5 children go 11 days without food thanks to mom: "We were supposed to wait for God to provide, and thats what we did"
Offline http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/jersey/index.ssf?/base/news-15/1259894705182640.xml&coll=1
Thoughts?
Mom expected God to provide food, daughter testifies
Friday, December 04, 2009Joe MoszczynskiSTAR-LEDGER STAFFThe 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.
Walker, 50, of Brooklyn, is charged with four counts of second-degree child endangerment. If convicted, she faces up to 10 years in prison on each count. Walker was not charged in connection with her oldest child because she was a legal adult at the time.
The young woman and her two siblings -- a 16-year-old sister and a 15-year-old brother, betrayed no resentment toward their mother, speaking in soft, even tones.
Under questioning by Sussex County Assistant Prosecutor Frances Koch, they said Walker never tried to get any assistance for her family, either from her estranged husband or from other relatives. She likewise avoided seeking help from two churches near the Hopatcong cabin where they had been staying, the children said.
Though she had previously worked as a teacher, Walker made no effort to earn money, her children said.
"She never tried to get money or food or get a job," the 16-year-old daughter said.
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
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"Walker, 50, of Brooklyn, is charged with four counts of second-degree child endangerment. If convicted, she faces up to 10 years in prison on each count. Walker was not charged in connection with her oldest child because she was a legal adult at the time."
So, the oldest child was a legal adult at the time this took place ??
If the oldest child was a legal adult at the time this all took place, why didn't he or he or she get a friggin job to help? If in fact this 'child' was a legal adult, at what point in that 11 day fast did he or she stop to think "oh, well I think god isn't going to help us, maybe I should do something". Or better yet, why not be tried as a legal adult.
I would guess that the older child(actually, all the kids) was so brainwashed to believe that "god will provide" that there was no use of logic to to determine that the family would have to do for themselves as nobody else or 'thing' else was going to do it.
...just don't know what else to say~I feel bad for the kids and outraged that the mother would do this to her own flesh and blood.
I wonder if the whole "god told me" thing started when the church wanted to kick her and her brood to the curb...perhaps she wasn't a believer at all and she was just saying that because she thought the church would let her and her kids stay there?
Slowly building a blog at ~
http://obsidianwords.wordpress.com/
Well, churches are not there for the community. That wouldn't be bootstrappy.
"Last year, Walker rejected a plea-bargain offer that would have required no additional incarceration other than the one year she already served in the county jail, if she agreed to undergo additional psychiatric testing."
http://www.njherald.com/story/news/walker-day-three
This explains a bit more. The children were home-schooled, with primary emphasis on bible study.
Pretty typical in the north-east for religious crazies. Their children aren't "tainted" that way. They are raised to know of the bible as the "one truth".
Without knowledge of anything else, it is pretty normal for them to behave irrationally to things. It seems like the mother was raised that way too.
I was briefly homeschooled, and met other homeschoolers at "meets"...and let me just say they were very, very disturbing people. Like, one was determined to "die for the lord" in his life so he would be rewarded in heaven somehow. I never asked him what he meant by that. I just kind of nodded and walked away.
There is a huge culture for it. They even have biblical video games where you kill atheists with "truth", and others where you forcibly convert people. Ever heard of Left Behind, the video game?
From it's wiki:
In 2007, the evangelical organization Operation Straight Up (OSU) prepared to distribute care packages called "Freedom Packets" to the U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq as a part of the U.S. Department of Defense's America Supports You program. The packages were slated to include copies of "Left Behind: Eternal Forces," but reports of "kill or convert" violence against non-Christian characters and characters shouting "Praise the Lord!" when non-Christian characters are killed were made in a blog entry on the The Nation's website[22] prompted ABC News to contact the Department of Defense.[23]. As a result of more media scrutiny, OSU dropped its plans to include the game in the care packages.
it would be laughable really if it wasn't as common as it is.
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
http://www.parallelpac.org/murder.htm
It supports things like this happening too. The thing is, a lot of the homeschooled kids, and kids at "brainwashing centers" of religious schools in the midwest and south...they can't identify reality.
They are raised to believe in a fictional world, and isolated from normal fairly rational society. Without the support to identify reality, you end up with more people like this.
I meet a lot of people that are shocked there are people that don't go to church. SHOCKED. I have seen people become alarmed about it, like it couldn't be true. While in the next sentence condemning people that DO go to church, but not their brand of evangelicalism.
When you have such a warped sense of reality it is hard to distinguish what is real and what is fiction. I remember believing things that now I know were just crazy when I was younger, and if I hadn't parted ways with that...I would still be just as crazy as the people I meet on a daily basis that live in their own magical worlds where they are immune to snakes, poisons, and dependence on an imaginary being for other life-sustaining issues. People have watched someone get bitten by a poisonous snake at one of the snake-handling churches. Couple of days later he was found dead. Did he got to a hospital? No, God was going to take care of him. Worked out real well didn't it? Do you think the people going to the church, that watched the man and allowed him to die stopped going? Of course not. It was just "God calling him back". Life is meaningless to YOU after all, because you exist to live and die for the lord. It is his will.
This is how these people think. This is what I am used to. I find it to be insanity.
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
Sorry. Felt a little bit rantish.
I blame it on Cpt. for her arguments that entire communities of people must have been predisposed to do things like this without religion.
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
both the mother and the children seem a little off to me. I don't think I can blame the children for that though...but I will say they are a little thick. Then again all home schooled people I know were a little off when I first met them. I even had a girlfriend that was home schooled.... that didn't last longer than two weeks. Crazy person, also kind of a sled dog now that I think about it, guess iv raised my standards since I was 16
. No point to any of this really except to say public school may be bad but kids need other kids homeschooling isn't the best with that part.
Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
No animal shall wear clothes.
No animal shall sleep in a bed.
No animal shall drink alcohol.
No animal shall kill any other animal.
All animals are equal.
Thanks for sharing this article, ClockCat. For those who didn't read it, it's about a christian who blew his atheist roommate's head off with a shotgun. This reminds me of a debate I watched on Youtube between atheist Edward Tabash and christian apologist Bob Siegal. The christian said that atheists used to say how great christians are and how great the Bible is, but they didn't want to be christians because they just didn't believe any of it. And now, he said, since the internet came out, atheists talk about how evil christians are and how evil the Bible is.
I know that not all christians are evil, but I do know that many evils can be justified by referring to the Bible or by believing you're having a special revelation from god. And not all evil comes from religion or irrational thinking -- some people have psychological problems.
One more point. I'm using the word "evil" to mean "aggression," meaning "behavior intending to cause harm to a sentient being." I'm not using it in the lay sense of "vigorous action or effort," or in the context of certain sports where the goal is to hurt the opponent.
Having read that link now, I will say those fucks are supremely lucky. If I was related to the case and had to deal with those idiots, they would ALL be dead today, and the world would be better for it.
Enlightened Atheist, Gaming God.