Killing in the name of Jesus is not murder..

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by Bells, Apr 15, 2015.

  1. Bells Staff Member

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    At the end of February of this year, a small Pentecostal Church and members of its congregation decided to perform an exorcism on a 2 year old boy.


    Police say the pastors at a Balch Springs church starved a 2-year-old boy they said was possessed by a demon, and later held a ceremony to resurrect the boy.

    Several people told police the boy was given water four to five times a day, but no food for 25 days before he died on March 22. A church member tried to feed the boy, but the pastors scolded her and forbade her from doing so, according to court records
    .​


    Araceli Meza, the head of the small Church, touts herself as a prophet, who could speak directly to God.

    The Church is run out of her home. The authorities did not even know it even existed until this case came to light.

    Meza had something special planned for the little boy. She planned to resurrect him.

    The morning of March 22, police said, Meza and three other people — listed as suspects in court records — held a ceremony to revive the boy.

    A video of the ceremony shows Meza reciting prayers while holding the boy, whom she refers to as Benjamin, in her arms.

    “In the name of Jesus, I’m utilizing this oil to try to get him back to life,” she explains in Spanish.

    After applying oil to his head, she says it’s time for him to wake up, “right now.”

    Meza later told police she believed that was the day God was going to wake up the boy, court records say.

    The next morning, Meza, the boy’s parents and other church members took the boy to Mexico for burial.


    The child was a US citizen.

    If that is not disturbing enough, it seems that what Meza and the others involved in this sad story did not commit murder.

    Araceli Meza, 49, was arrested Monday and charged with injury to a child causing serious bodily injury by omission.

    In short, it was a charge of abuse to a child. In this case, it led to death. This was a deliberate act of withholding food for 25 days, until the child died. At no time did they report the death to the authorities. Instead, the body was taken out of the country and buried in the hope that the authorities would not be able to conduct an autopsy.

    Yet a woman can miscarry a child and be charged with murder.

    Go figure.

    Actively setting out to starve a child to death in the name of Jesus is not murder, but miscarrying a baby is.
     
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  3. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    This is the face of faith. The tragedy of it all is that so many faithful I've known would resent such sentiments, but given the chance they would make excuses. And that's the thing. They wouldn't defend the idea that the child needed to die, but they would hold back against murder charges. After all, it's no different than being a police officer or a firearms owner. Any excuse to kill.

    Even civilized society itself is nothing more. And what sickens me most is the promises made along the way, the lies people tell in order to get everyone else to play along. You know, civilized society sounds like a great idea, but the whole point is to make it easier and less risky to simply kill one another.

    Then again, I come from a civilized society where the guiding philosophy is to let others suffer and die, just as long as it doesn't get in the way of buying another luxury yacht or vacation home.

    Remember, this is what people are fighting for. This is what faith exemptions from the law are all about, that those unsatisfactory to faithless usurpers like this self-styled pastor might hold God's judgment of life and death for themselves. It is an earthly sickness, and one that has the luxury of existing in a time when an eye for an eye is an unacceptably high price.

    Then again, we're not going to call off the whole of civilized society for these fuckups. Not even for the whole of their Christianity, so definitely not for some halfwitted, faithless, frail usurper.

    Dignity and decency may be their lies, but it is within our power to build a world in which their deadly lies are our living truths. They can bleed Jesus for all he's worth, but not a single one of them is decent enough to climb up, pull the nails, and bring him down from the Cross.
     
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  5. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    It bears repetition. Freedom of Religion has limits just like other rights and freedoms and just a few of those limits are the other freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights by the US Constitution.

    It goes without saying (in places other than Texas, evidently), that murder in the name of any religion is prosecutable as a crime. Everyone in that church that knew about what they were doing and did not act to counter it is an accessory to the murder of this child. The members of this church are holdovers from the branch Davidians from Waco, no doubt. It is unfortunate that there is really no legal remedy that would allow banning such people from becoming involved in a cult or a religion that was just as bad again. Testing them all for drug use and/or schizophrenia and getting them into therapy may be the only way to prevent another tragedy like this one.

    If anyone really needed an exorcism, it was the members of this church.
     
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  7. Photizo Ambassador/Envoy Valued Senior Member

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  8. Bells Staff Member

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    They are all to blame for this. Not a single one of them contacted the police before the child died. Nor when he died. They waited until his body was taken to Mexico for burial before they gave the tip off to police.

    And then comes the fact that she in particular, was not charged with murder. But a woman who miscarried her baby was charged with murder. How does that work, exactly?

    While I can hope that they want the body before they charge her and hopefully the parents, her husband and others who were in that house and witnessed that child starving to death, appropriately, I doubt they will. Parents who allow their children to die, or who refuse to render any help to a child who is dying because of their religious beliefs often walk away scott free. While I do not think Texas has religious exemptions for child abuse, the fact that this isn't being treated as such is disturbing. They have eye witnesses, video evidence of her with the child's body.
     
  9. Russ_Watters Not a Trump supporter... Valued Senior Member

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    I'd like to see a source for the part about a miscarriage being murder, however I can offer an explanation of the difference: intent. The difference between murder and neglect is that for murder, it has to be proven that death was the intent, whereas with endangerment it only has to be shown that death should have been foreseeable. That said, the investigation is ongoing and would not conclude that there can't be additional charges. In similar cases, others have been charged with murder. Either way, the choice of charges has nothing to do with religion.
     
    Last edited: Apr 15, 2015
  10. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Something like this pops up in the news every few years. The last time, a woman was convicted of murder--I don't remember the specific details: starvation, beatings, exposure, withholding medications...? Anyway the judge sent her to prison for a long time, perhaps life. She told the judge that she was 100% positive that her son would rise from the dead before long. In that case, it would be obvious that she had in fact not committed murder because the boy would not be dead.

    She asked the judge to clarify her sentence. When the boy did, in fact, return to life, would he please vacate her sentence and let her out of prison?

    The judge thought about it for a minute or two, then smiled and said, "Sure."
     
  11. Daecon Kiwi fruit Valued Senior Member

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    And Christians think themselves better than "Muslim terrorists"?
     
  12. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    And this.

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  13. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    There is an obvious syntactical clusterdiddle in my prior post; I should at least acknowledge that fact even if I'm too annoyed at other stuff to fix it. So far, though, people seem to have read through it. Thank you for that.
     
  14. Bells Staff Member

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    The case was Purvi Patel.

    As for whether death was the intent in this case, I would say a case could be made for her to be charged with criminal homicide under Texas legislation.
     
  15. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Unfortunately we do have a bit of a history of invoking Jesus in state-sanctioned killings, so there is sometimes some bleedover.
     
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  16. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    Billvon posted "And this. --Breivik picture tastefully removed--"

    Anders Breivik killed 77 people in Norway in 2011 with a terrorist explosion, and only got only 21 years guaranteed incarceration/institutionalization, with a longer sentence possible if he continued to be a threat. Security guard personnel needed to be rotated frequently with Breivik, due to his manipulative personality. I don't recall this being an issue with Charles Manson, or was it?

    Breivik was diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic. He was also an Islamophobe, Zionist, anti-feminist and anti-protestant (but not a white or Ayrian supremacist, evidently), and railed against Euarabia in his manifesto (Islamification of Europe). He wrote that he was often hopped up on steroids and adopted many paranoid precepts in in his manifesto that were similar in some respects to those of the Unibomber. His politics have been described as National Conservative, rather than Nazi inspired. He claimed that his political world view came mostly out of the pages of Wikipedia, which, as far as I am aware, has only a minor political bend toward Libertarianism mainly because of Jimmy Wales.

    So why is his picture shown in a thread about a group of religious folks who starved a child to death because they thought they could exorcise a demon that way? The crusades were fought for a motivation similar to Breivik's. In an earlier era, Breivik could have been ordained Pope for acting on basically the same philosophy, only with more carnage against the Islamic world.

    These folks were not crusaders, nor were they acting on a global threat any of them could perceive, other than some imagined demonic possession of a child.

    You weren't suggesting Breivik was somehow channeling to the child, were you?
     
  17. Russ_Watters Not a Trump supporter... Valued Senior Member

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    That link/case does not support your claim: that link discusses a case where a woman was charged with murder for a self-administered abortion, not merely for having a spontaneous miscarriage.
    Agreed.
     
  18. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Nope. Tiassa's comment was "This is the face of faith. The tragedy of it all is that so many faithful I've known would resent such sentiments, but given the chance they would make excuses. . . . . Any excuse to kill." Photzio posted a picture of Christ to demonstrate how beatific the face of faith is. I posted a picture of Breivik to remind people that that is ALSO the face of faith - a murderer who planned a Martyr's Mass at his local church before he started his killing spree. Fortunately people like Breivik are rare - but it is worth remembering that they exist.
     
  19. Bells Staff Member

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    There was no evidence of the drug in her system. Nor any evidence that she even took it. There is also the fact that they charged her with two conflicting charges in that one cannot apply if the other applies, but they have managed to now set a precedent where both laws are pushed to ridiculous extremes. Most importantly, there is no evidence that it was not a spontaneous miscarriage. Then of course we come to feticide laws now applying to women in regards to their own pregnancy and abortions are not illegal, even if she did have an abortion, but there is no evidence that she had one (those drugs would have appeared in the blood tests). For it to have been murder, her foetus would have to have been classified as a person. But then she was charged with neglect and for failing to have provided care for the child when it was born. Again, if she is charged with murder for having an abortion, how can she then be charged with neglect of her child after it was born? Which one applied? How can she have killed it in utero (which is what an abortion does) and then be charged with neglecting it after it was "born"? And how can they charge her with neglect when Indiana has exemptions which allow parents to not provide medical care for their children?

    And if she had provided no medical care to her child and sat there and prayed over the child (especially if she belonged to one of the religious sects that believe that on Jesus or God can heal and not doctors), she probably wouldn't have had anything happen to her, because Indiana is one of the States in the US which allows religious exemptions, which would have allowed her to withhold and not provide medical care or assistance to her sick child. Some conservatives even believe withholding medical care from one's own child is a First Amendment right:

    Furthermore, Sen. Dan Coats, R-Indiana, and Congressman Bill Goodling, R-Pennsylvania, claimed during floor discussion that parents have a First Amendment right to withhold medical care from children.


    Makes me wonder why she was charged as she was.. There are so many things wrong with that case, it made my eyes twitch.

    That aside..

    In respect of the case in the OP, Texas has no exemptions - thankfully, or she wouldn't have been charged at all to be honest. We can only hope they are able to exhume the child's body and perform an autopsy. However they do have video footage of the child after he had died, when she tried to resurrect him.
     
  20. danshawen Valued Senior Member

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    I don't understand how an autopsy by a medical professional could help the situation. If these people withheld medical treatment from the child, on whose authority is an autopsy to be performed? Surely this too would somehow be against their religion. And this too would be overstepping the limitations of a right to religious freedom. You are free to worship your G-d. You are not free to force others, including your children or your neighbors or associates in your church to worship your G-d, nor are members of other religions free to force or coerce you into worshiping theirs.

    In matters bearing on the continued life of anyone, the person affected alone has the right to refuse medical treatment when it is offered if they are in a suitable condition to do so. If they are not, it is the role of a designated health care provider to make a determination as to whether life saving measures are needed and to report it to authorities in a position to enforce it. No religious leader or layperson, or parent deemed incapable of rendering a medical decision because of concerns unrelated to the health or well being of the patient has any right to refuse treatment in such a case. Revokable power of attorney for life threatening medical conditions imposed on victims incapable of resisting or otherwise coerced into not receiving medical attention needs to be a part of the law in every state. Unrestricted freedom of religion is not in the US Constitution and does not belong in the laws of any state.

    Makes me twitch too.

    Nor would it be appropriate to charge anyone involved with practicing medicine without a license.
     
    Last edited: Apr 18, 2015
  21. Russ_Watters Not a Trump supporter... Valued Senior Member

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    You may not agree that the prosecution had a quality case, but that isn't the point: the fact of the matter is that she was accused and convicted of self-abortion, not accidental miscarriage, and there was no law against having a miscarriage at work here. So the fact remains, this is not an example of it being illegal to have a miscarriage.
     
  22. Bells Staff Member

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    They classified the alleged self abortion as being murder, but then also charged her with killing the child by neglect after it was born, because they advised the child was born alive. In short, she was charged with two different types of homicide. One in utero and one to a live child. Hence the double dipping and double standard. Not to mention the fact that they have managed to set a precedent for this with a law that is not meant or designed to apply to one's own child. Feticide laws are designed for when another person aborts a woman's child without her consent.

    While she may have been found guilty, we both know that the case is absolutely bogus and shameful, which is why it made headlines around the world and was soundly mocked for being so bogus.

    Had she given birth to her child prematurely and not provided medical aid or sought to get the child medical help, she could have claimed a religious exemption, because in Indiana, a parent can sit and watch their child die and nothing can be done to them, because they can claim a religious exemption. See and note the double standard. Parents in Indiana are not legally required to seek medical care for their children, yet she was charged because the child she apparently murdered in utero with her "self-abortion" was born alive, so they claimed she neglected it, which led to its death. This child died twice by the telling of the prosecutor and she was charged and found guilty for both.

    Texas does not have religious exemption clauses, which begs the question why they are not being charged with homicide, since what they did falls well within the purview of their homicide legislation.
     
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  23. Russ_Watters Not a Trump supporter... Valued Senior Member

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    It appears to me to be a grey line if the criminal act that causes it happens when the fetus is inside the womb and the death happens outside. Does it make sense to convict her of both instead of one or the other? Perhaps not, but I don't have a strong opinion about that either way. But again, neither of those charges was accidental miscarriage and that's what I was asking about. I'm not really interested in the other stuff here.
     

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