In the last week or so it seems like I haven’t been able to pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV without hearing about so-called Black Friday – that orgy of consumer spending that erupts every year in the US on the day after that orgy of gluttony known as Thanksgiving.

Stories about what I’ve come to think of as Black Tuesday & Wednesday have been much harder to find.

Here are a few examples (all from foreign sources, of course):

Indians Throng Nepal’s Gadhimai Fair For Mass Animal Sacrifice (Sudeshna Sarkar/The Times of India; Nov 24)

KATHMANDU: Thousands of Indians from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and other states bordering Nepal swarmed to the Himalayan republic’s southern plains Tuesday to attend a notorious Hindu fair there and sacrifice animals and birds in the hope their wishes would be fulfilled.

While a debate began to grow in Nepal about the Gadhimai Fair in Bara district and the wanton cruelty it inflicted on animals, the festival drew its strength from zealous Indian attendees who have been flocking to it every five years in a bid to circumvent the ban imposed on animal sacrifices in their own states.

The name on everyone’s lips on Tuesday, when the slaughter of buffaloes started, was that of Raman Thakur, a farmer from Sitamarhi in Bihar who sacrificed 105 buffaloes to show his gratitude. The goddess, Thakur said, had answered the prayer he had made five years ago by granting him a son.

Men, women and children poured in from Bihar, most of them carrying kid goats and roosters, many of which had been smuggled across the porous Indo-Nepal border, bypassing the few Nepali quarantine posts. “My son Vishnu has been ill for years and can’t walk,” said Kalaiya Devi, pointing to a severely malnourished child in her arms whose legs looked like matchsticks. “I am going to sacrifice a pigeon now and come back with a buffalo at the next fair if the goddess gives him the strength to walk.”

People who believe in witchcraft and supernatural powers and were hardened to suffering due to the suffering they themselves have undergone for generations are the people who keep the Gadhimai Fair in Nepal alive while the locals regard it more as an occasion to do brisk business when their hotels and restaurants remain full.

Ram Mahato, 37, who also came from Sitamarhi, planned to watch the execution of the animals, visit the circus and drink his fill of local liquor that has also been doing brisk sale underground despite an official ban on it. He had not heard of Maneka Gandhi, let alone her plea to the Nepal government to ban the quinquennial slaughter at Gadhimai. Neither had he heard that six people, including one from Motihari, had died after consuming adulterated hooch.

“Gandhi?” he asked, scratching his head. “Is she related to Indira Gandhi? But then, they have everything, unlike us. They can afford not to seek the blessings of the goddess.”

The local Maoist MP, Shiv Chandra Kushwaha, said he had decided to skip attending parliament – which his party had agreed to allow to convene for three critical days to pass the budget – to attend the fair since it was for a bigger cause. “About 75 percent of the people who come to fair to offer sacrifices are Indians. We can’t stop them because it is a religious sentiment. Why blame us? It is not us who are making the sacrifices.”

The Maoist MP estimates about 15,000 buffaloes will be killed Tuesday. On Wednesday, he says, the number of slaughtered goats, roosters and pigeons will run into hundreds of thousands. The temple authorities have built a new slaughter house at a cost of nearly NRS 5 million while a huge pit has been dug to bury the heads of the butchered animals. The animal skins are being bought by tannery owners in India and Nepal.

Nepal’s government refused to ban the massacre despite warnings by animal lovers and livestock experts that it could cause an outbreak of animal-borne diseases like goat plague, swine flu and bird flu.

Though celebrities like Maneka Gandhi and yesteryear’s sex symbol French actress Brigitte Bardot raised their voices against the killings, the root of the problem perhaps is that these voices are not as potent in the drinking water and electricity-less villages of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh as the voices of imagined gods and demons.

200,000 Animals Sacrificed In Nepal To Appease Gods (SIFY/Asian News International; Nov 25)

Considered as the single largest mass slaughter of animals on earth, priests at a Hindu temple in Nepal sacrificed some 200,000 animals and birds in an ancient ritual to appease gods.

According to organizers, more than 200,000 animals, including buffaloes, goats, roosters and pigeons have been sacrificed during the festival at the Gadhimai temple in Nepal’s Bariyapur village on Tuesday.

“If I give you a rough estimate around 20,000 buffaloes, 30,000-35,000 goats and countless birds and pigeons are flown on this day and most of them are sacrificed on the 7th day,” said Mahesh Jha, a temple priest.

The animals are sacrificed to goddess Gadhimai From Bariyapur in the temple.

“I am an educated woman, but I have believe in this ritual from the past and would continue to believe it in future as well. Our Goddess has given everything and it should be given back to her. This has been continuing since many years and it would continue in future as well,” said Champa Devi, a local woman.

Hindus in Nepal are known to offer animal sacrifices to deities for luck and prosperity or to ward off evil.

Animal rights activists who called for an end to the centuries-old ceremony have criticized the festival, which is held every five years.

Nepal’s Bloodbath Fair Claims The Lives Of Three Indian Infants (Sindh Today/The Indo-Asian News Service; Nov 25)

KATHMANDU: At least three Indian infants died due to cold in Nepal’s most controversial religious fair, where thousands of animals and birds are being slaughtered by Indians and Nepalis, mostly in the hope of getting a son or wish fulfilment.

Nisha Kumari Shah, the one-year-old daughter of Prem Shah who went to attend the Gadhimai Fair in Nepal’s Bara district, died Tuesday after failing to receive adequate treatment at the “health camps” put up at the fair to treat the millions of Hindu devotees who have been swarming to witness the killing of thousands of birds and animals for two days from Tuesday.

A four-month-old baby girl, whose parent was identified as Rajesh Prasad, also died due to the cold in the plains as well as a two-month-old boy who could not be identified immediately.

All three families came from Narkatiaganj in India’s Bihar state, from where the majority of the pilgrims are, Nepali daily Kantipur reported Wednesday.

Before the animal sacrifices began Tuesday, an Indian from Motihari died in the fair after drinking moonshine.

Animal rights activist R.B. Bomjan, who had been campaigning in Bara to prevent the slaughter, said the human toll would rise once police collected figures about the road accidents.

Thousands of Indians have come to the fair laden on tractors and buses and there have been several accidents, Bomjan said.

The fair, held every five years, is driven by Indians from Nepal’s neighbouring states who flock there since animal sacrifices are banned in their own states.

Besides Bihar, people come from Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and West Bengal.

The majority of the pilgrims, especially those offering animal sacrifices, come from low-income households with a high degree of illiteracy and superstition….

Devotees Seek Blessing In The Blood Of 250,000 Animals (Olivia Lang/The Sydney Morning Herald/Guardian News & Media; Nov 26)

Nepal has played host to the world’s biggest animal sacrifice with more than 250,000 animals expected to be killed as part of a Hindu festival in the village of Bariyapur, near the border with India.

The two-day event, which occurs every five years, began Tuesday with the decapitation of thousands of buffalo, killed in honour of Gadhimai, a Hindu goddess of power, and continued yesterday with the killing of goats, chickens, pigeons and other creatures.

With up to a million worshippers on the roads near the festival grounds, this year’s two-day event appeared more popular than ever despite protests from groups who have called for it to be banned.

”It is the traditional way,” said 45-year old Manoj Shah, a Nepalese driver who has been attending the event since he was six. ”If we want anything, and we come here with an offering to the goddess, within five years all our dreams will be fulfilled.”

The festivities included a ferris wheel, fortune-telling robots and stalls selling tea and snacks. Buses packed full of people with goats or buffalo were still arriving late on Tuesday.

The fair officially opened at dawn Tuesday with the sacrifice of two rats, two pigeons, a pig, a lamb and a rooster in the main temple, to cheers of: ”Long live Gadhimai”.

In the main event, 250 appointed residents with kukri knives began decapitating the thousands of buffalo in an enclosure guarded by high walls and armed police. Frightened calves galloped around as men wearing red bandannas pursued them and chopped off their heads. Hundreds of visitors scrambled up the three-metre walls to catch a glimpse of the carnage.

The dead beasts will be sold and organisers will funnel the proceeds into local development, including maintenance of the temple. The festival is lucrative for businesses such as local guesthouses and shops.

Animal rights activists have dubbed the slaughter ”barbaric and cruel” and have petitioned for its cancellation. Protesters made a final plea to organisers by cracking open coconuts in a nearby temple as a symbolic sacrifice.

Activist Manoj Gautum said: ”It is like a live holocaust. These men had some kind of violent streak in their eyes. I didn’t see any sign of humanity in there.”

The Government donated 4.49 million Nepalese rupees ($67,800) to the event and has shown no sign of discontinuing the centuries-old tradition.

Behold the glories of religion!

Glories that American journalists seem to completely ignore. (They seem infinitely more interested in the man and woman who crashed the White House state dinner for India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last Tuesday than in the absurd beliefs of India’s people and the way those beliefs regularly inspire unimaginable suffering. Even an atheist who dares to put up a billboard gets far more coverage than theists who slaughter hundreds of thousands of living creatures….)

To learn about how Muslims are even worse when it comes to animal sacrifice, see the two-part entry I posted on Feb 13, 2003 or the entry I posted on Dec 31, 2006.

To learn about how the Bible’s allegedly all-mighty creator of the universe often seems to love nothing so much as ritual slaughter and the stench of burning flesh, go here, here, and here.

To learn about how even the allegedly gentle , compassionate, and “sin free” Virgin Mary is said to have engaged in the “holy” murder of harmless little birds, see Luke 2:22-24….