“Deeply Religious” Parents Whip Child to Death

Interestingly enough, nowhere in this article is the Schatz’s religion mentioned. That seems like a very glaring omission to me.

Yes, it’s interesting…but I submit that it’s not that important. One kind of woo-woo or another, what’s the difference?

That’s a tragic story for sure, but I’m not sure it’s pertinent in this case to bring the parents religion forward. This kind of mistreatment is unfortunately not unique, and not necessarily linked to religion.

Talking about it in this setting reminds me of when christians point out that Hitler was an atheist – even if he was, nothing says that he acted as he did because of his atheism.

We should be the ones who know our logic, so don’t fall for the post hoc ergo propter hoc 😉

I think the failure to mention which faith they belong to is simply due to the typical mindset of Americans that there is only ONE religion, christianity, rather than any conscious (or unconscious) effort on the part of the reporter to cover anything that might make christianity look bad. In their mind, there’s no -need- to mention what religion because the default religion is christianity.

I’m willing to bet if these people weren’t christians, the headline would be LOUDLY proclaiming exactly what faith they DID belong to, though.

@Gavrilo,

According to the Wikipedia article, that looks at things Hitler actually said and wrote (as opposed to hearsay attributed to him but unsupported), he was more of a theist like the founding fathers in the US, than specifically a christian, though he often appealed to christian teachings in some warped way in his public statements. Those are usually considered propaganda.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler%27s_religious_views

“I’d love to know how any Christian could defend this couple.”

The article does say that some two dozen people showed up to support the parents at their hearing, so it’s likely that some of them have found a way. I’d really like to know what goes through the mind of one of those people.

I’d be interested to see what defense they use or what their lawyers say to try to mitigate this situation. If they try to use their “deeply religious” convictions as an excuse, then it is absolutely appropriate to “bring their religion forward”. It could very well be that their religion is why their child is dead, and they shouldn’t be allowed to escape justice because of it. Sick things like this shouldn’t happen, and there shouldn’t be any excuse.

Interestingly enough, nowhere in this article is the Schatz’s religion mentioned. That seems like a very glaring omission to me.”

The Schatz’s had a total of 9 children (6 of their own and 3 adopted), all of whom were home-schooled. That made them sound like a “quiverful” family to me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t track down anything related to that or what sect they belonged to. Hopefully that information will come out during the coverage of the trial.

I hope these sadistic abusers are not given a lighter sentence or in any way excused because of their religious convictions. Torture is torture, even in the name of religion.

“I’d love to know how any Christian could defend this couple.”

Last time I checked, the majority of Christians are opposed to child abuse.

This is a tragic situation, and I hope that the law comes down as hard as possible on these child murderers.

See this article exposing Michael Pearl, of No Greater Joy, connection to this incident.

Apparently he recommends using this particular plumbing supply line and suggests these instruments are “cheaper by the dozen at Home Depot.”

I’ve said it before, and unintentionally insulted one of your readers, but this is why I have a major problem with homeschooling. It is not that I think that homeschoolers are any less loving than other parents or any more likely to be abusers — it is that those parents who are abusers and homeschool are less likely to be identified and stopped because their kids have fewer opportunities to be observed and protected by other adults.

Let’s change the article a little bit. All of the details stay the same, except now the anonymous neighbor says that they’re atheists instead of saying that they’re deeply religious. Would you then complain that the article isn’t delving deeply enough into their religious beliefs or lack thereof?

Could there be a religious connection in this event? Yes, definitely. But it’s by no means certain that religion had anything to do with it, especially when you only have the word of an unnamed neighbor that they were religious at all. Sadly, people seem perfectly capable of finding reasons to hurt their children which have nothing to do with religion. I’d rather focus on what we (as individuals and as a society) can do to make this less likely to happen again.

@mkb:

That sounds more like a rationalization for why you don’t support homeschooling than the reason why you don’t support homeschooling. Consider the fact that many children are abused by people other than parents, yet your solution to preventing abuse is to have them around more potential abusers. Is the greater possibility of detecting abuse offset by the greater possibility of abuse occurring in the first place? Without looking at the numbers, I have no idea. But I’d be willing to bet that you wouldn’t start advocating homeschooling even if we were to crunch the numbers and see that they’re against your position here.

@ Derek

OK, I understand your wish to paint a bright line between yourself and these folks. I hope that the good Christians in the USofA will publicly denounce organizations like No Greater Joy with more vehemence than they generally hurl at gay marriage advocates. At the very least I expect to hear that Christian adoption agencies will deny parents who follow this type of child rearing. We’ll see.

I have to say this incident makes me wonder about those Christians trying to illegally shuttle children out of Haiti.

I am appalled at this, that this is allowed to happen, and that these actions are allowed to be advocated by a religious group!

@Siobhan: You are absolutely right, they HAVE to be Christian, if they weren’t it would totally be the headline!

The worst part of this is that those little girls were adopted, meaning they could have wound up with a loving caring family. One where the couple couldn’t have children of their own and would have spoiled them rotten. Instead of being given to a family that has too many children already and intends them serious physical harm.

Home-schooling should be moderated by home visits, by some kind of social worker trained to recognise symptoms of abuse like this. That is the only way home-schooling can continue without events like this happening again and again..

This breaks my heart. That poor girl. Goddammit.

My husband has had to do service calls in the homes of these quiverful cavemen and he reports that these poor kids display a sullen, broken spirit. He comes back home feeling so sorry for them.

Eye for an eye.
By their own ideology they ought to be beaten to death with a rubber hose.
I volunteer my services.

I agree with betsy. Let’s leave mental illness out of religion bashing. Some people with a mental illness live productive lives because they learn to manage it. There’s lots of freethinkers that have mental illnesses (managed or not). I am one of them.

Religion and mental illness in my family were only correlations. One was not caused by the other. I can say that confidently.

Derek, you run a Christian bookstore and you’ve never heard of Debi and Michael Pearl? I’m a lifelong atheist, and I’ve heard of them. Granted, I do a lot of reading about the religious right and the Quiverfull movement, but their names have come up many, many times.

This is not the first time that their methods of punishment have been connected to a child’s death.

Sean Paddock: Dead at Age 4

Child Abuse on the Religious Right: The Pearls

Spare the Quarter-Inch Plumbing Supply Line, Spoil the Child

I must confess this last one makes me physically ill. For more sickening reading:

Bold Christian Living: Chastening Children

For those of you who find the Duggars inoffensive, please be aware that this is exactly the type of thing that we don’t see on their television show. Vague references to “training” and “correction” absolutely imply this type of corporal punishment. In their book, the Duggars list How to Raise Happy and Obedient Children as one of their resources. The Duggars also practice “blanket training,” which they detail in their book.

Beating children for mispronouncing a word should not be considered torture……

its enhanced education.

@Jeff — My husband has totally co-opted Bill Cosby’s line about cocaine intensifying your personality for religion. It seems to hold up pretty well.

Of course, other religious people might spin a positive feedback cycle the other way and not harm a fly.

But a person raised with effective secular socialization and not suffering from severe mental illness will generally do at least as well on this point as the same person raised to believe that not harming people is based on divine authority. Research has demonstrated that authority-based morality is less effective.

If a person has a predisposition to corporal punishment and can find a passage or two in the bible condoning corporal punishment, then there is the possibility that the person can elevate their predisposition to a point of absolute certainty that it is the right thing to do.

Or to put it another way, a parent who otherwise would’ve learned to manage his/her anger and sympathize with the child will instead have his/her emotional development stunted in these areas because of following biblical injunction.

Some people are just damaged. I don’t know if religion is what damaged these parents but it must have been a factor.

Seriously, check out http://www.nogreaterjoy.org/ (preferably not on a full stomach=.

The “testimonials” make me want to cry and scream at the same time. One man writes in at how he beat a 2 year old girl with his belt for opening the door too often. When the baby girl started crying he ordered her to stop, and then beat her when she didn’t. Then he carried on beating this baby until she got quiet. The whole sickening tale is told with the sort of tone usually reserved to teaching a child to ride a bicycle. And there are dozens of these horrible tales of parents proudly proclaiming how they physically abuse their children, how to avoid leaving visible marks, how to hide evidence from social services etc.

Some Muslim families beat or even kill their daughters in the name of their religion, and these folks torture their kids. But no, being “deeply religious” should be a defense…

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.” – Blaise Pascal

Anyone else as disturbed as I am about the constant references to making your children “submissive”? That’s a term well beyond respect or even obedience. It implies complete dependence on an authority figure, and I can’t imagine that would ever be healthy.

Quiverfull is dangerous for women and children, and is part of the biblical patriarchy movement that advocates beating kids into submission.Wosre, submitting is not enough,the kids have to be JOYFUL too! As does the wife, no matter what her husband demands, outside of “sin”.

Here is another example of abuse, from another “deeply religious” (likely quiverfull) family:

14yr old locked in closet, starved and veaten with rods for 2 months

http://www.religionnewsblog.com/24097/one-mind-ministries-trial-2

Thanks to all who did on their comments and links (which I can’t bear to read at the moment with my six year old grandson playing Lightning McQueen on the playstation across the room from me but will later after bracing myself) and the books, etc.

I grew up with this spare the rod and spoil the child mentality. I’ve known this torture long before these books were published. My mother (how she would have relished these movements) wore slip on shoes — so she could slip them off quickly and start hitting us with them whenever we pissed her off. Of course, we’d start crying because it hurt then she’d hit us for crying and she’d say she wasn’t going to stop until we stopped crying. I was in such pain, I couldn’t stop crying. I’d reach the point where I thought I was going to die, usually shortly before her arm gave out. She eventually stop hitting but only because her arm was in pain from swinging so fast and so hard. I could easily have been one of these news stories if she had more endurance and stamina.

And, yes, she’d scream spare the rod and spoil the child. Couldn’t turn to Dad whose attitude on his 8 children was “children should be seen and not heard” and if you disturbed him with your prescence, you were as likely as not to get the belt. We learned to take Dad literally at his word that he didn’t want to be disturbed by the sounds of our voices — or laughter or playing. Didn’t stop us but we’d try to be out of his earshot doing it. If we screwed up as kids are bound to and he’d come out in a rage yanking off his belt, we’d scatter and woe to the slowest child (invariably the youngest) who he laid his hands on.

I was born in 1958 and, hence, grew up in the ’60’s when they were only beginning to pay attention to the problem of child abuse. I think it mostly wasn’t until the ’70’s that most laws protecting children from beatings were enacted. But I’m sure I didn’t know if there were any or not. In that environment, your parents’ word is law. Not God, theirs. Of course, I certainly believed it was God’s law too.

With all due respect to more enlightened theists, to claim this has nothing to do with religion is horsepucky. My mother certainly justified it with religion. When we got big enough to defend ourselves, all 8 of us knocked her on her butt at one point in our life. That is when the phsyical abuse (mostly) ended. (She once slapped me so she could send my sister back to a mental hospital when she leapt to my defense. No, I still haven’t forgiven her for this and never will.) However, then the tune changed from spare the child to thou shalt not suffer a witch to live when we pissed her off. I spent my teen years worrying about her deciding I was a witch. It was a death threat, in my book. Plain and simple. Push me so far but if you cross a line, I will kill you. I only pushed her so far.

I broke the cycle of abuse. My daughter and my grandson go unbeatened. But it pains me to admit this but I sincerely believe that would not have occured if I had not lost my religion. Yes, I decided when I was 7, I was never going to make a child of mine feel that way but I sincerely believe I only succeeded because I no longer believed the buybull. If I believed in it, I would have considered things like not sparing the rod a direct order from god and would have felt compelled to use corporal punishment when my child seemed like a hellion (she was about the best behaved child you could hope for just because she is by nature very mild tempered but even the best behaved child has their moments). I also would have felt it necessary if she expressed any doubt even rebelliously because I would have felt I had to save her from hellfire. I am very glad I lost religion and kept that promise I made as a child to my daughter and my grandson.

So are there Christians who would never comprehend such abuse of children? Of course and I hope to hell the majority of them don’t. But I would certainly say that there are some who do because they’re Christian, because they feel to not do so is literally condemning their child to hell by not teaching them the fear of god.

As far as mental illness goes, yes and no. I agree with the ones above who say don’t link mental illness with Christianity but I also agree it can feed the illness. I’m convinced, though never diaganosed, my mother was definitely mentally ill. I have two schizophrenic sisters and my daughter battles mental illness. She has learned to mange it but we have no religious aversions to pshyciatry and medicine.

Her father, my ex-husband, though never diagnosed was definitely mentally ill. He took his life in the end so he had at least issues with depression which is what she struggles with. I watched through four years of marriage, drugs exacerbate that mental illness though I was not at that time educated on it. Wish I had been more educated.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say religion causes mental illness (though I think some things it causes might, such as child abuse) but it certainly exacerbates it where it lives. There are certainly many sane, sound people of faith just as there are people who drink and use drugs recreationally who are too. But these things do aid and abet mental illness. I don’t drink because I know myself too well. I wouldn’t want to be about drink like I am chocolate. Plenty can drink without that problem but I wish more who could not recognized it as I do and abstained but, of course, that’s not usually the case. I think the same is true of religion. Many handle it fine but many do not. And if someone is mentally ill and not managing their illness, well, they’re just not going to.

The sad thing is the lasting effects of childhood abuse. I’ve had to explain to my grandson just as I did his mother before him that hands in my face scare me because I was hit a lot as a child so don’t do it which makes my heart hurt because children naturally carress and play at the face all the time and it makes them sad but I am so frightened by hands in my face that it was necessary to explain to them not to. I’ll never be able to trust as fully as other people do. I’ll never not be totally unafraid of being hurt. And, physically, well many of my health problems, both recent ones that I’m rather young for and lifelong afflictions, stem from being beaten and underfed as a child. Nothing I can do about that but deal with it. I’m only glad that there is something in me that does.

Well, at least, functionally. 🙂

Why mention Christianity in relation to this sad family when no religion is mentioned? Jesus Christ is the antithesis of whipping children to death. He said it would be better for someone to have a millstone around his neck and thrown into the sea than to stumble one of His little ones. Get real. This family is pathological, not Christian, and no christian would defend the actions of these twisted parents.

Thank you, lunamoth, but I’m one of the lucky ones. I not only survived but I survived to function as a whole adult. Didn’t become an alcoholic or a drug addict or a criminal. I am definitely one of the lucky ones.

I didn’t post my story for pity. I don’t think I need any given how well I’ve overcome it. I post to speak truth to the lie that seems to be running above that Christianity had nothing to do with it.

Certain brands of Christianity wouldn’t and would roundly condemn it (though why don’t I see them doing so publicly) but there are the ones who embrace and encourage it and, indeed, condemn parents who don’t raise their children this way.

And, too, as I said those brands of Christianity exacerbate any existing mental illness much the same as drugs and alcohol can. The fact that there are social drinkers and recreational drug users who are not addicted, who maintain some degree of control of themselves doesn’t make it untrue that addicts exist and that there are those who get violent when they drink who aren’t otherwise so.

This is one of the motives that I runned away from religion. I was mistreated. In my case wasn’t only ignorance from mentally poor people, but also ‘couse the bible says that children have to obey and respect their parents, but there isn’t a word about the parents caring about their children. I’ve heard/read about punishement for children, but care, respect, love ? No, no, no.

Isabel, though I have a child, I hear your pain. I wish my mother had aborted me rather than have me to half beat to death.

She left it in God’s hands. End result, 8 kids in 10 years for 2 people who weren’t capable of loving and caring for even 1.

And thanks for mentioning the starvation thing. Part of my weight problem today is having been starved as a child. When you grow up scrabbling for every scrap of food often fighting seven siblings for the last scrap, all because your parents had more children than they could afford, it’s hard to tell yourself, no, that’s too much. I shouldn’t eat that much. You had the eat as much as you can get a hold of inured into your psyche as a child.

I once had a Jewish friend who had four grandparents that were all concentration camp survivors. She told me they had the same issues with food. Terrible what starvation can do to you.

And you have a point about children of ignorant parents. I broke the cycle of abuse but it took one hell of a lot of determination and conscious effort and leaving religion.

My siblings — both those who left religion and those who didn’t — didn’t fare as well. And neither did the children of those who had children. (Only half of us did.)

I have gotten so angry at abortion protesters shouting what if your mother had aborted you that I have yelled back I wish she had. And I meant it.

In short, I think I will be recuperating from beating beat in the name of God all my life.

I have come across numerous biblical citations that liken Michael Pearl’s teachings to that of the anti-christ because they steal up children’s souls with violent dominance before they have a choice or are aware, right from infancy they are dominated into submission with pain. Remember, the anti-christ fools people into worshipping him as God. Michael Pearl tries to give people the illusion that they can control completely like God and they can be God-like and “sit as God.” Once his obedient souless minions are in place and fully obedient to him he can denounce the religion that got him power, just like the Bible predicts.