“SAN ANGELO, Texas (AP) — Adult mothers who have been allowed to stay with their young children since they were taken from a polygamous sect will be separated from them after DNA sampling is completed next week, a child welfare official said Saturday.

Texas District Judge Barbara Walther late Friday ordered that parents and children of the Yearning For Zion Ranch submit DNA samples to help sort out family relationships that have confounded authorities since 416 children were taken into state custody two weeks ago.

The child welfare agency has said that the sect encourages adolescent girls to marry older men and have children, and that boys are groomed to become future perpetrators. Sect members deny the allegations.”

From the AP >

The continuing saga of the Yearning for Zion Ranch, where members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints settled, highlights how religion can be used to brainwash and negatively affect the lives of otherwise ordinary people. The children were taught from a very young age that rejecting polygamy would land them in hell.

It is true that people can be brainwashed without religion but there is no denying that this was a religious organization and that God, damnation, and the rest of the church’s belief system were the tools that were used to abuse the victims.

“BAGHDAD:At least 40 women have died this year at the hands of religious vigilantes in the southern city of Basra, the police chief said Sunday, describing the discovery of mutilated bodies accompanied by dire notes warning against “violating Islamic teachings.”

“The women of Basra are being horrifically murdered and then dumped in the garbage with notes saying they were killed for un-Islamic behavior,” Khalaf told The Associated Press. He said men with Western clothes or haircuts are also attacked in this oil-rich city some 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the Iranian border and 550 kilometers (340 miles) southeast of Baghdad.”

Those who behind these atrocities are organized gangs who work under cover of religion, pretending to spread the instructions of Islam, but they are far from this religion,” Khalaf said.”

Via the Herald Tribune >

The people who committed these murders included notes saying that the women were killed for un-Islamic behavior.

“… Across this remote region, deep in the highland forests, the pattern was repeated over and over.

Churches were ransacked, entire villages razed and their inhabitants forced to flee into the forests.

The violence, which began on Christmas Eve, has now largely abated, but the plight of the people has not.

Many are now living in the shells of their burned out homes, all their possessions lost.

The conflict has pitted Hindu against Christian, tribal against non-tribal.

All share some responsibility for what has happened, all have suffered. Years of relatively peaceful co-existence of these communities, living a fragile rural existence, has been shattered.

The Christian community blames the virulently anti-Christian rhetoric of Hindu nationalist organisations; and one person in particularly, a revered local holy man, Lakhanananda Saraswati. …”

Via BBC >
What’s behind the Christian-Hindu violence? Let’s not make this more complicated than it is: religion.

Whatever else I might have thought of [President George W] Bush’s call, with its assumption that prayer is some sort of miracle Vicks VapoRub for the national charley horse, it’s clear that his hands were reaching for any hands but mine.

“New research published in the March issue of Psychological Science may help elucidate the relationship between religious indoctrination and violence, a topic that has gained renewed notoriety in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. In the article, University of Michigan psychologist Brad Bushman and his colleagues suggest that scriptural violence sanctioned by God can increase aggression, especially in believers.

The authors set out to examine this interaction by conducting experiments with undergraduates at two religiously contrasting universities: Brigham Young University where 99% of students report believing in God and the Bible and Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam where just 50% report believing in God and 27% believe in the bible.

After reporting their religious affiliation and beliefs, the participants read a parable adapted from a relatively obscure passage in the King James Bible describing the brutal torture and murder of a woman, and her husband?s subsequent revenge on her attackers. Half of the participants were told that the passage came from the Book of Judges in the Old Testament while the other half were told it was an ancient scroll discovered in an archaeological expedition.

In addition to the scriptural distinction, half of the participants from both the bible and the ancient scroll groups read an adjusted version that included the verse:

“The Lord commanded Israel to take arms against their brothers and chasten them before the LORD.”

The participants were then placed in pairs and instructed to compete in a simple reaction task. The winner of the task would be able to “blast” his or her partner with noise up to 105 decibels, about the same volume as a fire alarm. The test measures aggression.

As expected, the Brigham Young students were more aggressive (i.e. louder) with their blasts if they had been told that the passage they had previously read was from the bible rather than a scroll. Likewise, participants were more aggressive if they had read the additional verse that depicts God sanctioning violence.”

Anyone surprised by the results of this research?

Via EurekaAlert >

“NEW DELHI (AP) 

Police in eastern India killed at least three people when they opened fire on a group of hard-line Hindus who set fire to a police station during ongoing clashes between Hindus and Christians, officials said Friday.

The killings, which occurred Thursday in a remote corner of Orissa state, bring the death toll to four since violence broke out on Christmas Eve when long-standing tensions between the Hindu majority and the small Christian community erupted over conversions to Christianity.

The Hindus had attacked the police station in the Kandhamal district’s Brahmangaon village, complaining of a lack of protection after a group of Christians burned down several Hindu homes in an apparent retaliation for earlier Hindu attacks on churches.

About 19 churches, most of them small mud and thatch buildings, have been ransacked and burned since Monday and several homes destroyed, including that of Radhakant Nayak, a member of India’s upper house of parliament and a Christian leader in the area.

The state’s chief minister, Naveen Patnaik, told reporters Friday that three people were killed in the violence at the police station, but provided no other details.

Patnaik also called for more federal forces to be dispatched to the area after local police and a curfew failed to halt the violence. On Thursday the federal government said it was sending a 300-strong paramilitary force to the region.

At least 25 people, belonging to both Hindu and Christian communities, have been arrested for suspected involvement in the violence, Superintendent of Police Narsingh Bhol told The Associated Press by phone.

India is overwhelmingly Hindu but officially secular. Religious minorities, such as Christians, who account for 2.5 percent of the country’s 1.1. billion people, and Muslims, who make up 14 percent, often coexist peacefully.

Is “often coexisting peacefully,” often enough? Is it too much to ask that they always coexist peacefully? If that’s not a possibility, maybe we should consider that the world might be better without religions. Three dead due to religious violence is 3 too many… no matter the frequency. 

 Via AP > 

“Reports from exiles along the frontier confirmed that hundreds of monks had simply “disappeared” as 20,000 troops swarmed around Rangoon yesterday to prevent further demonstrations by religious groups and civilians.

Word reaching dissidents hiding out on the border suggested that as well as executions, some 2,000 monks are being held in the notorious Insein Prison or in university rooms which have been turned into cells.

There were reports that many were savagely beaten at a sports ground on the outskirts of Rangoon, where they were heard crying for help.

Others who had failed to escape disguised as civilians were locked in their bloodstained temples.

There, troops abandoned religious beliefs, propped their rifles against statues of Buddha and began cooking meals on stoves set up in shrines.”

Read more at Daily News > 

“Christiane Amanpour is on vacation in France. Sort of. The CNN star also is putting the finishing touches on a six-hour documentary airing next week about the often volatile mix of politics and religion.

She has spent the past eight months on the project, traveling around the world – to the West Bank to spend time with Jewish settlers, to Iran to film Shiite Muslims, to the United States to sit down with Christian conservative Jerry Falwell just before his death, and to Jerusalem, ground zero for all three religions.

The result is “God’s Warriors,” a provocative look at the fundamentalist foot soldiers who fight in the name of their faith.”

Via SignOnSanDiego.com > 

“WHEN Times editors assigned me to the religion beat, I believed God had answered my prayers.

As a serious Christian, I had cringed at some of the coverage in the mainstream media. Faith frequently was treated like a circus, even a freak show.

I wanted to report objectively and respectfully about how belief shapes people’s lives. Along the way, I believed, my own faith would grow deeper and sturdier.

But during the eight years I covered religion, something very different happened.” (cont’d)

Cont’d at LaTimes.com >

A well-written account of one man’s journey away from his faith as the result of covering news stories related to religion.

The Emmy-winning scientist angered a few audience members when he criticized literal interpretation of the biblical verse Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great light, the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”

He pointed out that the sun, the “greater light” is but one of countless stars and that the “lesser light” is the moon, which really is not a light at all, rather a reflector of light.

A number of audience members left the room at that point, visibly angered by what some perceived as irreverence.
“We believe in a God!” exclaimed one woman as she left the room with three young children.

Via Ocellated.com >

It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. That people can still deny this easily understood and intuitive scientific fact by relying on their holy text should give us pause considering some of the other, less benign, things that are written in it. For instance, things about the roles of women, the value of certain races, and the end of the world