A nice day out
A pretty story.
Naked men, women and children, some of them in chains to prevent them escaping, cower in front of the men in charge in a dimly-lit room in the church of St Mary on Mount Entoto…The church…sits above a mountain stream, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church believes the stream is holy water with the power to cure HIV/Aids…Plastic jerry cans are filled with water from a pool, and passed along a human chain to priests dressed like deep sea fishermen. The bright yellow waterproofs protect them from the drenching they administer to their congregation. They hurl the water over the mass of people kneeling in front of them who shriek and scream, either through devotion or the simple shock of the cold water hitting their naked flesh…The church claims that more than a thousand people have been cured in the past two years. And yet the head priest Father Geberemedhen admitted to me that only the newly diagnosed are likely to be helped…”We don’t allow patients to take medication if they want to receive holy water,” he told me. That means they must stop taking the antiretrovirals which prevent the disease taking hold, and prolong the life of those who carry the HIV virus.
Jesus saves. Or not.
Not.
A sophomoric joke from the days of my youth and alleged innocence:
“Jesus saves. But Moses invests.”
We need a new category of crime to capture the evils of men like der Popenfuhrer and these idiots. “Murder by Authority” perhaps, indicating that, although they don’t actually kill anyone personally by hand, they directly cause deaths through the exercise of their powers as persons in positions of authority (authority completely illegitimate and undeserved on any rational basis, it goes without saying). Mere “criminal negligence” doesn’t capture their responsibility for the resulting deaths at all.
“Jesus saves Green Stamps.”
That’s really dating me. How many people alive today remember Green Stamps?
“People who come here just after they discover they are HIV positive, before their bodies are damaged, are easier to cure.”
Hm. I guess it’s easy to say “hey, look, we’ve cured you!” while you’re still asymptomatic. Brilliant.
One assumes this deception is deliberate, which means that the unspeakable christians pushing this giant con trick are – well, you know ….
What can be done about it, though?
The medical authorities and others know, and publicly state that these “cures” are pure quackery, but the gullible follow anway.
Can you really save people from their own stupidity?
Remember that ignorance is cureable, but stupidity isn’t.
And stupidity is a Capital crime – and in this case, it will kill the stupid, unlike, say, a stupid person behind the driving-wheel of a car …..
(?) Think of it as evolution in action ?
Except that the con-men will survive, to go on perpetrating their scams, just like those in Nigeria, who have set the Polio-eradication programme back …..
To paraphrase the “Daily Mail”, is hanging too good for them?
What I do know is that this is very very nasty.
Lourdes help us.
Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has roughly 39-40 million (although 45 million has also been claimed} which is over half of Ethiopia’s population.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, was in 1959 granted its first own Patriarch by Coptic Pope Cyril VI of Alexandria, the word Coptic can be considered a misnomer because it means Egyptian.
Before the revolution the numbers of Ethiopian clergy were big, since Orthodoxy is usually much vested in monastic order. They say that during the Red Terror (1975-78) over 200 thousands monks were executed in Ethiopia.
The Orthodox monk is the best expression of the difference between Western and Eastern Christianity. Without too much theology to go through, it could be said that the Orthodoxy (monotheist) believes in one nature of Christ and it is fully divine.
That doctrine results in this strong division between two realities — Man’s and God’s.
An Orthodox believer has to make a more radical choice since there is no middle ground between Hell and Heaven.
“Plastic jerry cans are filled with water from a pool, and passed along a human chain to priests dressed like deep sea fishermen.
Desperate measures for desperate situations. With such a long
“religious” history, it is a sad and pathetic indictment that the unfortunate HIV aids victims have to resort to pseudo attired fishermen, jerry cans, and a substance which covers 71% of Earth’s surface. There are 1.4 billion cubic kilometers (330 million mi³)[2] of it available on Earth. That is coptic religion in all its modernity. Lourdes is another kettle of fish!!
Marie-Therese, excuse my flippancy, I use it as a pitiful defence against such crushingly depressing stories…
Nick,
I flipping knew that, I should have emphasised it more succinctly, by saying another “fishy” kettle of fish.
I should not say stinking, oops, there have said it.
NOW I HAVE GONE AND DOUSED MESELF AFTER JUMPING INTO A “HEAP OF SILO”?
There is a disease known as – Phi Beta Kappa. A former American model and a Phi Beta Kappa, by all accounts, gets a lot of stick from people because of her affliction. It must be for her very painful, nobody likes to be undeservingly so denigrated or put down. Especially when one does not ask invite same.
Roman Catholicism is a chip off the old Coptic block.
Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia article on the Henoticon [1]: the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, and many others, all refused to accept the “two natures” doctrine decreed by the Byzantine Emperor Marcian’s Council of Chalcedon in 451, thus separating them from the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox — who themselves separated from one another later on in the East-West Schism (1054).
“Pope John Paul II defined Lourdes as a “unique school of prayer” and invited hundreds of thousands of pilgrims “to pray for vocations to the priesthood and to virginity for the Kingdom of God”
Will HH Pope Shenouda III, 117th Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of All Africa on the Apostolic Throne of St Mark Live to see another “Lourdes” miraculously unfold in the analogous scenic mountainous virgin territory of Ethopia? Will the thousands of pilgrims, like Lourdes worldwide pilgrims in no time also increase to hundreds of thousands, and will the hundreds of thousands then become millions? They have after all the Aids and the population to draw upon. Will ‘Lourdes,’ handicapped victim pilgrims also draw parallels with Ethiopia’s Aids victims. Am I being merely sceptical – I wonder? I wonder?
Phi Beta Kipper ?
I ray, what a whole load of Coptic codswallop.
Oops, you bet a be kipping! If not, in no time will Betsy Prig give you a baptism of hell that you will remember.
Have a good Easter all.
I wonder if someday the history books will be brave enough to lay the AIDS epidemic directly at the feet of the religious–who did so much to ensure that the virus would be transmitted to as many people as possible.
Hey, god chasteneth whom he loveth, you know.
dzd. so people have no responsibility for their own behavior? let me see if I get your logic,people (mainly men) cant keep it zipped but it is all the fault of the church!
Spare me the right-wing talk radio aphorisms.
If the church is telling them they are cured of HIV and then they go an infect someone new, you suggest the church isn’t to blame?
Woudnt the church be against casual sex encounters that lead to that kind of infection? dzd pointing out the weakness in your argument has what! to do with right wing talk radio?
Who says the sexual encounters are ‘casual’ or non-marital? People with HIV could be abstaining from marital sex, then told by the church that they are cured, then return to sex with spouse.
But apart from that, the church is no doubt against many things, but it doesn’t follow that the church is morally justified in punishing people who do those things by giving them a bogus ‘cure’. I don’t think people should drive while talking on the phone, but that doesn’t mean I think they should have untreated Aids as a punishment.
Not to mention that saying “abstinence yay” is one thing–spreading misleading information about the efficacy of condoms, ordering them to stop taking their medicine, and providing false “cures” in the place of both is quite another entirely. And the Christian churches in Africa have *quite* a history of the latter form of behavior.
I wouldnt disagree with any of the last two posts,but however revolting the church in Africa might be the main reason for the aids epidemic in Africa is because a large number of men are behaving like alley cats!That is not the fault of the church.
The main reason for the Aids epidemic everywhere is that there is a virus. Of course men should behave responsibly, but individual morality is one issue and the far-reaching actions of powerful institutions is another.
“a large number of men are behaving like alley cats!”
Oh no, people are having sex. What can we do?
A) adopt a realistic policy that takes the natural proclivities of human beings into account–yes, people will have sex, here’s how you can do so more responsibly
B) attempt a ludicrous behavior-modification scheme which completely ignores the ways that real human beings act while simultaneously using your financial and political power to eliminate all other methods of controlling an epidemic
No points for guessing the one the churches have taken. Ridiculous behavior-modification schemes and restrictive political maneuvers are their stock-in-trade.
Again I wouldnt disagree,but it does not change the fact that the aids epidemic in Africa is the fault of men refusing to modify their behavior even when it is killing them,if anything it has got even worse because young girls are being raped by older men with h.i.v.in a vain atempt to rid themselves of the disease!
Richard we know all that, but what of it? That hardly makes it okay for any church or Church to 1) tell people not to use condoms or 2) tell people not to take meds. I’m not posting hymns in praise of HIV-positive men who infect their wives here, I’m criticizing the actions of churches.
Maybe people get the kind of church they deserve?
No, I don’t think any of us have done anything bad enough to deserve a church. Any church.
Oh come on, Richard – are you seriously saying people ‘deserve’ to die slow nasty deaths of Aids? Including people infected by their spouses or by rapists or during gestation? Do the orphans of people who die of Aids deserve to be orphans?
No I am not saying that orphans,rape victims deserve it,but the problem I often find with discusions about aids in Africa is that everything other than the behaviour of Africans themselves is blamed for the epidemic!
Re: “Lourdes, is another kettle of fish”
It should have read another can of worms.” Do not start on me!
No, Richard, your problem is that you’re upset that Africans won’t behave the way you think they should behave.
It’s remarkably easy to sit here and make moon-faced statements about “personal responsibility” (mantra of the right wing talk radio program here in the USA), but the fact of the matter is that well-heeled religious organizations have been systematically denying Africans the information and the protection they need to be truly responsible. They have instead been presented with a false dichotomy (no sex or eternal hellfire)–and the organizations that have worked so assiduously to set this up are absolutely responsible for the results.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. Evangelical millions destroyed Uganda’s successful AIDS battle:
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/03/30/uganda10380.htm
“No I am not saying that orphans,rape victims deserve it”
But notice that my first (and main) question was ‘are you seriously saying people ‘deserve’ to die slow nasty deaths of Aids?’ Do I take it you are seriously saying that people other than orphans and rape victims do deserve it?
As for the problem you often find with discussions of Aids in Africa, what of it? That’s not what I’m saying, so why bother to address a problem you have with discussions in general?