A woman allegedly held her “severely emaciated” stepson in captivity for over 20 years, since he was 11 years old, and forced him to endure “prolonged abuse."
Glad to see she’s wearing a cross around her neck. God must have told her to do it
If he didn’t, all she needs to do is “ask him for forgiveness” (aka literally just think to yourself, “I’m sorry Jesus.”), and she will get into heaven for all eternity! Good stuff.
I’ve had conversations with some religious people where they’ve basically stated that the only reason they don’t murder people is because of God and the Bible. Not the exact words, but basically that’s where all their ideas of morality come from. That’s fucking scary if the only thing holding people back is a fucking book. And not, you know, compassion and empathy.
This is also why so many Christians immediately assume all non-Christians are immoral. Because they derive their morals from Christianity, they default assume that people can’t have morals without Christianity. Like if you ever talk to one about it, they’ll be genuinely confused about how someone can be moral without religion.
if the only thing holding people back is a fucking book
that’s the mindset. they’re raised to believe that humans literally aren’t capable of being any definition of “good” without church. and even still, as mentioned above, you can pretty much do all the stealing, adultering, raping, murdering you please anyway as long as you “repent” and ask forgiveness. it’s all such a steaming truckload of horseshit
It follows the same line of thought when you apply it economically: all people are selfish so we can’t do X.
You know that experiment where a teacher ran a thought demonstration with their class in the 50’s? Each student is supposed to run a fake company and sell fake widgets on their fake class market. In the 1950’s the students quickly realized it was a competition to race to the bottom to sell as many widgets as possible for the least amount of cost.
It’s supposed to teach supply and demand of capitalism but also teach that humans will undercut each other in competition.
A teacher ran this in a post-bachelor accounting class I was in—and my teacher got really angry because none of us were doing the behavior he was expecting.
Instead of undercutting each other, we started to work together in a group to get the work done while keeping our independence as “separate businesses.” We each built different model companies to compete but didn’t do so in a way that harmed each other.
Instead of the teacher realizing that maybe our class didn’t naturally have a selfish competitive mindset—that maybe this was also a perfectly valid reaction to the experiment—we just got told we were “doing economics wrong.”
I don’t think it’s surprising that anecdotally we find many people who insist on brimstone religion to keep people in check also believe “people won’t work” and “people are selfish and bad” when it comes to shaping economic policy. Bowling balls full of horseshit.
Details to be aware of: Everybody knew there was a problem when this man was still in elementary school. He reported that food was withheld from him. Teachers would bring food for him to school. CPS was called 20 times. He’d been ordered to tell them that everything was fine. Then he just stopped coming to school. Everybody knew there was a problem. Nothing was done.
All the mandatory reporters did their jobs, CPS really fucked this one up
Those last two sentences encapsulate the US so well.
The 32-year-old was also found in a “severely emaciated condition and had not received medical or dental care” during his time in captivity inside the home over the past two decades, according to police.
Damn. Give that boy a cold beer and free dental for life.
Sorry, best we can do is 6 weeks in a halfway house then kick him out to find a job
Nah, Connecticut has a pretty robust social safety net compared to many states, and this guy is high profile so they’d never risk the bad press. He probably won’t need it though. He’s going to make a million doing the talk show circuits and publishing an autobiography. That’s the American way.
