Another hit-and- run posting as the issues surrounding this story (and others like it) has once again become the focus of hours of pondering thanks to an essay and subsequent comments concerning whether "religion is the cause of harm."
I think we all can agree that any individual that would do such harm to a child is mentally ill. But I have always questioned incidences where religious ideation is present (thank you Andrea Yates).
You see, you never hear of non-believers cutting off the arms of their 11-month old child (courtesy of Dena Schlosser) - in what had been described as a religious frenzy - because some news story was interpreted as a sign of the coming apocalypse and that she had heard God commanding her to remove her baby's arm and then her own.
Did the religious zealotry come first or did the precursors to illness come first? Did the belief system give the delusional thinking associated with the illness a focal point, hence an "excuse" for the behavior? Or is religious belief a mental illness in and of itself?
This is what runs through my mind late at night. Then again, is this more of a morals and ethics question?
(In defense of Yates and Schlosser there were, IMHO, others involved in their crimes. Namely their authoritarian, narcissistic husbands and church leaders.)
__
Marcell Washington put his 3-year-old son into a cold shower and demanded to know if the young boy worshiped only God.
When Ameen said "no," Washington forced open the boy's eyes so water could fill them.
"I did this because I wanted to kill the Shatan that I believed was in my son," Washington explained later. "I thought by killing a portion of Ameen, it would kill the Shatan in him."
The boy's frantic struggle convinced his father even more that "Shatan," or the devil, remained in him.
The exorcism continued. Washington held his son's face under water for about 10 minutes.
"When I was holding him under the water Ameen was still fighting me really hard," Washington said later. "After about a couple of minutes Ameen stopped fighting so hard and he started to collapse. After ten minutes or so Ameen collapsed in my arms and I took him out of the shower."
[,,,]
"He said, Mom, have you heard anybody whispering,'" recalled his mother, Marcena Davis, in a January 2012 interview. ''He said he just felt paranoid and everybody was against him and out to get him. It was like he wasn't my son.
Syracuse man confesses to murdering 3-year-old son: 'I wanted to kill the Shatan' | syracuse.com
No comments:
Post a Comment