Côte d'Ivoire: Child Sacrifice On Rise in Election Run-Up
Child abduction, which is already a serious problem in Cote d'Ivoire, may worsen in the run up to presidential elections later this year as political hopefuls using traditional myths of human sacrifice to improve their electoral chances will fuel an already significant market for stolen children, according to the Ivorian police.
Child abduction, which is already a serious problem in Cote d'Ivoire, may worsen in the run up to presidential elections later this year as political hopefuls using traditional myths of human sacrifice to improve their electoral chances will fuel an already significant market for stolen children, according to the Ivorian police.
"[Child abduction] is something that needs urgent attention especially in the run-up to the election because a lot of things are going to happen like human sacrifices and other rituals where the organs of children will be particularly in demand," said Sergeant Antoine Goua Bi, a spokesperson for the child protection unit of the Ivorian police, who says child sacrifice always increases around election times.
"The number of children disappearing in Cote d'Ivoire has already reached extremely worrying proportions," said Jean-Michel Boka, coordinator of the Ivorian non-governmental child protection organisation Roxal. "Every day we register three new cases - that adds up to between 60 and 90 cases per month."
Organ traffickers, who slice out hearts, kidneys, lungs and other body parts for sale to medical facilities and soothsayers are the main culprits, Bi said. The children are also taken to work in the sex trade, for use by illegal adoption rings, and for work on plantations, he said.
Parents' chances of getting their children back once they have disappeared is slim. Boka at the NGO Roxal estimated a recovery rate of just one in 20.
Kouassi Bâ, coordinator of the international NGO Save the Children in Korhogo, northern Cote d'Ivoire, said they are working alongside the UN Children's Agency (UNICEF) and International Labour Organization, to raise awareness against child trafficking, but that there is no specific project against child abductions.
How Rituals Aid Social Conflicts In Ghanaian Society
For example, Liberia, as much as everyone knows now, was partly destroyed by its elite's irrational appropriation of the Bawku superstitious diet - amulets, talismans, juju-marabout mediums, all sorts of mindless spiritualists in free fall, spiritualists party, human sacrifice incomprehensibly fearful rituals such as the late President Samuel Doe got involved with amulets and goat horn wrapped around his waist, bathing with the blood of virgins periodically as part of his rituals for fortification. And President Charles Taylor and other elite mired in near-mass human sacrifices, among other strange superstitions, during the 14-year civil war.
The Bawku rituals resonate Africa-wide and is so cultured in Liberia that on June 29, 2005, prior to Liberia's current democratic dispensation, its interim leader, Gyude Bryant, warned any aspiring presidential candidates tempting to boost their chances by carrying out human sacrifices that they would be executed. "If you think you can take somebody's life in order to be president, or the speaker (of parliament) or a senator, without anything being done to you, then you are fooling yourself." And the outcome is "even further backwardness," as Sakye-Addo argues of Uganda's Lord Resistance Army and the Sierra Leonean and the Liberian civil wars where human hearts were eaten for rituals. "It's all a lot of nonsense that leads to needless fighting, destruction…"
In Bawku, while the scientific side of the mind demand objective evidence as to why amulets and juju should let them commit conflicts perennially, their brains' mythopoeic, irrational amulets-juju-thinking side entice them to irrational marvels - to the believe that "an attacker's knife will fail to pierce simply by staring cross-eyed at it, they do not hesitate to start a fight. Neither are they keen to make peace in mid-battle, if they're convinced that their chest can deflect bullets and arrows once they have on some goatskin armband and they remember to yell a password," as Sakye-Addo explains.
Lindow Man was sacrificed almost 2000 years ago. He'd been bludgeoned, garrotted and had his throat cut. Satisfied he was probably dead by then, his persecutors threw his body into a bog or pool which now forms part of the Lindow area of Wilmslow.
Sacrifice such as this wasn't altogether unusual. Water carried religious significance for the Iron Age peoples in Northern Europe and it was common practice to make offerings of weapons, clothes, food and even each other, to the deities they imagined lived in water.
Sacrifice such as this wasn't altogether unusual. Water carried religious significance for the Iron Age peoples in Northern Europe and it was common practice to make offerings of weapons, clothes, food and even each other, to the deities they imagined lived in water.
Human sacrifice is the best you can get in archaeology to excite an audience, save for treasure. Lindow Man's twisted body should therefore have provided a perfect centre piece to a tip-top exhibition in Manchester about the Iron Age in Britain.
Or so you'd have thought.
Sacrifice, as I argued elsewhere (Jihad, the Lord's Supper, and eternal life, Asia Times Online, September 19, 2006) is the means by which human beings approach a God who is beyond human conception. In Judaism and Christianity, divine love displaces the sacrifice so that the worshipper may live.
To achieve life beyond this world we must die to this world, by sacrificing ourselves. That is true of every religion. The religions differ only in the nature of sacrifice. As Jon Levenson showed in his study The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son, the offerings of revealed religion are sublimated human sacrifice. In Judaism and Christianity, the God spares the victim out of love, just as God provided a ram in place of the bound Isaac on Mount Moriah. Christians believe that a single human sacrifice spared the rest of humankind.
In Islam, though every man must be his own Christ. Sacrifice is not sublimated but rather demanded of each individual. That is why jihad is the central and most fundamental form of Islamic worship, the only action that ensures the believer's acceptance in the next world. The jihadi who sacrifices himself in the violent propagation of Islam goes straight to his heavenly reward.
There is no mention of jihad by any of the Ankara "revisionists", only the dry contention that perhaps the Koran's endorsement of polygamy or the veil might not necessarily apply to every place and time. Nor could there be, for by repudiating jihad, a Muslim would close off his possibility of approaching God. Traditional society closes ranks against encroachment from the outside, and this fragility explains the resurgence of political Islam.
Inmate: Assault victim chosen as 'human sacrifice'
Joey Couey says he tried to kill Matthew Hawthorne in order to found a Satanic Church upon human sacrifice, as he was "chosen to pave the way for Antichrist."
Couey, 40, already serving 60 years in prison for a second-degree murder conviction from Oklahoma County -- and five years for possessing contraband in prison -- was sentenced Monday by District Judge Tom Lucas to another 15-year prison term and five years probation after pleading guilty to assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.
According to reports, Couey was in an outside area of Unit 5, an inmate's living unit at Lexington Correctional Center, on Aug. 16, 2007, when correctional officers saw him throwing liquid -- later identified as bleach -- in the face of Hawthorne, 23.
Couey then pulled a "long object, wrapped in cloth, from the waistband of his pants, striking inmate Hawthorne in the head," reports say.
Officers said Hawthorne tackled Couey and lay on top of him to prevent further injury. Officers secured the inmates and placed them on investigation in a secure housing unit. Hawthorne was treated for his injuries at the medical unit of the medium-security Lexington prison, officials said.
According to a "serious incident report" written Aug. 16, 2007, by Deputy Director Bobby Boone, Couey's weapon was a piece of metal created from a ballast in a prison cell's light fixture. "It was a flat piece of metal that he had manipulated to resemble a machete and the edge was sharpened," Boone said.
In an Aug. 16, 2007, written statement, Couey said: "In the Satanic Bible, the chapter entitled 'On Selecting a Human Sacrifice' states that one should choose a victim which the killer would be 'doing society a favor by exterminating.'
"By society's standards, all of us convicts fit that bill. But my selected victim is a true maggot, a piece of (expletive deleted) who preys upon the weak (As I and people I love have been).
"My intention was/is to found my Church, the Church of the New World Order, upon a human sacrifice, as I am chosen to pave the way for Antichrist ..."
His only regret is that "I failed my mission," Couey states.
BLACK MAGIC
MUMBAI: A tale of black magic does not fit into this concrete jungle. But there is a hint of the supernatural in the mysterious death of Shivani Shelar, claimed her family on Tuesday.
The three-year-old girl went missing from her Wadala home on June 3. Her body, with bruises on forehead, was found on June 5 at an isolated place on the shores behind Raj Bhavan in Malabar Hill. Post mortem report ruled out rape. Motive of theft too seemed improbable as the girl's gold ear-rings were untouched.
Shivani's relatives were firm in their belief that the toddler had been a victim of human sacrifice. They suspected that she had been picked up by a tantrik, who later 'sacrificed' her to God.
"The day she went missing had been an amavasya. It is possible that she was used for human sacrifice. We want police to investigate the case from this angle," said Nana Sonawane, 31, Shivani's uncle, who works as a supervisor at a doctor's clinic.
He added that when they went to register a missing complaint at the Wadala Truck Terminal (WTT) police station on June 3, there were few other parents too, who had come with similar complaints.
In 1931 Wittgenstein spent some weeks reading James Frazer's imaginative work on myth, The Golden Bough. He objected to Frazer's attempts to explain, in rationalistic terms, such rituals as the sacrifice in ancient times of the priest-king in the sacred grove of Nemi, 20 miles from Rome. ("Those trees in whose dim shadow/ The ghastly priest doth reign,/ The priest who slew the slayer,/ And shall himself be slain," as Macaulay put it.)
"What narrowness of spiritual life we find in Frazer!" Wittgenstein exclaimed. Himself, he found the ritual at Nemi "terrible, impressive, horrible, tragic", but no different in kind from ritual actions that we might ourselves perform: the kissing of a loved one's picture, the confessing of one's sins, or Schubert's brother cutting up the composer's scores after his death to give fragments to his favourite pupils.
Such human reactions to birth, death and the natural world prompted Wittgenstein to remark: "We could almost say, man is a ceremonious animal."
This conclusion is all the more interesting because the British anthropologist Mary Douglas constructed an almost identical dictum: "As a social animal, man is a ritual animal." This comes in her book Purity and Danger, in a chapter also taking Frazer to task. "Ritual is more to society than words are to thought," she declares. Later she was to apply these ideas to such everyday matters as the foolish (as she saw it) abolition for Catholics of abstinence from meat on Fridays.
Her ideas about ritual and meaning are very much on Wittgenstein's territory. Yet Wittgenstein's remarks on Frazer were not published, I think, until 1979, and Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger came out in 1966. Of course, she could have heard by other means about his idea of man as a "ceremonious animal", though she does not mention Wittgenstein's name in the books concerned. It is too late to ask her now, as she died last year.
Wittgenstein certainly saw himself as a student of the natural history of human beings. I can't help thinking that both he and Mary Douglas were right to say that, as Wittgenstein put it: "There is something in us too that speaks in support of those observances by the savages."
Fergus Kerr concludes that perhaps "considering the execution of an innocent man is a more promising starting point for sustaining Christian theology than proving that God exists".
The Christians for National Liberation-southern Mindanao, an underground movement of revolutionary Christians, condemns the Task Force Davao-Apollo Quiboloy conspiracy in the killing of Datu Dominador Diarog in Manuel Guianga, Davao City.
Apollo Quiboloy had obviously been pleased by the Task Force Davao's fait accompli in killing Diarog. With Diarog's murder, a human sacrifice in the altar of Quiboloy's "prayer mountain" was offered before his merciless god. In doing so, Quiboloy has enlarged his estate by forcing the eviction of the true owners of the land and their future generations.
In truth, the Diarog murder has laid bare Quiboloy's deceptive and murderous character. It has unmasked Quiboloy as the false prophet of our times. For, indeed, his penchant for land and wealth projects him as the Devil luring Jesus with earthly riches, rather than as his megalomaniac delusion to being the Son of God.
Any discerning Christian can see through the falsehood of Quiboloy's claim to divinity. Quiboloy consciously uses religious obscurantism to justify his landgrabbing and self-aggrandizing schemes.
He has used the name of God in vain, in pursuit of his own vanity, turning "Jesus Christ the Name Above Every Name" into a multi-million business empire. In this empire, he acts not only as the high priest but the self-appointed messiah, constantly pleased by a coterie of servants at his beck and call.
Quiboloy's personality and history is as dubious as his self-claim to being the Son of the Father. Using all deceptive methods perfected by right-wing evangelicals in the United States and dirty tricks found in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) manual in the infiltration of religion, Quiboloy's religious merchandizing grew from the low-intensity conflict at the heart of "Nicaragdao" into the thriving business that it is today.
Quiboloy will not desist from offering more human sacrifice as long as there are threats to his business interests. He has announced to unleash a 20,000-strong army "who are willing to die in his name" against the New People's Army. For the moment, the Task Force Davao is serving as his reliable mercenary army to massacre the defenseless in his name.
During Arafat's 12 year war in Lebanon (1970 to 1982), Arafat's Palestinians used Christians as a live blood supply for his wounded Palestinians. When the Israelis drove Arafat and his Palestinians out of Lebanon, they found prisoners stacked up like cordwood in the hospitals - totally drained of their blood.
Human sacrifice from their earliest times was part of the culture of those who today are called "Arabs" and "Muslims". Granted Egypt and Iran do not consider themselves as Arabs but most of them are Muslims. In fact, the term "Aryan" is derived from the same root as "Iran".
When Israel trades hundreds of Muslim Arab prisoners who were caught (often at great risk to Israeli Jewish soldiers), tried and convicted for their crimes, they simply go back to their trade of Terror through murder in the most hideous ways conceivable.
Israel gets back bones and "body parts" but the released Terrorists return to generate more Jewish bones and "body parts".
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