Candide
roman catholic by birth; scientific atheist by choice; sinner by merit. blogging on brains, evolution and language. gaidhlig-speaking neuroscience student at oxford. likes to Question Everything!
15 year old Kristy Bamu was brutally tortured for 4 days by his sister and her boyfriend because he was suspected of practising witchcraft. He was attacked with knives, sticks, metal bars, and a hammer and chisel and he “begged to die” before slipping under water and drowning in the bath during a final ritual of deliverance. He suffered 130 injuries.
The reasoning of his sister and her boyfriend for doing this came from a pastor. A pastor who worked in backstreet churches. There are many of these churches and many of these pastors. Pastors who will meet with a family and convince them that their family’s suffering is because of (most often) a child who is practising witchcraft. These pastors tell the family that this child is essentially evil and that the devil must some how be dragged from them. Some pastors recommend the same rituals that Kristy Bamu was subjected to, while others con the family into paying more money than they can afford for an exorcism.
So Kristy Bamu’s horrific ordeal was not the first and will not be the last. The NSPCC children’s charity warned that this was not an isolated case and that it certainly “is not a one-off incident.”
This is what devout religion does and what it leads to.
It’s disgusting.
Blind faith can justify any deed - good or bad or truly evil. That’s the problem: it can lead to people devoting their lives to caring for the poor, or, it can lead to things like this…
evidence, on the other hand, can justify only the truth.
