News today that an Australian judge has just passed sentence on a bunch of religious cultists who allowed a little girl, Elizabeth Struh, with diabetes, to die slowly, painfully and distressingly, by withholding her insulin. The cult calls itself The Saints and thankfully, there are apparently only a dozen or so of them, all now jailed. They withheld the insulin because they believe that medicine is evil and prevents god’s healing power. They did nothing but just prayed over the child as she died, and they even failed to report the death for 36 hours in the belief that their god would bring her back to life. I won’t bother naming the child’s parents, or the couple who led the cult, or the miserable cult members who did nothing: they all deserve oblivion. Indeed, the sentences were reduced ones for manslaughter, not murder, because apparently, the child was much ‘loved’ and there was no ‘intent’ to kill her. I suppose that in legal terms, the judge had no choice, but those bastards deserve to be permanently removed from society. They will be out on the streets in about a decade, spreading their lunacy again no doubt.
There is little about the cult online, except from the girl’s adult sister, who left the cult because she is gay - another thing they believe to be evil. Reading her story through, it seems there was nothing particularly unusual about the cult’s beliefs. The same sort of garbage, based on isolated biblical texts, is spouted by ‘Christian Scientists’ (sic), Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other idiots. This pathetic faith that god intervenes in this way, against all sane evidence, lurks in the beliefs of many fundamentalist Christians although few have the utter bloody-mindedness to follow through to its inevitable, tragic conclusion. I was searching through the online media reporting of the case to get some clue as to why, in this case, common sense, if not love or pity for chrissake, could not have prevented the tragedy. I found the answer I think in something the sister, Jayde, said:
[The cult leader’s] main messaging, Jayde says, was that the world was going to end, and Jesus would come back and save them.[my emphasis]
"It's almost like an Armageddon, and that fear … if you're not absolute in the walk of God, you'll go to hell forever and burn eternally," she said.
I expected as much.
The church through the centuries has used the threat of Armageddon and Hell to impose its inane set of beliefs on believers. Catholic or Protestant, it is the same old story. But fundamentalist go one better. What happens after you die is one thing – frightening perhaps, but for most, comfortably in the future, so plenty of time to get ‘right with God’ and avoid eternal damnation. But fundamentalists like this cult, believe in an utterly insane doctrine known as the Rapture. If you watched the TV show, The Leftovers, you will get the idea. Jesus is coming in the air, in clouds of glory, and his faithful will rise up into the air to join him, leaving the rest of us behind. The point is that no one knows when it will happen. There will be no warning. It could happen as I sit here writing this or as you sit there reading it. There will be no chance to plead one’s case: you are either ‘born again’ and ‘saved’, or you have had it. It is this terrifying prospect that makes people do terrible things like letting a child die. For many fundamentalists believe that, although we do not know exactly when the Rapture will happen, it will be soon. We live in the Last Days before god calls a halt. So don’t give a dying girl the insulin she needs to save her life: it is pointless because the world is about to end anyway. The fact that fundamentalists have believed themselves to be living in the Last Days in every century since christ, or that the Apostles themselves thought Jesus was coming in their own lifetimes, and that they were all utterly and unambiguously, wrong, does not seem to penetrate these people’s thick skulls. And so, a little girl dies in agony. It is for her and others like her, that I write my books and post these blogs. You may think religion is on its way out. But it remains, a blot on our humanity, and it kills.