Ramkissoon is a member of a religious group, called 1 Mind Ministries, that has been implicated in coercing the woman to deprive the child of food and water because he refused to say “amen” over meals.  The group’s leader, a 40-year-old woman calling herself “Queen Antoinette” declared the boy a demon and allegedly ordered the actions which led to his starvation.

The group has also convinced her that the child’s death is okay, because he will be resurrected – something Ramkissoon still believes to this day.  It was clarified in court this week that the “resurrection clause” would require a true bodily revival and not a “perceived reincarnation.”

After the child’s death in 2006, the body was placed in a suitcase with mothballs and dryer sheets, and was left in a back room for a over a year while Ramkissoon and others awaited the resurrection promised by Queen Antoinette.  It was discovered in 2008 after the group traveled across the country, leaving the suitcase behind.

Ramkissoon’s lawyer, Steven Silver, was clear that this clause was “very important to her”, and was apparently essential to her agreeing to a guilty plea.  In exchange, she must testify against four other members of 1 Mind Ministries relating to charges including first-degree murder.  She is expected to receive a 20 year sentence which will be suspended, and be compelled to undergo deprogramming and psychiatric therapy.

Silver describes his client’s state of mind in demanding the clause;

“She certainly recognizes that her omissions caused the death of her son. To this day, she believes it was God’s will and he will be resurrected and this will all take care of itself. She realizes if she’s wrong, then everyone has to take responsibility … and if she’s wrong, then she’s a failure as a mother and the worst thing imaginable has happened. I don’t think that, mentally, she’s ready to accept that.”

And yet, she was mentally ready to accept her child being starved to death because he was a demon?  She was mentally ready to accept that he would be resurrected by the same power that commanded his murder?

The court has found her competent to stand trial, but is clearly treating her as if she is not criminally liable for her own actions.  If she were claiming she was commanded to starve her child by voices in her own head, or her dog, would she still be treated the same way?

From the naive single mother to the judicial system – why do we expect, perhaps even excuse, insane behavior when it is advocated by a person claiming spiritual authority?

At the end of the day, all religious groups are cults.  Some preach peace and love, others preach hatred and death.  Some elevate freedom of thought and discovering one’s own divine plan, others demand subservience and equate knowingly and willingly rejecting truth with enlightenment.  Simply said, some religions are better than others… unfortunately, most of them are pretty bad.

As long as we continue to hold mere religiosity as a virtue, regardless of the substance of the religion or group in question, we will tacitly endorse this sort of appalling behavior alongside all the benefits of faith.

We can do ourselves a huge favor by eliminating the benefit of the doubt for religious people – from now on, if you want to guide your entire life according to mythology, you had better be able to prove a significant benefit for yourself and society as a result.  Finally, it’s time to stop believing nonsense when you know better, just because it’s part of your chosen religion… otherwise, you’re just as bad as this woman who is still waiting for her dead baby to come back to life.

“The plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live.”

These are the words that herald the beginning of the end.

The end, that is, of Bill Maher’s Religulous, a 101-minute exploration of the absurdities and the terrors of religion as filtered through Maher’s unique lens.

Maher, who was raised Catholic (by a Catholic father and Jewish mother), has long since left the religious life and is not content to accept the quiet agnosticism of so many who have abandoned religious practice.  Rather, his declared atheism carries hints of the vehement anti-religiosity of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens.

The film is at times hilarious, sometimes silly, occasionally a bit mean-spirited, and almost entirely thought-provoking.  Definitely all-around entertaining for our atheist friends, but it will likely be a harder pill to swallow for our Christian, Jewish and Muslim friends who are brave enough to face their own beliefs portrayed in such a way.  More so, because Bill isn’t just preaching to the choir here – he appears to be seeking converts.

Maher and his fellow “fundamentalist atheists” do not simply hate religion for petty reasons or want it to go away because it offends them.  They are making an impassioned plea for the soul, if you will, of humanity.  He continues;

“The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge in having key decisions made by religious people, by irrationalists, by those who would steer the ship of state not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken.

George Bush prayed a lot about Iraq, but he didn’t learn a lot about it.

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking.  It’s nothing to brag about.  And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are our intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.”

It is difficult to argue with the logic here.  While many individuals can relate subjective stories for how religion has made their life better, while it surely brings comfort and fellowship to the lives of many who will never kill or injure another human being in the name of their god, the record of human history is undeniable.  No number of charities or good works can ever remove the bloodstains of the centuries’ worth of terrible actions.

Apologists like Dinesh D’Souza have pointed out, rightly, that religion is not the sole cause of a bloody and violent history.  The most prominent example of Joseph Stalin is often given as proof that institutional atheism can equal or even exceed the violence, terror and destruction of organized religions in human history.

But the concept of God isn’t the issue here.  The specific problem with religion is pinpointed:

“Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings, who don’t have all the answers, to think that they do.  Most people would think it’s wonderful when someone says, ‘I’m willing, Lord.  I’ll do whatever you want me to do.’  Except that since there are no gods actually talking to us, that void is filled in by people with their own corruptions, limitations and agendas.

And anyone who tells you they know – they just know what happens when you die, I promise you, you don’t.  How can I be so sure?  Because I don’t know, and you do not possess mental powers that I do not.

The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt, doubt is humble, and that’s what man needs to be, considering that human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong.”

It is my personal opinion that these 3 paragraphs serve as the most poignant argument possible in favor of the original thesis – that religion must die, in order for mankind to live.  To reply further to D’Souza’s point and begin to transcend the myopia of Maher’s point, they’ve both got this shit dead wrong.

Doubt is a virtue.  As Thomas Jefferson once said, “It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.”

The 800 pound gorilla in the room isn’t faith, God/gods, or the structure of organized religion.  The problem is “arrogant certitude,” the lazy choice of accepting someone else’s beliefs “hook, line and sinker” so as to avoid life’s hard questions, and then having the balls to assert an absolute knowledge of the answers to those questions. It’s hiding behind the false piety of  saying “I don’t judge you, but God hates you.”

At a certain point, all religious people must recognize that their relationship with God is entirely unique to them, and what works for you doesn’t necessarily work for your neighbor.  And that includes the religion of atheism!  To our religious friends, “arrogant certitude” could aptly describe the attitude of Maher, Hitchens or Dawkins.  In fairness, on most points they have scientific facts to back them up, but while we can prove the earth is not 6,000 years old we cannot prove there is not some kind of “higher power.”

Faith is a virtue, in measure.  It takes a certain amount of faith to function; if we were constantly doubting the structural integrity of our houses, or the love of our family, or the approval of our employers, we would be constant nervous wrecks.  The problem arises when we equate ignorance with faith – as Maher put it, “Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking.”

God, gods, and religion have their place in civilization.  Religion is as much a part of culture as music, art, literature, cuisine or clothing – the ways we express ourselves, the ways we relate to each other and the world around us, and the ways we come to know ourselves.

Many of the founding fathers of this country were Deists.  They believed in a natural God who created the physical universe, and that religious truth was found by the direct application of reason and observation of the natural world, not by the revelations of another fallible person.

It was this wisdom, this strength to admit we don’t always have it right and the desire to know God directly for oneself through experiencing his creation that formed the spiritual foundation of our religious freedoms as well as our protections from religion.

Maher wraps up his case, then I do the same:

“This is why rational people, anti-religionists, must end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves, and those who consider themselves only moderately religious really need to look in the mirror and realize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you actually comes at a terrible price.

If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia,violence and sheer ignorance as religion is, you’d resign in protest.  To do otherwise is to be an enabler, a mafia wife, with the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the billions of their fellow travelers.

If the world does come to an end here or wherever, or if it limps into the future, decimated by the effects of a religion-inspired nuclear terrorism, let’s remember what the real problem was: that we learned how to precipitate mass death before we got past the neurological disorder of wishing for it.

That’s it.  Grow up or die.”

Maher’s final salvo hits hard, like an Israeli airstrike on the Gaza strip.

Which brings me to my final point.  Religulous deals almost exclusively with the Abrahamic monotheistic faiths – Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  Barring a quick aside to Amsterdam for the religion of pot-smoking, Maher deals only with the Big 3.

2 of these 3 religions, all from the same root, dominate the world today at a combined total of approximately 53% of the global population.  They all believe the end of the world is imminent, and the bloodshed will be of cosmic proportions when the true believers and the rest face off and fight it out on a dusty hill in modern day Israel.  Incidences of religiously-motivated violence outside of these 3 religions is virtually unheard of through human history.

On this point there can be no disagreement, no compromise.  If humanity is to survive, this terrible fantasy of epic violence must be abandoned.  No true god advocates murder, torture, willfull ignorance or subjugation, and the world will only come to an end if we let the extremists destroy it.

This study published today shows that more and more Americans are identifying as non-religious, non-denominational or simply spiritual.  Others are gravitating to new and alternative religions, or even creating their own religion.  There is hope that mankind can shed the old worn-out dogmas and dangerous beliefs without losing its connection to the divine.

Grow up or die, indeed.

Referencing Matthew 15:21-28, the author says:

This not a story for people who need to think that Jesus always had it together, because it looks like we’ve caught him being mean to a lady because of her ethnicity. At first, he ignores her cries. Then he refuses to help her and compares her people to dogs.

But she challenges his prejudice. And he listens to her challenge and grows in response to it. He ends up healing her daughter. What we may have here is an important moment of self-discovery in Jesus’ life, an enlargement of what it will mean to be who he was. Maybe we are seeing Jesus understand his universality for the first time.

It has been pointed out that the authors of these meditations incorrectly attributed the scriptural reference, and even left out a verse in the quotation they use.  So we can question the professionalism of the publishing team that put this together.

I think, however, that dismissing the scriptural interpretation here as “twisted leftist Screwtape revisionism” misses the point.

Some would reject this meditation outright, on the basis that it claims Jesus didn’t always “have it together.”  Why is the implication that Jesus was not perfect so threatening to the majority of Christians?  Can he truly have been both God and Man, if he was without sin?  Is it not sin that defines humanity in the Biblical worldview?

If I was discussing the Wedding at Cana and suggested that there was plenty of wine until Jesus and his buddies showed up, and that perhaps Jesus was a bit of a drunkard in his youth, I don’t believe the reaction would be so vehement.

Surely the fact that the issue of racism is being raised makes this sting a bit more.  As Attorney General Eric Holder recently noted, we are “essentially a nation of cowards” when it comes to discussing race, and I think the knee-jerk responses here validate Mr. Holder’s claim.  Discussions of race have become so reactionary and convoluted that we now talk of “reverse racism,” and the very act of pointing out or denouncing racism can get one painted with any number of broad brushes.

It seems to me, if you set aside any dogmas about Jesus, the story is one of personal growth, as the meditation states.  Racism is a strong word, but there is a clear indication in the scripture that the woman is initially discounted because of her ethnicity.  Jesus transcends a culturally-inherited bias, and heals the woman’s daughter.

Unfortunately, as usual, it appears most followers of Christ are more interested in arguing fine points of dogma and creating divisions amongst themselves than walking the talk of “love thy neighbor”.