The Hazards of Belief

Irish Examiner wrote:

The Government’s response to the UN Committee Against Torture recommendations on the Magdalene Laundries issue has been termed "cynical" and "disingenuous".

The Government had been given one year to report back on measures taken to put last June’s UNCAT recommendation on the laundries into effect. The committee said it was "gravely concerned" at the failure by the State to protect girls and women who were involuntarily confined in the laundries between 1922 and 1996.

It recommended that the State institute "prompt, independent and thorough investigations" into complaints of torture and other forms of mistreatment in the institutions. In its response, the Government said those alleging criminal wrongdoing in the laundries "have been consistently advised that if they have any evidence of criminal offences having been committed, they should report the matter to the police for criminal investigation and where appropriate prosecution".

It also said people could initiate a civil action in the courts seeking recompense for any wrongdoing suffered. The response also stressed that, as the laundries were "private, religious institutions", basic facts about their operations "are not in the public domain".

It also said it would consider further action when it received the report of the inter-departmental committee examining State involvement in the laundries. In a statement, Justice For Magdalene’s said in a statement that the Government’s response to the UNCAT recommendations was "lacking in compassion".

"The Government’s response is disingenuous in suggesting that the women are primarily focused on prosecutions, when what they have sought is an apology and restorative justice. "It’s one-line invitation suggesting women take civil cases appears cynical and is lacking in compassion and understanding.

"There are barriers to this type of case that are not addressed, such as the statute of limitations, free legal aid provision, the availability of evidence as the religious orders have withheld records, and not least of all the fact that this is a vulnerable and aging population." JFM has uncovered and published more than 50 examples of the State committing girls as young as 14 to laundries.

In his most recent report, Geoffrey Shannon, special rapporteur on child protection, said the treatment of women and girls in laundries "constituted slavery".

Some Nutter wrote:

Note that suicide is the sixth leading cause of death for 5- to 14-year-olds. The idea of child suicide was unheard of before the schools became atheistic. It is true that family dysfunctions can depress a child, especially if that child has no recourse to God, because the school told him that there is no God, just as there is no Santa Claus.

Everybody wonders why there have been so many shootings and massacres in schools and elsewhere, so many teen suicides, and so much self-destructive behavior among teens. But the obvious is too unbelievable to atheist-humanist America. Simply put, Godless education leads to depression.

[...]

Depression, fear, anger, nightmares, morbidity. These are the negative emotions and reactions stirred up in students by death education. Is this what parents want their children to experience? Is this why they send their children to school so that they can learn about death rather than life? However, according to the misguided Ms. Rosenthal, simply because death education can cause such emotional turmoil and anxiety is no reason not to teach it. “Since death has been such a taboo topic, open and honest communication is essential. Such communication,” she writes, “helps to desensitize students to anxiety-arousing items.”

Thus, the purpose of death education is to “desensitize” children to death — to remove or reduce that reasonable, rational, and useful antipathy toward death that helps us preserve our lives. It is when children begin to see death as “friendly” and nonthreatening that they begin to be drawn into death’s orbit and lured to self-destruction. It’s a phenomenon that might be called “death seduction,” in which an individual is drawn irresistibly into a fascination and then obsession with death. The individual begins to disdain life and love death.

Some Nutter wrote:

The spiritually crippled young Americans who emerge from the public schools become the drug-addicted young men, the unwed mothers, the delinquents, the functionally illiterate youths who become the nation’s social problems. They were led by their educators into the blind alley of social dysfunction. Some of them are eventually saved by finding God. But many of them remain dependent on government programs for the rest of their lives as members of the underclass.