem you, change you, begin a work within you that makes you a better person/Christian. What He begins to do within you (through the Holy Spirit) is free you from the bondages of your sin, from your traumas etc. And what I'm saying is, if you truly had a relationship with Him, if you truly knew Him, you wouldn't leave Him because He makes you better and heals you (as I've stated). How could you leave after knowing the truth? The power of His Holy Spirit? Then it comes down to, you were possibly just a professing/cultural Christian and considering you left and now are an ex Christian/evangelical etc. this tells me that you didn't have faith in Him nor gave Him a chance to truly begin that work. There's no way you can still be holding onto that trauma/pain/hurt without not forgiving . Forgiveness means to let go, let go of what was done/said to you, by whoever it was said/done through. Forgive so that you can be forgiven. Then it comes down to this as well: if you're an ex Christian/evangelical etc. with "religious trauma" you're playing the victim because all those in Christ Jesus is VICTORIOUS, THERE'S VICTORY WITH JESUS CHRIST. WHAT HE BEGINS, HE DOESN'T STOP UNTIL IT IS FINISHED. I'm out.

[anxiously-sidequesting]

I know we as a fandom all love to shit on Duncan whenever we get the chance (see: me posting Duncan GruncanWuncan) especially since the like, two times we ever see him he's shitting on us for being ourselves then tries to kill us because of his own delusions of grandeur but I thought about it and I was like, "......man that's kinda Sad actually"

BECAUSE seeing this from Duncan's perspective; he's The Best, he always has been the best, but reality constantly shows him that isn't true (Malorn, The Wizard, anyone else)

Like imagine how painful that can be when you think something that you truly deserved and something that you've fought for, maybe for your entire life, is seemingly handed to others who aren't nearly as deserving as you

And yeah WE know that Duncan has neither worked (very hard, at least) for his perceived greatness NOR does he truly """deserve""" it (Duncan has been shown to be shirking his duties off to us and possibly others for his own gain), but DUNCAN doesn't know this. Like in his mind he truly, honestly, genuinely believes with his whole fragile heart that he is just above everyone else and puts more effort in trying to convince others of that rather than literally just trying to work towards that himself

And then there's the extra added insult that even in his own class he's pretty mediocre. Duncan INSISTS that he was Malistaire's best student and that he praised Duncan maybe once and that all other Death students only wish they could be like him, but... Malorn. And I bet deep down Duncan KNOWS that in fact Malorn was Malistaire's best and most talented. And Duncan can't even really twist that in his mind because it was made solid when Malorn took over Malistaire's duties instead of him. It was proven as a hard fact that Malorn was more suited to the job than Duncan was and is widely recognized as being The Best Death student (if the YW isn't a Necromancer)

Okay so fine. Whatever it's just Death right? At least Duncan can be the best at ANYTHING ELSE, maybe he's not the most talented Necromancer but there's 6 more types of magic to excel in!!!

But then another person ruins that. The Young Wizard poofs in from another world and suddenly, Duncan is overshadowed once more because a literal child prodigy and Local Hero arrives and literally saves their world and then, the universe. Multiple times in fact

Like bro I can imagine that could be at least a little bit painful for anyone, but imagine with Duncan's already low self-esteem and his fragile, large ego, he literally and genuinely took that personally and a hit to your pride is devastating for anyone, no matter who you are. That was like, Strike Three for Duncan and it was so very personal and important to him that it left him in a deep and vulnerable state

But I think the absolute saddest part of Duncan's downfall is that near the end, he was ultimately manipulated by an adult. A grown ass adult noticed and acknowledged his insecurities and purposely struck where it hurts the most, in his weakest state. Duncan already wasn't thinking clearly from the start but when everything went to shit for him and he was clinging, Gretta DarkKettle approached him and completely broke him down to make him into something else entirely for the Schism's benefit.

Of course Duncan was a piece of shit from the start but he truly didn't have any malicious intentions until Gretta messed with his mind. Like, he went from a pretty much harmless bully to an actual criminal of the state and a threat to the literal universe. Duncan was CORRUPTED and all of his worst fears and delusions were solidified the moment Gretta """validated""" those feelings Duncan had.

Is Duncan completely blameless? Fuck no he did some fucked up shit actually and I'm glad he was held accountable for it by the narrative and the fandom!!! But I think it's something to be said that at the end of the day, Duncan was still a child that was suffering from many type of issues before being recruited and manipulated by a powerful literal cult. Wizard101 does have a theme of malicious intending and less than responsible adults using children to get what they want (Malistaire, Morganthe's brother, GF Spider, GM Raven, coughcoughAmbrose) but unlike the Young Wizard who successfully stays true to themselves despite that, Duncan had a more Morganthe-like route and ultimately succumbed to it. Of course their situations are a lot different since the YW wasn't brought in by a cult, but you can't help but feel bad for someone so young being preyed on by older people who are supposed to look out for them and protect them from something just LIKE that.

I will always shit on Duncan because it's funny and hold him accountable for his actions because he should, but I also feel bad for him and I hope he had a better ending after he was defeated

[goreyskeleton]

genuinely makes me sick to my stomach how she pretends to care about me but if I told her I self harm she wouldn’t be cornered in the slightest. She’d tell me it’s a sin and I’ll go to hell and I’m fucking crazy and overall she’ll just scream at me. Wanna know how I know this? Cuz it’s happened 3 years ago.