“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.

“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 > 

“JAKARTA, Indonesia — A dozen Christian men were convicted Thursday and sentenced to up to 14 years in jail for beating to death and beheading two Muslims to avenge the government executions of three Christians in Indonesia last year.

Five other Christians received eight-year terms for burying the pair, who were set upon by a mob as they drove though a Christian neighborhood on Sulawesi island a day after the Sept. 22, 2006, executions of Fabianus Tibo and two other Christian militants.

The three executed Christians had been found guilty of leading a militia that killed at least 70 Muslims during a 1999-2002 religious war on the island that led to the deaths of at least 1,000 people from both faiths.”

Full article here (WashingtonPost.com) >

“Cairo - Fifty years ago, no Egyptian would have believed that a fight between two children - a Muslim and a Christian - could ignite violence requiring the presence of truckloads of heavily-armed riot police to contain it.

But this happened last month in the once cosmopolitan Mediterranean city of Alexandria, albeit in one of the city’s poorer districts. There, a fist fight between two boys in front of a church turned into a full-blown sectarian clash between Muslims and Christians.

As religious zealots and angry mobs fanned the flames, the incident could have escalated had it not been for police which arrived quickly on the scene and contained the clash.

‘This situation is not unique to Alexandria. The tension is everywhere,’ says Father Yohanna Naseef, a Christian Coptic priest and an Alexandrine.”

“Claims of discrimination and even religious persecution against Copts are on the rise. Egyptian authorities claim radical Coptic communities resident abroad, especially in the United States, are fanning the flames, and asking foreign powers to intervene to empower Egypt’s Christian minority.”

From Monsters and Critics >

“LYNCHBURG, Va. – A Liberty University student who told a family member he had made bombs and planned to attend the funeral of the Rev. Jerry Falwell was apparently upset about an anti-gay fringe group that protested at the funeral, authorities said.

Officials were still trying to figure out what Mark David Uhl planned to do with the bombs. Police do not believe he intended to disrupt the funeral Tuesday or harm the Falwell family, Campbell County Sheriff Terry Gaddy said.

Uhl, 19, was being held without bond in the Campbell County Adult Detention Center on charges of manufacturing an explosive device. It was not known if he had a lawyer, and messages seeking comment left at numbers believed to belong to his family were not returned.

Uhl, of Amissville, was arrested Monday night after a family member contacted authorities, who found homemade bombs in the trunk of Uhl’s car, Major Steve Hutcherson said.

Gaddy described the five bombs as “sort of like napalm” and about the size of soda cans.”

Read more @ The Star >

In this case, Mr. Uhl is clearly the perpetrator of violence and he is wrong. I’m posting this story because his actions were in response to hate messages founded on religious beliefs.

“Members of the Gig Harbor Church of Nazarene are deeply shocked. Their former pastor Stephen Kerr, who they had trusted to teach them religion and values, now sits in jail, accused of molesting a 7-year-old girl.”

“Stephen Kerr was arrested for allegedly trying to have sex with a 7-year-old girl while making her watch videos of children playing with men’s private parts.

Kerr pleaded not guilty in court on Tuesday. Hughes said he was surprised by the plea, because Kerr told him something different.

“He openly confessed it, you know,” said Hughes. “There was no question to the fact that he had admitted to his guilt. But it was explained to me that there are technical, legal reason for that.”

Prosecutors believe the sexual abuse had been going on for at least two years.”

From KOMO TV >

After creating the “Abuse of Power” category for the last post I decided to search the web for similiar stories because I realized that “clergy abuse” is something that I had, up to this point, neglected. I’ve got to say, I’m not sure I have the stomach for this. I don’t think that I am capable of actively searching out stories like this one. It saddens me and it sickens me. If I run across them, that is one thing and I will post them, but this is too much.