Witches

The other day i heard some news. Family news, nothing worthy of a front page.
It turns out my brother is to be a Dad.
Becoming a parent is one of the few things i beat him to.
Knowing him as i do, i'm not entirely sure how he'll adapt to this position.

Having a child lives up to every cliche in the book. It alters you, and fundamentally changes your values and outlook on everything.

For me, when my son Jake was in utero, i thought every change was going to be for the worst. I thought my life was being taken away from me and the good times were grinding to a halt.
I was wrong, and while i shudder at the teen pregnancy trend used by young girls to gain free accommodation, i still thoroughly recommend parenthood.

I'm not about to wax lyrical about it all. As i said before, pretty much every cliche is true, and you find yourself faced with this tiny human that you're responsible for. You can fill them up with morals, values, truths and love. Or you can go the other way, and frankly i don't know how or why anyone would want to do that.

With this in mind then, i can only stand with my jaw on the floor when i hear of stories like the one about Nwanaokwo Edet. Hardly a household name i know, but Nwanaokwo was a nine year old boy from Eket in Nigeria. If you didn't hear about this story i'll quickly relay it; Nwanaokwo's family pastor accused him of being a witch. A nine year old boy remember........
As an exorcism, his father tried to force acid down his throat. As the boy struggled, the acid spilled and burned away his face and eyes. A month later he was dead.

Apparently there's a rising trend in Africa of children accused of witchcraft and then tortured and killed by their own families.

When i think of my son, i can't even think of hurting him. I'm not one who's outraged at the idea of smacking. I've smacked Jake only once, and that was on the wrist but you know what? He was being naughty and he deserved it.
I felt bloody awful after it. His face all screwed up and wet with tears. The shrieks and yells.
Usually in that circumstance you rush to comfort them, but when you've just dished out punishment, you can't.
It's a hard one, but sometimes necessary.
Thankfully not often with Jake, he's a cool kid.

The idea of beating, abusing, torturing or going near him with acid actually makes me feel sick.
I fail to see two things.
Firstly, how there could have been any love from Nwanaokwo's father towards him at any point in his nine short years.
And secondly, how fucked up people must be to believe everything their pastor says.
Let's add a third and fourth thing here: how fucked up the pastor must be to come out with such monumental bullshit, and how the job fucking lot of them manage to sleep at night knowing what they've done.

So now we approach the thorny subject of religion.
It's easy to say it's all religion's fault for a Dad throwing acid in his son's face deliberately.
If that 'Dad' wasn't such a gullible dickhead, he might have thought for himself.
If a pastor, priest, vicar, mormon, scientologist or Jehova's witness came up to me and said to me earnestly that my son is a witch and deserves to die, that person would be meeting the God they worship a lot quicker than they first anticipated.
Why then, did Nwanaokwo's Dad not share my mentality on this?

According to Fox News, it's because families are extremely poor and are sometimes grateful that there's one less mouth to feed, and because when communities are under pressure they look for a scapegoat and children are defenseless. In the past month alone, 3 Nigerian children accused of witchcraft were killed and another 3 set on fire.

In Nigeria, churches outnumber banks, clinics and schools put together. If you're a pastor, the competition is tough to recruit people to your church.
So now we're getting down to the real reason these bastards are accusing kids of being witches.
Pastors can establish their credentials by doing so. If the pastors are respected they get more people joining their church. More people joining their church means.............ker-ching!

In an odd twist, the church that this particular pastor belonged to is Mount Zion Lighthouse which is based in California. Needless to say the Californians have pleaded ignorance to it, but the Nigerian branch say that with 30 million members, they ' cant keep an eye on everybody '.
Turns out they can collect membership fees from everybody though.

There's more horror stories: one child's mother tried to saw the top of her skull off after a pastor denounced her, another was buried alive and let's not forget the one who was starved, then made to eat cement and finally set on fire.
For me, this opens up so many questions about the nature of religion and the screaming divide between our country and those in the third world.

Science, industry, knowledge and technology surge forward relentlessly, and some citizens of this planet are being left behind. The gap is only getting bigger to me, as stories like this one show.
The actions of these ' parents ' are signs of out and out madness, but at least they used religion as an excuse eh? Baby P's Mum was just an evil fucker.

I hope as my son grows up he'll realise how fortunate he is to have been born here and in this day and age. I'll certainly try my best to make him see it.

It's Halloween on Saturday. He'll be going out with his Mum Trick or Treating. He's 7 now, so he's still at the age where he believes in the kid stuff like the Tooth Fairy, Father Christmas, and ghosts and goblins.

Long may that continue. It's what being a kid is all about isn't it? Believing in magic and fairy tales. I stopped believing in that stuff a while ago. But then i hear about people setting fire to their own kids because somebody told them they were Witches and i realise that monsters really do exist, and that ignorance can be the scariest thing of all.