Dallas Woman Says “Signs From God” Led Her To Shoot, Kill Co-Worker (Wendy Hundley/The Dallas Morning News; Aug 27)
A Dallas woman told police that God told her to shoot her longtime co-worker Wednesday morning at a Carrollton pest control business.
Theresa Gail Robbins, 48, was arrested on suspicion of killing Greg Brasch, a McKinney husband and father who was described as “friend to anybody,” including the woman accused of shooting him once in the chest with a handgun.
“Afterwards she put the gun down and didn’t threaten anyone else,” Carrollton police Officer Dustin Bartram said Thursday. “She put the gun down and sat in another co-worker’s office and waited for police to arrive.”
Brasch, 57, was taken to Baylor Medical Center at Carrollton, where he was pronounced dead.
Robbins was been charged with first-degree murder and was being held Thursday at the Dallas County Jail in lieu of $500,000 bail.
On Thursday, Brasch’s family was trying to understand the killing.
“This was all out of the blue,” said Howard Max, Brasch’s brother-in-law. “We think she just snapped.”
He said Brasch, a native of Australia who had lived in Texas since 1985, was a sales manager at Bizzy Bees pest control, where Robbins was office manager.
Max said they both worked at the business about 13 years and were friends. He said Brasch recently offered to let Robbins sell an antique sewing machine on eBay and keep the money.
He described Brasch as an outgoing, likable man who was a “friend to anybody.”
A woman who answered the phone Thursday at Bizzy Bees declined to comment.
Police were called to the business in the 2800 block of Trinity Square Drive shortly before 9 a.m. Wednesday. They found Robbins sitting in an office, where she was arrested without incident.
When an officer asked her what happened, she said, “I got signs from God, he told me to distribute the world order information,” according to the arrest-warrant affidavit.
She told the officer that Brasch was her “closest friend.”
When asked why she shot him, Robbins replied, “I was expecting someone else to come in” and that God told her to shoot.
The document also states that Robbins indicated she was taking medication for depression.
Robbins’ Facebook page shows a range of emotions in the evening before the shooting.
“Today I am happy, because I thought of you,” Robbins posted at 6:57 p.m. Tuesday.
“I am really confused and I pray for guidance,” she wrote at midnight.
“Paranoia big destroya going to bed,” Robbins wrote in her last posting at 12:03 a.m. Wednesday.
Brasch is survived by his wife, Carolyn, and three children….
If that isn’t enough to convince you *not* to listen to “God” when you think you hear him/her/it offering you guidance, check out the entries I posted on March 11, 2009; March 20, 2009; April 25, 2009; June 19, 2009; and Nov 17, 2009.
“I avoid diarists like itiswelljournal because they are trolls, for the most part – but their latest entry was about the site of the WTC attacks being ‘hallowed ground.’ I pointed out that thousands of people dying in one place does not make it holy, and their note was that with all the thousands of people that come there to pray, it is just that. What do you think? What about the atheists numbered among those victims who would probably be offended at being memorialized in such a way? Ugh. It just infuriates me.” - Ampris (8/25/2010 11:11:21-11:12:11 PM)
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to address this issue, Ampris!
Ah, where do I begin?
Let me start with two definitions of “hallowed” that I found online:
—– sacred; worthy of religious veneration; “the sacred name of Jesus”; “Jerusalem’s hallowed soil” (WordNet)
—– Hallow is a word usually used as a verb, meaning “to make holy or sacred, to sanctify or consecrate, to venerate”. The adjective form hallowed, as used in The Lord’s Prayer, means holy, consecrated, sacred, or revered. (Wikipedia)
As one who rejects theism, religion, and the premises that lie behind these concepts, I also reject those sub-concepts like hallowed, sacred, and holy that depend upon them.
Listening to people declare one thing or another hallowed, sacred, or holy is like listening to people declare a certain area haunted or another area the landing site of alien spacecraft. Until people detail the exact nature and logic of their supernatural and other bizarre hypotheses and/or until they provide me with good evidence in support of their extraordinary claims, I am not inclined to step into their apparent fantasy worlds or play along with the apparently delusional rules that govern those worlds. Indeed, to do so would seem to constitute a very serious breach of intellectual honesty and integrity (as well as of social responsibility).
As with so many of the rituals and dictates associated with religion, the concepts of hallowedness and holiness seem to me to be rude power plays rather than a respectful and genuine search for (or expression of) objective truth. Declaring a person, place, or thing “sacred” reminds me of two boys I knew growing up who one day went around rubbing various items against their cocks in a childish attempt to “girl-proof” them. Which, now that I think about it, reminds me of the way male dogs go around peeing on things in an attempt to mark their territory. Theists who shout “THIS is SACRED!” strike me as doing much the same thing. It’s not an attempt to convey objective truth – it’s an attempt to bluntly assert a kind of personal ownership of a person, place, or thing and to warn others to respect that ownership or suffer the consequences.
The wildly subjective nature of the act is made obvious if one pauses long enough to ask the question “What scientific test might one perform on a person, place, or thing to determine whether or not he, she, or it is in fact hallowed?” It’s a ludicrous question, of course – much like asking “What scientific test might one perform on a person, place, or thing to determine if it’s Ohio?” Hallowedness – like Ohio – is a human construct – not an objective part of natural reality. If enough people agree that Ohio is a certain stretch of land residing between Lake Erie and the Ohio River between such and such a latitude and longitude, and if there are no objections, fine – it can be a useful political, social, and/or economic concept, but still hardly a scientific one.
Unlike Ohio, however, religious abstractions like “hallowed” are rarely objection-free or particularly useful to those belonging to different tribes. Instead, they tend to divide us and lead to endless quarrels over exactly what is and isn’t “really” holy and sacred.
Those theists who object to a mosque being built near Ground Zero in NYC (not *on* Ground Zero, mind you – simply *near* it) would probably be hard pressed to say exactly where a mosque *should* be built since any such religious structure representing religious assumptions so contrary to their own seems, by its very nature, fraudulent, unholy, and – following this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion – outright evil. And who tolerates outright evil but evil people?
(As a side note…. I think it was St. Augustine who asserted that *everything* was holy and hallowed – including shit – since everything came from gOd and necessarily reflected his creative energies and will. It’s not a view I hear expressed much by American Christians these days, but it seems just as valid a delusion as anything I *have* heard. I wonder how certain strident American Christians might deal with this ancient Christian point of view that so directly contradicts their own were they actually to be exposed to it….)
(And as another side note…. One of the things I’ve learned in recent years is that during the Revolutionary War the British kept American rebels imprisoned on ships docked in New York. Thousands of those Americans seem to have died in horrible conditions as a result. The sites of those deaths now seem to have been pretty much forgotten, as have those deaths themselves. I can only wonder how many of those prattling on now about the “hallowed” nature of Ground Zero have traveled to “pay their respects” at Ground Zero while blithely and unknowingly violating the “hallowed” ground where the bones of our ancestral, gOd-fearing freedom fighters might yet lie a-moldering…. [How many might unknowingly live in neighborhoods rendered "holy" in Indian eyes by massacres perpetuated by European invaders is a question I'll leave for another day.])
If there’s anything we as Americans might come together on and highly value in a pseudo-sacred sort of way it would seem to be the US Constitution, the First Amendment of which guarantees the right of Muslims to build their mosque. If that offends you, well – too bad. The atheist in me is deeply offended by the construction of *any* religious structure (including the new $12,000,000+ Catholic Church in my town that has just been capped off with a 20-foot-tall cross covered in gold). The American in me, however, recognizes the right of Catholics to offend me – just as I have the right to offend them in turn. Only intellectual fascists think they have the right not to be offend, the right to peremptorily curtail the activities of those who might offend them, and/or the right to themselves freely offend those they deem lesser beings.
That’s my two cents, anyway.
Or maybe my buck fifty-nine.
What do YOU think?
Hmmmm?
*Offering you a fresh cookie for your thoughts*
I mean, really – how long DO I have to stay away before stories like these become very rare things – or at least stop being a continuing daily plague?
Albino Girl Beheaded In Swaziland “For Witchcraft” (NineMSN; Aug 23)
An albino girl from Swaziland has been shot dead and then beheaded for the sake of witchcraft, according to reports.
Banele Nxumalo, 11, was on her way home with friends, after washing clothes and bathing in a river, when she was grabbed by a man wearing a balaclava.
The attacker shot Banele in the back and then dragged her away, right in front of her friends.
A short time later the girl’s headless body was found upriver, the UK Telegraph newspaper reports.
Police believe the murder is the latest in a series of ritualistic killings targeting albinos in Sub-Saharan Africa.
People living with the rare skin pigmentation apparently are concentrated in this part of the world.
But they often fall prey to human traffickers because black magic practitioners use their blood and body parts for good luck potions.
One such witch doctor was jailed in Tanzania last week for abducting and attempting to sell a live albino man.
Alaskan Muslim Gets 8 Years In Prison For Hit List (The Associated Press; Aug 23)
A man from a remote Alaska community who compiled a hit list of targets he believed were enemies of Islam was sentenced Monday to eight years in prison.
Paul Rockwood Jr., along with his wife, Nadia Rockwood, faced counts of lying to FBI agents when questioned about the list of 20 targets in May. They pleaded guilty to domestic terrorism last month, the first time such charges were brought in Alaska under the Patriot Act. The law was enacted after the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The length of Paul Rockwood’s sentence was the maximum penalty for the crime. Nadia Rockwood, 36, who holds dual citizenship in the U.S. and United Kingdom, was sentenced to five years probation. She will be allowed to return to Britain and take care of the couple’s 4-year-old child. She is due to give birth in November.
Authorities said Paul Rockwood, 35, of King Salmon, converted to Islam about a decade ago and followed the teachings of a cleric who supports acts of terrorism and espouses hatred for the United States. The hit list included members of the military and media.
Rockwood, who worked for the National Weather Service in King Salmon, an isolated town of a few hundred people, converted to Islam in late 2001 or 2002 when he and his wife lived in Virginia. He was enamored with the teachings of American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, prosecutors said. The couple moved to Alaska in 2006.
Federal authorities say Rockwood did far more than make a list. He considered the possibility of shooting people in the head. He began researching how to make explosive components, construct remote triggering devices and put together a bomb that could be delivered by any mail carrier, court documents say.
At Monday’s sentencing, Judge Ralph Beistline had harsh words for Rockwood and his wife, describing their actions as “cowardly” and “despicable,” and designed to “undermine the rule of law in the free society that protected them.”
“They have betrayed everything it means to be an American,” Beistline said….
Thirteen Injured As Islamic Sects Clash In Nigeria (Tunde Sanni/This Day; Aug 23)
IBADAN, Nigeria: Thirteen people were yesterday injured while houses and Mosques were vandalised in an inter-Islamic sects combustion in Sabo area of Ibadan over the control of the Sabo area between the Izalla and the Darikat Islamic sects.
By the time the skirmish subsided, blood stains and carcasses of vandalized buildings littered the area as weapons wielding youths patrolled the area, in search of rival sect members to attack.
But for the combined efforts of the State Police Command, the crisis would have escalated to the entire community as shop owners in the area and other residents in the Hausa Community hurriedly shut their doors with numerous others fleeing the area for fear of reprisal attack.
Speaking with newsmen on the development, the Sarkin Sabo, Alhaji Ahmed Zungeru who described the incident as unfortunate blamed the Izala sect leaders and their visitor from Jos, Plateau State, Mallam Kalid Usman as the brain behind the imbroglio, saying his preaching had always contradict what the Islamic religion teaches.
The efforts of the anti-riot police officers who mount surveillance in company of the Armourd Personnel Carrier (APC) saved the day as normalcy returns to the community two hours after the ugly incidence lasted.
Aside the injuries sustained mainly by Izala group members, their three identified mosques in the area were vandalized by their rival sect members while four vehicles packed beside their mosque were equally not spared as the irate ‘extremists’ smashed the windscreen of two sport utility vehicles and two others.
Those injured in the fracas were rushed to nearby hospital while others with minor injuries were seen been treated by their colleagues with the first aid materials at their disposal.
The Sarkin claimed that when he saw the rampaging youths heading to Izala’s place he stopped them and appealed for calm but when he sensed that his pleas was falling on deaf ears, he had to personally approached the Divisional Police Office at Iyaganku for them to send their men to quell the matter.
But one of the Izala leaders, Alhaji Abubakar Saliu Tanko passed the blame on the leadership of the Hausa community, describing the Sarkin’s allegation as unfounded.
According to him, the invasion of their ‘lawful gathering’ allegedly by Sarkin himself, his chiefs and the youths was a ploy to phase out their activities in the area.
Tanko said the attack on his group by the Tijaniya/Adriyah was a fallout of last Friday’s a judgment of an Ibadan based Magistrate sitting at Iyaganku, where the judge ruled that none of the two groups had always been at each others’ throat over their preaching to stop using Loudspeaker while the service was on so as to avoid what anything that may cause crisis.
When asked if the two sects complied, Tanko alleged that the Tijaniyah group who were obviously the majority in the area had not complied while they (the Izala) had obeyed the judgment and were conducting their service peacefully when the ‘assailants’ invaded their gathering, caught them unaware and wounded them with dangerous weapons.
Somali MPs Killed In Hotel Suicide Attack (The BBC; Aug 24)
Islamist gunmen have stormed a hotel close to Somalia’s presidential palace and killed at least 32 people, including six MPs.
The BBC’s Mohammed Olad Hassan in Mogadishu says the men were disguised as government soldiers.
They approached the Muna hotel, opened fire on a guard, then one of them blew himself up inside the building.
Sheik Ali Mohamud Rage from the al-Shabab Islamist militia said its “special forces” were behind the raid.
The hotel attack comes on the second day of heavy fighting between al-Shabab and troops of the transitional government, who are backed by the African Union (AU).
Our correspondent says the Muna hotel is popular with government officials, because it is in a government-controlled area and security was seen as tight.
Deputy Prime Minister Abdirahman Ibbi told the BBC Somali Service that the suicide attacker had blown himself up using a hand grenade.
As well as the six MPs, five government officials and 21 civilians were also killed.
Maj Barigye Bahoku, spokesman for the African Union peacekeepers, said an 11-year-old shoe-shine boy and a woman selling tea in front of the hotel were among the dead.
An MP at the Muna hotel told a BBC reporter that there were “dead bodies all over” and the scene was a “massacre”.
He said the gun battle at the hotel had lasted about an hour.
“They rained gunfire on everybody. Nobody stood a chance. I was lucky because they aimed at me but I jumped out of the window and survived,” hotel employee Adan Mohamed told the AFP news agency.
Mr Ibbi called the attack “shocking and brutal”, especially given that it had happened during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Al-Shabab launched a new offensive on Monday soon after its spokesman said the group was declaring a “massive war” on the AU force, describing its 6,000 peacekeepers as “invaders”.
An injured woman is carried to Medina hospital on 24 August 24 2010 as fighting rages in Mogadishu The hotel attack brings the number of people killed to more than 70 in the latest fighting
At least 40 other people have been killed in the fighting and more than 130 wounded, with shells being fired into residential areas, according to health officials.
The government controls only a few key areas of the capital.
The group said it carried out last month’s deadly twin bombings in Uganda’s capital during the football World Cup final.
They were in retaliation for Uganda’s deployment of troops to Somalia with the African Union force, it said.
The AU has responded by saying it will send extra troops to bolster its force in Mogadishu.
Somalia has experienced almost constant conflict since the collapse of its central government in 1991.
Montana Sect Leader Waives Extradition On Rape Charge (The Associated Press; Aug 24)
BILLINGS, Montana: The leader of a Montana religious sect arrested last week in Wyoming has waived extradition to Utah, where he faces charges of raping a 15-year-old girl.
Terrill Dalton appeared in Hot Springs County Circuit Court in Thermopolis, Wyo., on Monday and agreed to return to Utah. Dalton’s bail remained at $250,000.
Dalton surrendered to authorities last Thursday near Thermopolis, a day after federal agents arrested another church leader, Geody Harman, in Fromberg. Both men are accused of raping the same 15-year-old girl in Utah in 2005 or 2006.
The Church of the Firstborn and the General Assembly of Heaven moved to Fromberg from Idaho in September after claiming persecution. Church members fled to Idaho after federal agents raided their headquarters in Magna, Utah, in May 2009.
Catholic Priest Directed Deadly Ulster Attack (The Australian; Aug 25)
A Catholic priest directed a devastating IRA car-bomb attack in the Northern Ireland village of Claudy in 1972.
It was one of the worst atrocities of the bloodiest year of the Troubles — and his role was covered up by British police, government ministers and the Catholic hierarchy, an official investigation revealed last night.
Nine people were killed, three of them children, and more than 30 were injured in the attack. No one was ever charged with the killings, and the IRA denied responsibility at the time.
But a long-awaited report by the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland last night confirmed suspicions Father James Chesney, from the nearby village of Bellaghy, was directly involved in the IRA operation.
Father Chesney was transferred to a parish in County Donegal in the Irish republic, outside the Northern Ireland jurisdiction, following secret talks between the then British secretary of state, William Whitelaw, and the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Cardinal William Conway.
Mr Whitelaw and Cardinal Conway discussed the scandal after being approached by a senior Royal Ulster Constabulary officer because the police were reportedly reluctant to arrest the priest for fear of inflaming the security situation.
The Claudy attack happened on the same day British troops stormed republican areas in the city of Londonderry.
That occurred just six months after the Bloody Sunday killings of 13 civilians by British troops in Londonderry when Martin McGuinness, now the Deputy First Minister of the Northern Ireland Executive, was the Irish Republican Army’s second-in-command in the city.
An RUC officer’s request to arrest the priest was refused by an assistant chief constable of the Special Branch who said “matters are in hand”. That officer had written to the British government about what action could be taken to “render harmless a dangerous priest” and asked if the case could be raised with the Catholic hierarchy.
At the Claudy bomb inquest, a coroner described the outrage as “sheer, unadulterated, cold, calculated, fiendish murder”.
Later poet James Simmons described the moment of the attack in his work Claudy.
“An explosion too loud for your eardrums to bear, and young children squealing like pigs in the square, and all faces chalk-white and streaked with bright red, and the glass and the dust and the terrible dead.”
Thanks for all the notes and links! I wish I had the time and energy to respond to each one individually, but… it seems that I barely have the time and energy anymore to feed myself. With any luck at all, that should be changing in the days and weeks ahead. In the meantime, rest assured that your comments here are very much appreciated.
And just in case you’ve been wondering what exactly has been keeping me away….
It hasn’t been grief, nor has it been any sudden re-examination of my own beliefs in the face of death. Instead, it’s been the fact that my recently deceased relative left a huge house behind and very few relatives to take care of it or the 35 years of stuff she filled it with. It’s not quite as bad as the situation you might have seen on one of those TV shows about hoarders, but… suffice it to say that trying to figure out exactly why anyone would stash three defective electric juicers in three very different places has been just one of the questions that have thoroughly pre-empted those raised by religion during the last month.
Which now leads me to a question YOU might be able to help me answer.
My deceased relative wasn’t terribly religious, but she did accumulate a variety of religious artifacts during her very long life. Should I include these items in the estate sale I’m now planning or should I destroy them?
These items aren’t very valuable. We’re talking about framed copies of the Beatitudes and cloying images of Jesus, not diamond-studded gold crucifixes.
We’re also talking about Bibles written for children.
And Bible Dominoes – “An Inspirational and Educational Game for Ages 4 to 10″ – probably from the 1940s or 1950s. Instead of the usual dots, the tiles have churches, crosses, Bibles, mangers, etc. It’s the sort of thing that you really have to see to appreciate. I’ll probably keep it for myself, just because it’s so weird (and makes me wonder if the Soviets ever stooped to making sets of dominoes bearing depictions of the hammer and sickle flag, Che Guevara, and happy Communist farmers bringing in the crops).
Although I’m hardly a fan of censorship, I feel no obligation to put this kind of crap back into circulation where it might warp yet another generation of young minds.
On the other hand, any money Christians might pay me for this crap is money they won’t be donating to The 700 Club or Mike Huckabee’s next campaign.
So… what would you do?
Or what have you done when you’ve been in a similar situation in the past?
Hmmm?
All answers will be kept private and confidential, so feel free to answer as often and in as many different ways as you like!
(Side Note: I also found a Nazi rifle hidden away in the attic. I guess my deceased relative’s husband acquired it during the latter days of his military service in Europe in 1946. Should I try to sell it even though it might end up in the hands of current Nazi sympathizers? Should I destroy it? Or should I keep it for myself? What would YOU do? And if you think Bible Dominoes ought to be treated differently than a Nazi rifle, please tell me why.)
The close relative I mentioned here has now passed away.
In the end, the Jesus she seems to have believed in for virtually all her long life gave her very little if any comfort.
In sharp contrast to this, morphine gave her a lot of comfort.
I’m told morphine was discovered by Friedrich Serturner back in 1804.
If you’re moved to sing the praises of anyone this Sunday, I hope you’ll choose to sing his.
Religion may indeed be the opium of the masses on a day to day basis, but I now have definitive proof several times over that it’s a piss poor substitute for doctor-prescribed narcotics when you’re on your deathbed.
Or perhaps I should say “explained further” since I’ve previously posted a good deal of interesting information on this subject and related issues. (For details, see the entry I posted on Aug 26, 2007 along with the related links.)
The bottom line is that these so-called mystical events that a lot of people point to as proof of the existence of the soul and/or an afterlife look to be nothing more than the subjective perceptions of a brain undergoing unusual electro-chemical changes. The mind isn’t escaping the material nature of physical reality but succumbing to it.
Here are two recent stories that explain this at some length:
That’s Not The Afterlife – It’s A Brainstem (Jonathan Leake/The Sunday Times; May 30)
Doctors believe they may have found the cause of the powerful spiritual experiences reported by people “brought back from the dead”.
A study of the brainwaves of dying patients showed a surge of electrical activity in the moments before their lives ended.
The researchers suggest this surge may be the cause of near-death experiences, the mysterious medical phenomena in which patients who have been revived when close to death report sensations such as walking towards a bright light or a feeling that they are floating above their body.
Many people experience the sensation as a religious vision and treat it as confirmation of an afterlife. However, the scientists behind the new research believe that is wrong.
“We think the near-death experiences could be caused by a surge of electrical energy released as the brain runs out of oxygen,” said Lakhmir Chawla, an intensive care doctor at George Washington University medical centre in Washington.
“As blood flow slows down and oxygen levels fall, the brain cells fire one last electrical impulse. It starts in one part of the brain and spreads in a cascade and this may give people vivid mental sensations.”
Many revived patients have reported being bathed in bright light or suffused with a sense of peace as they start to walk into a light-filled tunnel. A few even say they experienced visions of religious figures such as Jesus or Muhammad or Krishna, while others describe floating above their own deathbed, observing the scene.
In one of the most famous cases, in 1991, Pam Reynolds, an American singer, reported watching the top of her own skull being removed by surgeons before she moved into a bright glowing realm, including detailed accounts of the surgery and the conversations by her surgeons.
If Chawla is right, however, such experiences have a biological explanation rather than a metaphysical one. In the research he used an electroencephalograph (EEG), a device that measures brain activity, to monitor seven terminally ill people.
The medical purpose of the devices was to make sure that the patients, suffering from conditions such as cancer and heart failure, were sufficiently sedated to be out of pain. However, Chawla noticed that moments before death the patients experienced a burst in brainwave activity lasting from 30 seconds to three minutes.
The activity was similar to that seen in people who are fully conscious, even though the patients appeared asleep and had no blood pressure. Soon after the surge abated, they were pronounced dead.
Chawla’s research, published in the Journal of Palliative Medicine, is thought to be the first to suggest that near-death experiences have a particular physiological cause. Although it describes only seven patients, he says he has seen the same things happening “at least 50 times” as people die.
Other scientific studies suggest that 15%-20% of people who go through cardiac arrest and clinical death report lucid, well-structured thought processes, reasoning, memories and sometimes detailed recall of events during their encounter with death….
Who Have More Out-of-Body Near-Death Experiences – Atheists, Catholics, or Muslims? (R. Douglas Fields/Psychology Today; July 26)
A 55-year-old man was suddenly stricken by a heart attack. Rushed to the emergency room near death the man felt himself leave his own body and hover above the operating room like a vapor. Peering down on the frantic scene from above the man watched as the cardiovascular surgeon worked feverishly on his limp pale-white body to save his life. Later the staff confirmed that the man’s description was an accurate account of the surgical team’s behavior.
The dying man described seeing a brilliant light at the end of a dark tunnel. It drew him in with a strong attraction that seemed to emanate from a region of warmth, love, and peace. Approaching the light he met relatives who had long ago diseased. They communicated with him telepathically. His departed relatives urged him to resist the seductive pull and return to his body. After recovering from the heart attack the man felt transformed. The extraordinary experience infused him with an intense desire to help others and to talk about his near-death transcendental encounter with the afterlife awaiting the soul after the death of one’s body.
Near-death experiences with this mystical out-of-body nature are not uncommon, and the stories are remarkably similar as reported by individuals who return from the brink. Such powerful spiritual experiences are reported by 23 percent of people who suffer severe heart attacks. They occur in people close to death from other causes or even in situations of intense physical or emotional danger. These experiences share many common elements. Often there is an accelerated review of one’s life. Joy, peacefulness, and encounters with mystical entities or deceased persons are common.
Does a person’s religious belief affect the likelihood of experiencing such spiritual feelings on the threshold of death? A study by Zalika Klemenc-Ketis and colleagues published in the journal Critical Care investigated this question in a search for possible commonalities among people who have near-death-experiences, and the findings are provocative. Examining medical records of heart attack patients together with detailed questionnaires about the individual’s religious beliefs, other personal attributes, and medical data, the researchers found that if a person was an atheist, his or her chances of having an out-of-body experience were the same as for a Catholic or Muslim.
What then can explain who will and who will not see that light at the end of the tunnel on the threshold of death and turn around to tell the world about it? The person’s gender made no difference. Age, level of education, fear of death before the cardiac arrest made no difference whatsoever. But they did find a common thread among those who had battled the light and returned to their body.
The common feature among those who had out-of-body experiences was a rise in carbon dioxide levels in their blood above a certain threshold (5.7 kPa). None of the other chemical measures of the patients’ blood had a significant bearing on who had experienced such a spiritual event. Extreme hyperventilation can do much the same thing to the brain, explaining perhaps why those in extreme danger and near fainting can experience the phenomenon.
The study suggests that by more carefully controlling the blood’s acid/base balance during a medical crisis, which becomes upset when blood is overloaded by carbon dioxide, the whole mysterious experience can be prevented.
(R. Douglas Fields, Ph. D. is the Chief of the Nervous System Development and Plasticity Section at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. He received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.A. degree at San Jose State University, and a Ph.D. degree from the University of California, San Diego, working jointly in the Medical School and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Fields has conducted postdoctoral research at Stanford University, Yale University, and the NIH. He became Head of the Neurocytology and Physiology Unit, NICHD in 1994, and Chief of the Nervous System Development and Plasticity Section, NICHD in 2001. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Neuron Glia Biology, and member of the editorial board of several other journals in the field of neuroscience. He is also the author of The Other Brain: From Dementia to Schizophrenia, How New Discoveries about the Brain Are Revolutionizing Medicine and Science. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.)
A Christian reader of this diary once made the claim that the intricate nature of the human body proved the existence of a divine creator. This reader specifically pointed to the brain. I said no, all that the existence of an intricate natural organ like the brain proved was that nature could produce some pretty intricate things. Much better evidence for the existence of a supernatural creator and/or realm would be opening up the human skull and finding nothing – nothing at all – and yet a nothingness somehow capable of generating conscious thoughts regardless. If conscious thoughts can instead be explained by the electro-chemical interactions of neurons, the soul hypothesis becomes completely superfluous. One might as well continue to explain lightning as a thunderbolt thrown by Zeus even after taking a course in modern meteorology. It’s not just unnecessary – it’s primitive and inane.
Stories like these which explain near-death experiences as the result of the same basic sort of electro-chemical intereactions that are responsible for all our thoughts and feelings further underscore the point.
It’s a pretty weak sort of supernatural miracle that relies upon carbon dioxide levels rising above a certain point in the blood, no?
God’s Wheeler Dealer And The Mystery Millions (John Cooney/The Irish Independent; July 3)
It’s been some week for Pope Benedict. It began with his indignant protests against the seizure of secret church files on paedophile priests by Belgian police, then the US Supreme Court ruled that the Vatican no longer had diplomatic immunity and would have to defend a lawsuit against a dead Irish paedophile priest.
And now the 83-year-old German pontiff finds the church mired in a potentially massive financial scandal, as Italian lawyers claim widespread corruption within the heart of Rome.
Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, the former head of the centuries-old, property-rich Congregation for Evangelisation (Propaganda Fide), has come under serious fire.
Propaganda Fide owns and manages hundreds of properties in central Rome, worth an estimated €9bn [about $12 billion US] and fetching €56m [about $73 million US] in annual rent into the Vatican coffers. So powerful is the head of Propaganda Fide — a post briefly held by the Irishman Dermot Ryan, the former Archbishop of Dublin before his sudden death in 1984 — that he is known in the Vatican corridors of power as the Red Pope, or Il Papa Rosso.
A successor of Ryan, Cardinal Sepe is under investigation for corruption after allegedly receiving kickbacks during the five years that he headed Propaganda Fide from 2001 to 2006.
Charged by magistrates in the central Italian town of Perugia, he is suspected of collusion with Pietro Lunardi, Italy’s former Minister for Infrastructure and Transportation. In 2004, Sepe’s autonomous office reportedly sold Lunardi, a central Rome palazzo, way below the market price and a year later Propaganda Fide allegedly received €2.5m [about $3.25 million US] in public subsidies for repairs on its Piazza di Spagna headquarters that were never done.
Now the Archbishop of Naples, the 67-year-old Cardinal Sepe, revered by Neapolitans as “O’guapo”, the local slang for “The Boss”, has mounted a vigorous defence.
He insists that the two events were unrelated, and he claims that the money Propaganda earned from the sale of the lavish palazzo was sent to another Vatican office, the Administration for the Patrimony of the Apostolic See. (APSA).
Irrespective of the outcome, this high-profile case highlights the lack of transparency in the Vatican’s hidden wealth. Propaganda runs its multibillion-euro portfolio independently of APSA, the body that administers the Holy See’s assets, on which Ireland’s Peter Sutherland sits.
The Sepe case has shown that the Vatican’s two top money and property bureaux operate independently without any liaison….
For too long Italian property speculators have been too close to Princes of the church, who live in Renaissance-style grandeur in splendid palazzos that make the residences owned in the Celtic Tiger era by moguls such as Sean Fitzpatrick and Bernard McNamara look like downtown shanty hovels.
In 2006, a year after he was elected pontiff, Benedict surprised Vatican watchers by exiling Sepe to Naples. Usually such appointments are for life. It was a clear indication that the Pope was unhappy with his performance. Sepe’s successor, the holy Indian Cardinal Ivan Diaz, now wants out on health grounds.
Financial corruption in the Vatican could prove as damaging for papal prestige as the abuse crisis. The evidence is mounting that during Pope John Paul II’s reign, the church protected the serial paedophile, the late Mexican founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Fr Marcial Maciel. Maciel was a close friend of Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid.
The paedophile cover-ups by bishops in Ireland, Germany and Austria are all pointing to inaction in the Vatican. These files are stacked up on the pontiff’s desk.
Pope Benedict’s dilemma is that any temptation to blame his Polish predecessor, who he wants to fast-track to sainthood, will implicate himself to these abuse scandals. His chosen alternative is to inaugurate a new epoch of re-evangelisation in a crusade against secularisation.
It is a recipe for nurturing hard-line sectarian zealots within a shrinking flock. It smacks of Nero fiddling while Rome burns and the money trail vanishes.
Former Georgetown Quarterback Indicted In Church Investigation (The Washington Examiner; July 20)
A former all-conference quarterback for Georgetown University is in legal trouble in connection with a criminal probe of a controversial Waldorf-based church that ministers to people with drug and alcohol addictions.
J.J. Mont, who still owns numerous passing and scoring records for the Division 1-AA Hoyas, has been indicted on obstruction charges after authorities accused him of providing fraudulent financial documents to a federal grand jury.
Mont, 31, of Indian Head, is the treasurer for a church whose pastor is under a grand jury investigation for numerous possible violations, including for the breaking of federal bankruptcy laws.
Federal authorities are investigating the pastor of the church, and are trying to determine who has ownership over the ministry’s assets and several luxury vehicles including a 2004 Bentley Arnage, a 2004 Maybach 57 S and at least four Mercedez-Benzs, according to the indictment filed in federal court in Greenbelt.
The church was not identified by name in the charging document, but according to bankruptcy court records Mont is the treasurer of the Seed Faith International Church. The church filed for bankruptcy in March 2009.
A judge has allowed Mont to continue to attend services there but he is ordered to avoid contact with its pastor, Robert Freeman, and other top church leaders. Mont was released to his mother’s custody in Alexandria. He could not be reached Monday.
Freeman, who calls himself “Dr. Shine,” has claimed to treat addicts through the rites of exorcism, and has admitted to striking people who tried to fight back. According to a 2002 newspaper story in the Gazette, Freeman had $900,000 in court judgments against him….
Ohio Priest, Founder Of Rehab Center, Pleads Guilty In Tax Case (Thomas J. Sheeran/The Associated Press; July 23)
CLEVELAND: A Roman Catholic priest who founded an alcohol and drug rehab center in Ohio has pleaded guilty to dividing $1 million into 139 deposits to avoid a requirement that deposits over $10,000 be reported to the federal government.
The 68-year-old Rev. Samuel Ciccolini of Akron also pleaded guilty Friday in Cleveland federal court to avoiding $129,432 in taxes in 2003 by underreporting his income by $300,000.
He says the money was his and didn’t involve embezzled funds from the church or the Interval Brotherhood Home which he founded in Akron.
Ciccolini says he hoarded the money over a 33-year period and panicked in 2003 over a new U.S. currency design. He didn’t elaborate about his concerns.
Judge James Gwin set sentencing for Oct. 8.
Church Denounces Gay Priests After Magazine Revelations (The BBC; July 23)
An Italian Catholic diocese has denounced homosexual priests for their “double life” and said they should not be in the priesthood.
The Diocese of Rome was responding to a magazine article on three homosexual priests that gave details of alleged sexual encounters and trips to clubs.
The diocese said “the honour of all the others” was sullied by their behaviour.
The Church holds that all sexual activity outside marriage is sinful and regards homosexual acts as unnatural.
The article in the conservative magazine Panorama, entitled Gay Priests’ Nights on the Town, carried pictures and interviews with the men.
The research was carried out over a month using hidden cameras.
It recorded sexual encounters, including one in a church building.
The diocese said of the priests: “We don’t wish any ill-will against them, but we cannot accept that because of their behaviour the honour of all the others is sullied.”
It said it was “saddened and troubled” by the article and vowed to pursue “with rigour any behaviour that is unworthy of the priestly life”.
Pope Benedict XVI instructed in 2005 that actively gay priests should be barred from seminaries.
The Pope has said gay marriage is an “insidious and dangerous threat to the common good”.
Cult Leader Jailed For Raping Followers (Ian Proctor/The Harrow Observer; July 28)
BRONDESBURY, United Kingdom: A cult leader has been jailed for 10 years for raping and sexually assaulting two female followers.
Michael Lyons, 52, who was also known as Mohan Singh, had faced a string of sex offence charges that were said to have taken place between 1998 and 2008 against seven alleged victims – one an American and one a New Zealander – while he operated as a self-confessed ’spiritual group leader’.
Investigating officer Detective Sergeant Nick Giles said: “Lyons purported to be a naturopath, skilled in osteopathy, acupuncture and nutrition. His followers were mainly women, who supported his lavish lifestyle.
“He was introduced to potential new members through his followers. The new members were also women, with interests in spiritualism and well being.
“We heard in evidence that Lyons used a program of sleep deprivation and psychological harassment as well as group social pressure to coerce them to join. He sexually assaulted victims during this process.
“This coercive persuasion forced people to change their beliefs, ideas, attitudes and behaviours, using psychological pressure, undue influence, threats, anxiety and intimidation.
“Evidence of bad character was used to show his cult activities and sexual misconduct.”
One victim was attacked after travelling to a basement flat in Finchley Road, north-west London, for a so-called group healing session.
She was handed a carrot and orange juice drink and an Oxo cube-like liquorice remedy, which turned out to be a powerful laxative, before being invited into a side room to receive treatment for back trouble.
The woman said Lyons had a well-rehearsed patter that preceded the sex attack.
“It’s such a clever routine. I am certain others have gone through it,” she said.
“Just before he assaulted me, the thought went through my head: ‘He has done this before’.
“I just thought he was a chippy little bloke, I thought I knew the sort, the kind of guy he is. ”
“It is like someone jumped out on me in the dark, but in a psychological sense.
“It’s a sense of false safety. I didn’t realise that these women were effectively Stepford Wives. It’s all part of the grooming.”
Lyons, of Brondesbury Park, Brondesbury, had denied all the charges against him at Wood Green Crown Court in north-east London but on Monday (July 26) he was found guilty by the jury of the June 2002 rape of a 34-year-old woman at an address in Belsize Park in central London, for which he received seven years’ imprisonment, and of the assault by penetration of a 43-year-old woman in January 2005, for which he was given a consecutive three-year jail term.
He was cleared of three further counts of rape and one of sexual assault against four separate women and a further count of rape and a further count of sexual assault are to lie on file.
200 Women Killed Every Year In India After Being Branded “Witches” (The Hindustan Times/The Press Trust Of India; July 25)
Nearly 200 to 150 women are killed every year in India after being tagged as ‘witches’, a Dehra Dun based NGO has said citing National Crime Bureau statistics.
Jharkhand tops the list with 50-60 witchcraft-related murders every year followed by Andhra Pradesh where the number is around 30, Haryana 25-30 and Orissa 24-28, Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra (RLEK) Chairman Avdhash Kaushal claimed.
Jharkhand is not the only state where women are facing barbaric attacks in the name of witchcraft, such incidents are common in Orissa, Chattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Haryana, Kaushal said.
In past 15 years, more than 2,500 women were killed after being accused of practicing witchcraft, according to a study conducted by RLEK.
Five women were stripped and paraded naked last year in Patharghatia village in Deodhar district of Jharkhand.
In yet another incident, a 40-year old woman was lynched allegedly by her women neighbours at Sikariatand village in Simdega district of the same state, Kushal claimed.
“It is very sad that women are still being killed rampantly after being declared witches. Majority of these incidents are not reported in the media,” Kaushal, a recipient of Padam Shri, said.
He said in order to overcome the menace a national legislation was needed.
“We will soon file a writ petition in the court of law to seek a remedy in the form of a new legislation from Parliament on the issue,” he said.
To learn more about the never-ending witch hunts that continue to plague our world, see the entries I posted on March 29, 2009 and May 21, 2009.
Baby Drowned During Baptism (The Sun; July 26)
A priest has been accused of drowning a baby as he baptised the tiny tot.
The holy man is being quizzed after the baby’s parents claimed he accidentally drowned their son at the ceremony.
Witnesses claim Father Valentin did not cover the six-week-old tot’s mouth before immersing him in the font.
The priest denies being to blame for baby’s death after the baptism in the Rascani district in north-western Moldova, Eastern Europe.
The baby’s dad Dumitru Gaidau, 36, said: “We all saw it, the priest didn’t put his hand over the baby’s mouth to stop water going in as he should have done and as they do at every other baptism. We couldn’t believe it that he just put his hand over his belly and over the head and submerged him three times in the water.”
The baby’s godmother Aliona Vacarciuc, 32, said: “The baby was crying as he went into the water. We couldn’t believe it but we thought the priest must know what he’s doing, but he didn’t. When we got him back there was nothing that could be done anymore.”
She said that she and the other godparents had challenged the priest and asked him: “What have you done.”
She added: “He just told us that he knew better than we did what should have happened and that it was not his first baptism — he was experienced and knew what to do.”
Doctor Sergiu Raileanu who examined the tiny tot, however, told Romania’s Publica TV that his examination confirmed that the baby had drowned.
Local police said they have launched a manslaughter investigation. If found guilty, the priest faces up to three years in jail.
How many more lives will be lost to this primitive religious ritual before people wise up and abandon it?
(To learn about some of the other victims this ritual has claimed, see the entry I posted on July 23 as well as the related links.)
Super-attentive readers may recall that one of the books I’ve been reading this year is Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination. Like his earlier book, The Discoverers, this one is a sweeping survey of human thought and accomplishment over many, many centuries.
It is also not infrequently a catalog of the many ways religion has served to muck up human thought and retard human accomplishment in ways both big and small.
I shared a few examples in the entries I posted on March 4 and April 4.
Here now are a few more:
1) “The surprising path that Francois Rabelais (circa 1490-1553) created for himself was through medicine and the thickets of pedantry. Born to the family of a prosperous French lawyer in Touraine in central France, by 1521 he was a Franciscan monk, writing Greek verses…. In 1523, when the Sorbonne banned the study of that ‘heretical language,’ Rabelais’s Franciscan superiors seized his Greek books…. By 1528 Rabelais – without permission from his superiors – had taken off his monk’s robes and gone to Paris to study medicine…. Studying at the Faculty of Medicine of Montpellier he received his doctor’s degree in medicine (1537), and though it was forbidden by the Sorbonne, he actually dissected the corpse of a hanged criminal…. At Montpellier, Rabelais had impressed his fellows and alarmed his professors by his own translations of the sacred Greek medical texts because a student who could read these texts – and the New Testament – in the original might be tempted to draw his own conclusions. He never ceased to champion the ‘humanistic’ approach to medicine, seeking progress through the better reading of ancient texts.” (Page 289)
2) “What might have been Rabelais’s fate was dramatized in the tragedy of his friend Etienne Dolet (1509-1546), ‘the first martyr of the Renaissance.’ Dolet had set up a maverick printing press in Lyons, and after Rabelais’s own expurgated edition of Gargantua and Pantagruel, which softened his strictures against the Sorbonne, Dolet brought out his ‘new edition’ of Rabelais, reproducing Rabelais’s original indiscretions. The Sorbonne banned both editions. Dolet urged his countrymen to write in French, their mother tongue, rather than in Latin, ’so that foreigners won’t call us barbarians.’ His courage left many in doubt whether he was an atheist or merely a Protestant, but the Sorbonne was not interested in fine distinctions. They condemned Dolet for the heresy of denying the immortality of the soul. On his way to be burned at the stake, he punned, ‘Non dolet ipse Dolet, sed pro ratione dolet.’ (Dolet does not suffer for himself, but he suffers for the sake of reason).” (Page 291)
3) “On his [John Milton's] grand tour he met the elite of France and Italy, who were impressed by his facility in their languages…. His notable experience was meeting two famous victims of tyranny. In Paris he had ‘ardently desired to meet’ Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), the great Dutch humanist and founder of the modern science of international law. In his homeland Grotius had been sentenced to life imprisonment for his political views and for taking the wrong side in a Calvinist dispute over free will. After a sensational escape from prison in a box of books, Grotius had found refuge in Paris as Queen Christina’s ambassador. In Florence Milton sought out, ‘found and visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought.” (Pages 321-22)
(SIDENOTE: Boorstin’s chapter on Milton includes the interesting fact that the Great Fire of London of 1666 destroyed 80 churches, including St. Paul’s Cathedral. Apparently the gOd of the Christians once again was unable or unwilling to protect his own temples from the fiery power of nature. That ‘gOd of love’ was also unable or unwilling to protect the thousands upon thousands of poor devotees who lost everything to the flames. The year before, that gOd had proved equally useless as the plague snuffed out the lives of some 26,000 Londoners. [See page 329 for more details.])
4) “[Montaigne] was allowed to return to his study in 1585. There he revised Books I and II of his essays and worked on Book III. The religious war heated up again, with the Holy Catholic League in the ascendant. Now Montaigne, suspect for not having joined the Catholic army, and with a Protestant brother and sister and friends among the heretics, was in constant peril. ‘I incurred the disadvantages that moderation brings in such maladies. I was belabored from every quarter….” (P. 564)
5) “The boy [James] Boswell, not robust, suffered every sort of pressure. His passive mother had a taste for the mystical. But his father subjected him to the rigors of Calvinism, with the torturing ambiguities of predestination and the terrors of hellfire. From eight to thirteen he was educated at home by tutors. At twelve he seems to have suffered a psychological crisis. Entering the University of Edinburgh at thirteen, he completed the course in liberal arts. Somehow the metaphysics he studied reinforced his fears of hellfire and plunged him into a depression, which would recur all the rest of his life…. When his father heard rumors of his attending a ‘Romish chapel’ and consorting with a Roman Catholic actress, he promptly separated James from the seductions of Edinburgh….” (P. 589)
6) “‘I have composed within myself a confession of faith,’ he [Dostoevsky] explained, ‘in which everything is clear and holy for me. This confession is very simple… to believe that there is nothing more beautiful, more profound, more sympathetic, more reasonable, more manly, and more perfect than Christ…. Furthermore, if anyone proved to me that Christ was outside the truth, and it really was a fact that the truth was outside of Christ, I would rather remain with Christ than with the truth.‘” (P. 662-63) That’s one of the best illustrations of religion’s power to corrupt the mind that I’ve ever come across. I’m not surprised that it led to Dostoevsky’s embrace of human pain and suffering as something both good and deserved and helped to inspire his ardent defense of the tyranny of the Russian Czar.
7) “The power of the new art [of the motion picture] was proved in The Birth of a Nation, in which film historians see [D.W.] Griffith’s creation of a grammar and syntax of the modern film. Its three hours on the screen pioneered the long feature film. Budgeted at $40,000 (four times the usual cost for a feature at the time), it finally came to $110,000…. Within five years after its release in 1915 it would earn $15 million, thirty years later it had grossed some $48 million, and it went on earning…. Taken from a play by a bigoted North Carolina minister, the movie told a nostalgic tale idealizing the Old South and the institution of slavery, extolling the heroism of the Ku Klux Klan in saving white Southerners from bestial Negroes and their white political accomplices, and exhorting against race ‘pollution.’… In the 1920s the film helped spark a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, which reached a membership of five million by the 1940s, and it continued to be used for recruiting and indoctrination into the 1960s. Thorstein Veblen hailed the movie as a triumph of ‘concise misinformation.’” (P. 743)
8) “[In 1931] the Empire State Building rose to 102 stories and 1,200 feet…. [I]n 1945, when a small plane rammed into its seventy-sixth floor, killing the pilot and thirteen others, some said it proved that God never intended that there should be such tall buildings.” (P. 547)
There are many reasons I enjoy reading Boorstin. The bright light that he often shines on the inanities and cruelties inspired by religion are merely one of them.
I hope you appreciated reading the examples I posted here as much as I enjoyed sharing them. If not, well, you might try reading Boorstin for yourself. A few brief examples highlighting merely one aspect of his wide-ranging intellect simply can’t begin to do him justice.
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