—– Voodoo Made Me Drown Kids, Long Island Mom Tells Police (New York Daily News; Feb 10, 2009)

A Long Island woman Monday admitted drowning her three young children last year, saying she believed they were victims of a voodoo attack….

—– Elton Murphy Found Guilty Of Murder, Gets Life (MySunCoast.com/WWSB ABC7; May 11)

SARASOTA, Florida: A jury has found Elton Murphy guilty in the murder of art gallery owner Joyce Wishart. He has been sentenced to life in prison without parole….

“He felt like he was God some days… God was with him in a unique way telling him to go and rape women, God told him it was ok to do that, Jesus told him what he wanted, and he would ask Jesus why and Jesus would say ‘why shouldn’t you?’ It gave him a clear conscious to do anything,” says Dr. Kasper.

Would Dr. Kasper say something similar about Moses, Joshua, and the other holy murderers in the Bible?

Would the same jury have convicted Moses on the basis of his murderous actions (e.g., Numbers 31:17)?

“Ironically, the criminal’s religiosity fosters crime for, when it is genuine, it bolsters his opinion of himself as an upstanding citizen. It is as though by having felt remorse, prayed, and confessed his sins to God, the criminal empties his cup of whatever evil it might have contained so that he has even more latitude to do as he pleases” -Stanton E. Samenow, Inside the Criminal Mind (p. 171) (as quoted most recently in the entry I posted on June 7)

—– Outrage At Serbia “Beating” Video (The BBC; May 22)

Officials in Serbia are investigating a rehabilitation centre affiliated to the Orthodox Church where drug addicts have allegedly been filmed being beaten….

—– South Africa: Church Still Not “Moving Beyond Apartheid”, Meeting Told (Stephen Brown And Hans Pienaar/Ecumenical News International/allAfrica.com; May 25)

GENEVA/JOHANNESBURG: A South African church suspended in 1982 from the World Alliance of Reformed Churches because of its support for apartheid is “still not ready for readmission”, a meeting of the grouping’s executive committee in Geneva has been told….

WARC general secretary the Rev. Setri Nyomi, presenting his report on 23 May to the 2009 executive committee meeting in Geneva, noted that a WARC team had visited South Africa in March to meet the denomination.

“Our discussions showed a deep division in the church about moving beyond apartheid,” said Nyomi, a Presbyterian from Ghana, in his report. “It was our determination that they were not ready for readmission.”…

For more about the relationship between religion and prejudice, see the entries I posted on Oct 8, 2002, July 8, 2003, and Aug 5, 2008.

To learn more about the Bible’s so-called “curse of Ham” and how it’s helped to justify and inspire anti-black prejudice, see the entry I posted on Dec 8, 2003 as well as Wikipedia.

—– Archbishop Retires Amid Reports Many Of His Priests Are Not Celibate (NZCath.org/Catholic News Service; May 27)

VATICAN CITY: Pope Benedict XVI has accepted the resignation of a 54-year-old archbishop from the Central African Republic following an investigation into priests of his diocese who live more or less openly with women and the children they have fathered….

Africa News also reported that priests from nine of the country’s dioceses met May 22-24 in Bangui expressing their opposition to the removal of the archbishop and accusing the Vatican of being “discriminatory, partial and selective in the assessment of the situation since white priests and bishops are also guilty of the same practices.”

To learn a bit more about the extent of the hypocrisy and corruption in the Catholic Church, see the entries I posted on March 2, 2004, July 14, 2006, and May 12, 2009.