Tragic cases like this bring up a difficult topic, which must be balanced carefully.
That topic is the role of fundamentalist religions in crimes like this.
A creepy realization when something like this comes up (like the texas woman the other year - Dena Schlosser- who severed the arms of her 10 month old baby girl), is that they often have untreated mental illness, and are active in fundamentalist Christianity. Remember Andrea Yates? She drowned her kids in the bathtub to “save” them from ending up in Hell. She had been preached at about the world going more and more to the devil, and if she didn’t kill them they may be corrupted in the future - so she sacrificed herself for her kids. The logic simply makes sense, and others have done that too.
Here is a recent associated press article on this phenomena:
Another study of 56 Michigan mothers referred for psychiatric evaluations from 1974-1976 after killing their children found nearly a fourth of them experienced religious delusions, said study co-author Dr. Catherine Lewis, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut Health Center.
She said nearly all the women were Christian and many attended fundamentalist churches, but cautioned against assumptions.
"What isn't clear is what's causing what," she said. "Is the church causing people to develop these feelings or are people with these feelings more likely to gravitate toward a fundamentalist church?"
Yates, Laney and Schlosser all followed Christian fundamentalist teachings. So did their husbands, but with less zeal than their wives.
So, how do we balance the blame? The fundamentalist preachers involved, such as Michael Woroniecki in the case of Yates, are rarely if ever charged with anything. What about others close to the babies, who can see the family spiraling into this over time? And which causes which? Do deranged people like this preferentially move to fundamentalist churches, or do fundamentalist churches prevent treatment and indirectly cause things like this to happen? (like the autistic boy who was suffocated recently in a “prayer healing” to rid him of the demons, or the famous BTK serial killer who was the president of his local Lutheran church)
I have a friend who has Schizophrenia. She was brought up in the Pentecostal church, and for years her life was a nightmare because she was told the voices she heard were demons (and she of course believed it all). So of course she didn’t get treatment then, & things got worse. Had she not escaped that church on her own, tragic things could well have happened. Because of cases like that, and because the teachings line up so well with the results, my guess is that most of this correlation is not caused by certain people gravitating to these churches, but rather the lack of treatment, distorted worldview, and closed environment in these churches.
I think that what’s going on is that fundamentalist, Abrahamic religions tend to have doctrines that specifically take advantage of our evolutionary prejudices - such as seeing the world as good vs evil, or allowing aggression towards outsiders (heretics) as two examples. As such, they tend to discourage, not encourage, treatment for these mental problems, and are partly to blame in my mind - not because of evil intent, but because their magical thinking is so far out of step with the real world. It’s very difficult to work on this problem in the US because Christianity is so favored that even bringing up the problem is met with significant social repercussions.
My two cents-
-Equinox
™ Version 4.2
