It happened again.
Another deeply religious Christian mother, following instructions
from God, has once again put the Lord Jesus in a bind.
Jesus was already in hot water because of the Catholic church,
with its scandals involving some holy men of God(Catholic
priests) sexually molesting children and young adults.
This god/man Jesus, who(according to fluffy Christian
advertising) loves all the little children of the world,
has scored yet another zero in regard to child safety and
protection.
This unfortunate woman killed two of her children and injured a
third by "stoning" them.
Recently she was acquitted of murder on the grounds of insanity,
the jury concluding that at the time of the killings, she did not
know right from wrong.
The story can be found here:
Story
Link 1
And the same story can also be found here:
Story Link 2
The irony of the verdict in this case is simply stunning.
A Christian believer, who claims to have been following
instructions from God, has been judged insane during the period
of the killings.
Fundamentalist Christians are constantly telling the world that
Christians are morally superior to all unbelievers because they
embody(through belief in Jesus) the only true standards of right
and wrong.
Christians are supposed to be guided by the only true moral
compass in the universe, which is Jesus, who is also supposed to
be God. According to fundamentalists, the Biblical tribal God is
the only source of absolute right and wrong, and people have
access to these standards when they turn their lives over to
Jesus and let him be Lord over their lives.
Fundamentalist Christians also advertise to the world that the
only truth is their truth and that unbelievers will spend
eternity in a place called hell if they don't reach they same
conclusions about the Bible that believers have reached.
[Note: By Biblical standards, killing children does not
implicate someone as being insane.
There are many instances in the Holy Bible where God gives
instructions to kill children if it suits his purposes to do so.
God had no problem killing infants and children in the flood nor
did he have any problem instructing Moses to kill children(Deut
2:34, Deut 3:6, Deut 7:2, Deut 20:16-17, Num 31:17, Josh 6:21).
Would Moses and Joshua also be deemed insane because they did
what God instructed?
God himself struck a man dead when the Ark of the Covenant was being transported
by oxen on a cart.
When the oxen stumbled, the man(Uzzah) reached out to steady the
Ark which was being carried on an oxcart and God killed him on
the spot(2 Sam 6:3-7).
What do you suppose would have happened if Uzzah had let the Ark
fall?]
Yet, this woman who believed in Jesus and God, a genuine God
fearing Christian, is deemed insane because she did something
that God told her to do.
This sad chain of events is a rerun of the Andrea Yates case,
where a religious Christian woman killed her five children by
drowning them.
However in the Yates case, the mother was found guilty and not
deemed insane, perhaps because she heard voices from
"Satan" instead of voices from "God".
Both of these women were deeply religious Christian believers.
All the children(total 8) in both of these cases had
Biblical names.
In the latest case, the children were named Joshua, Luke, and
Aaron.
Both of these cases occurred in the state of Texas, which is
often proudly called "God's country" by many of the
Christian residents.
There can be no claims that these two women/mothers were
unbelievers, infidels, or "unsaved".
These were God's people, part of the flock of their Savior,
Jesus.
You won't hear about either of these cases on television Sunday
sermons, on TBN(Trinity Broadcasting Network), on the 700 Club,
on the Hour of Power, in Sunday school, or on other mainstream
Christian outlets used to broadcast the "good" news
about Jesus and candy coated salvation to the world.
The reason you won't hear anything about it is because they
represent failure, and failure can raise doubts.
Attempts to rationalize away the consequences and ramifications
of these cases of child killing on the part of devout Christian
mothers only serve to expose both fundamentalist Christianity and
the Bible as inept beacons of absolute truth.
As aptly pointed out by another commentator on the Yates case,
the following deduction can be made:
The Christian version of God, also commonly known as Jesus,
utterly failed to help his devoted followers in their time of
ultimate despair and need.
Any other conclusion amounts to blaming the victims.
These women didn't kill themselves or any adults, but killed
their children.
The Lord Jesus was nowhere to be found and was a complete
no-show, scoring zero points as a lover and protector of innocent
little children.
The Bible promises that God will deliver people that are
afflicted and helpless.
Psa 72:12-14
For he will deliver the needy who crieth, and the afflicted, who
hath no helper;
He will have compassion on the poor and needy, and will save the
souls of the needy:
He will redeem their souls from oppression and violence, and
precious shall their blood be in his sight.
The plight and sad events stemming from the actions of these two
Christian mothers makes a mockery of the high sounding promises
made by these verses.
Most likely, these two women prayed regularly for God to help
them understand the voices they heard in their heads and prayed
for their Lord Jesus to guide them to proper and righteous
action.
It's also likely these women asked other Christians to pray for
them or with them at various times prior to the killings because
they needed strength to understand and do God's will.
According to the infallible holy word of God, a believer should
be able to have their requests granted.
Jesus himself told and promised believers that they shall have
great powers if they believe in him and call on his name.
John 14:12-14
Verily, verily, I(Jesus) say unto you, He that believeth on me,
the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than
these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.
And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the
Father may be glorified in the Son.
If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.
Note that there are no qualifiers in these verses that
would allow for the failure of a request to be granted if it is
made by a believer in Jesus.
Like so much of the Bible, the promise by Jesus is absolutist in
nature and when absolutist claims fail, as they almost always do,
ways to rationalize the failure have to be concocted.
The New Testament provides such a rationalization for the
obviously false claim by Jesus that believers would be able to
make requests for anything in his name and have them granted, by
revising the promise with the use of a qualifier.
1 John 5:14
And this is the boldness which we have towards him, that if we
ask him anything according to his will he
hears us.
The added qualifier "according to his will"
makes the problem go away.
With the changed text, it can be said that if you make a request
and don't receive it, it wasn't God's will to grant it in the
first place. Problem fixed!
However, note that 1 John 5:14 wasn't the promise made by
Jesus.
Jesus had no such qualifiers on his claim.
Either Jesus meant what he said or he didn't.
Or perhaps, Jesus never said anything at all like this and a
writer put some words into his mouth to make it appear that
believers had special powers. Later on, when it became obvious
that the powers weren't all they were advertised to be, some
damage control was applied to dilute the claim and make it appear
more realistic.
Reality has a nasty way of throwing cold water on wishful
thinking.
One possible Christian apologetic attempt to rationalize the
whole mess into something acceptable would be to claim that God
decided to let the children be killed because he wanted to take
them home and be with him in heaven.
This sounds appealing at first glance but it's flawed on two
counts.
On count one, while it's commonly advertised that the dead who
are saved are immediately transported to heaven to be with Jesus,
such wishful thinking contradicts scripture(1 Cor 15:51-52, 1
Thes 4:16-17, Rev 20:4-6).
The dead are not automatically transported to heaven but wait in
"limbo" or are "asleep" until the Jesus
arrives to wake them up.
On count two, the scenario of God directing the fate of the
children, to be killed so he can take them home early, shoots the
commonly advertised Christian claim that God gave all mankind
"free will" squarely in the rump.
If God planned that the children be killed by their mothers(for
whatever reason), then the children were not granted the free
will to make their own choice about accepting or rejecting God.
The children didn't ask to be born nor did they choose their
parents.
The children were essentially puppets, created and disposed of
according to God's whims.
It's also interesting to note that when disasters such as floods,
hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes wreck havoc on humanity,
it's usually the female Mother Nature who gets the blame,
while the male God(the Father) gets full credit for any
believers who survive.
Such is the selective and whimsical nature of human God worship.
The role of Christian women in fundamentalism is essentially that
of breeders, or baby producing machines.
The Bible fully supports this attitude and stereotyped role for
women.
Believers are told that they must multiply and subdue the earth(Gen
1:28).
Women are told that they were the first sinners and that they can
help save themselves by keeping quiet and having babies.
1 Tim 2:11-15
Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.
But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over
the man, but to be in silence.
For Adam was first formed, then Eve.
And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in
the transgression.
Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they
continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.
The two Christian women in these cases had eight children between
them, more than enough to replace the four parents and help
"subdue" the earth. Religions like Christianity, that
like to expand their influence and dominate other beliefs, often
rely on unrestricted population growth to enhance their power
base.
However, while spurting out babies for Jesus may be spiritually
appealing, it taxes an already strained earth environment and
its limited resources.
Naturally, any ill effects of overpopulation are deemed
insignificant when compared to the goal of covering the earth
with Christian believers.
Adding to the irony of the insanity verdict for a Christian
believer, who heard instructions from God to kill others, is the
question of how people are to determine if someone is hearing God
instruct them.
Lots of people claim that God instructs them.
The Christian leader of the world's largest debtor nation, who is
also the leader of a government that uses legalized
counterfeiting to pay its bills, claimed that God called on him
to become a president and told him to strike at various enemies.
Exactly how is it determined that the mother who heard God's
instructions is insane while the leader who heard God's
instructions is inspired?
On what basis should anyone accept the claim that a leader is
hearing instructions directly from God?
What form of reasoning is employed to render such a claim valid?
Unfortunately, fundamentalist Christianity firmly requires that
the process of objective reasoning be regarded as a disobedient
school child and told to go sit in a corner, facing the wall,
with a dunce cap placed on its head.
The most honest rationalization for these two tragic events would
be to simply admit that Christianity, with all its rigid
dependency on selected writings deemed by councils of clerics to
be the word of God, cannot offer a sane explanation for these
killings. Their God was a complete no-show when his followers
needed him the most.
It was literally a matter of life and death.
It needs to be admitted that the wrathful, jealous, male tribal
God fundamentalist Christians have created in their supernatural
theological sandbox is no more absolute or superior than other
versions of God.
The fact that a devoted Christian believer, who heard
instructions from God, was judged insane speaks volumes about a
belief system that aggressively declares itself as the only
source of truth in the universe.
-- BACK --