You could starve whole continents waiting for God to provide

What kind of mother would allow herself and her five children to go for eleven whole days without food?

The careless and (above all) religious mother, that what.

The money ran out first. Then the food.

Over three months in 2006, as her five children grew more emaciated and listless by the day, Estelle Walker made no move to find a job, no effort to scrounge up a meal, her kids told a jury yesterday.

"We were supposed to wait for God to provide," said Walker's oldest daughter, now 21. "And that's what we did."

At one point, the daughter said, she and her siblings went 11 days without food. When police were at last summoned to the Sussex County cabin by neighbors, investigators found the children so malnourished they had difficulty talking.

More than three years later, three of the siblings took the stand in a Newton courtroom, describing how their mother watched them nearly starve.

This is perhaps a great illustration of the famous Steven Weinberg quote: “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil. But for good people to do evil – that takes religion.”. Not that I’m saying Walker was a good person, or a good mother – the fact that she would let her children starve for eleven days because she was too lazy, religious or both to even search for a damn job is evidence enough to the contrary – but truly, there is simply no greater force for evil in this world than religion, and how it twists and corrupts people’s minds.

Think about it: if Walker was sane and not filled with superstitious tripe, do you think she would’ve seen her children grow weak and emaciated with starvation and still fail to try and provide for them if she didn’t have that “God will save us” crap lodged in her head? It’s possible, of course, but far more unlikely.

However, she’s not the only one to blame; from what I can see, her church also has a hand in this atrocity.

In 2005, Walker and the children -- then ages 8, 9, 11, 13 and 18 -- had been placed in the cabin by their church, Times Square Church of Manhattan, to help them escape what Walker claimed was her husband's alcoholism. The cabin is owned by church members who open it for retreats.

Walker was due to leave the cabin in May 2006 but refused, saying God had told her to stay, church members have said. The church then cut off her support and began eviction proceedings.

So, her support (which I can safely presume included food) was ended in May of 2006, and later, she and her kids nearly starved to death. It’s rather obvious the heartless church had a role in this affair. They had all the right to cut them off, perhaps, considering the cabin was their property, but they deserve to be slapped in the same way the electric company would deserve a hard reprimand should kill someone by cutting power to a home in the middle of winter.

Anyway, all five kids are alive today and Walker, having undergone several psychiatric exams, has been found fit to stand trial. She’s being charged with four counts of second-degree child endangerment (she didn’t get charged for her eldest child, who was 18 at the time). Considering her defense rests entirely on “God is my defense”, though, I don’t see much trouble ahead for the prosecution.

(via Fark.com)
Technorati tags: religion · children · God · Estelle Walker · child endangerment