Want a Healthy Baby? Throw Them Off the Roof of a Mosque!!!
1 August 2009 by StardustYet another example how religion can be dangerous. Hundreds of infants were dropped from the roof of a mosque in western India in the belief that the fall (assuming they are caught in the bedsheet held by volunteers below), would ensure good health and prosperity for their families.
India’s National Commission for Protection of Child’s Rights issued a notice Thursday to the local administration in Sholapur and has begun investigations into the practice.
1 August 2009, on 9:07 pm
This is awful! Not only could it cause injury, just think of the trauma it causes to the child! The world is so full of crazy-ass superstitious fucktards!
1 August 2009, on 10:36 pm
Sometimes I think the more insane the idea the more the superstition is thought to be efficacious. What the hell is wrong with us humans?!
1 August 2009, on 10:43 pm
Is anything the “crazy-ass superstitious religious fucktards” do, EVER a surprise, anymore?
And, since we’re…”on a (weekend) roll”…let’s not leave that other Abrahamic crowd out of the madness…the original bunch of extreme loonies, after all…here’s another insane tidbit from the…”Holy (Wholly Insane) Land”:
“Gunman kills 3, injures 11 at gay club in Tel Aviv”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090801/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_tel_aviv_shooting
Looks like the Jews are still being influenced by that “Arch” Old Testicle fucktard, “Leviciousness” (Leviticus).
IOW…No surprise, RE never ending religious poison!
“Pork and Shrimp, anyone?…
NO? Ummm…Has anyone gotten ’stoned’ yet, this weekend?”
1 August 2009, on 11:50 pm
And people had the guts to complain about Michael Jackson dangling his kid over a balcony. Hey, at least he had the decency to not let go!
2 August 2009, on 1:48 pm
Wow, that is really fucked up. Amazing people can be so blinded by their religious belief that it never occurs to them that any gawd who would feel glee at watching his “children” defenestrated is a sick fucking god.
Sarah: funny that Jacko was the first thing I thought of when I saw this video. The west is (rightly) almost entirely intolerant of this kind of child abuse. I guess that just goes to show you the difference that exposure to an enlightenment can make in terms of your view towards your fellow humans. Humanity and empathy don’t have their roots in religion, as believers often insist, but in–surprise–humanism.
Nice to hear India’s National Commission for Protection of Child’s Rights is doing something about this.
28 August 2009, on 8:10 pm
It looks worse than it is. A sheet is good way to decelerate. They’ve been doing it for centuries and I’ve never seen a report of injury in any news article.
But even if it’s a 1/1,000 risk of permanent injury (spinal, concussion), only superstition would drive people to risk a baby like that. Sane, rational people don’t do that sort of thing.
29 August 2009, on 2:08 pm
Steve, even if a child doesn’t get physically injured, what does that do to him mentally? No wonder so many people in today’s world are fucked up in the head. We say they’ve been doing it for centuries, but just because they’ve been doing something for a long time doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.
Yes, only superstition would drive people to do such a thing, or insanity. Like Michael Jackson holding his infant son over the railing of a balcony. Religious superstition is so very close to insanity. I always say I wonder if this planet could be some kind of galactic mental asylum!
4 September 2009, on 11:50 am
Steve, even if a child doesn’t get physically injured, what does that do to him mentally?
Depends on the kid and his/her perception of what was happening. At least the bastards don’t drop them face down, to experience maximal horror.
Most kids like swings, trampolines, merry-go-rounds and other things that fling them this way and that, experiencing changing G forces. Granted, kids are usually several years older before they engage in such play.
4 September 2009, on 12:04 pm
Steve, I can’t believe you condone this sort of thing for any reason. This is MUCH different than swinging kids in the air, etc and even doctors warn about that since the baby’s brain can be bruised or damaged as it jostles around inside their head. Maybe that is what is wrong with the parents and superstitious folks doing this to the children…they were all brain damaged from this abuse. Ever hear of Shaken Baby Syndrome? Well, this sort of acceleration and then abrupt stoppage can cause the same ill effects.
And a couple of inches off and that child is going to land on top of the hard skulls of the superstitious freaks holding the blanket. (And look closely at the video how they land…all bend up, necks bent sometimes…it’s terrible!) Ever hear of the joke “he/she must have been dropped on her head as a baby”?
It’s totally dangerous to throw, toss or drop a baby whether they appear to be enjoying it or not, and in this video they are all infants and don’t have a clue about what is about to happen, they have a look of apprehension and even fear. And they are crying at the bottom, not laughing as they are being manhandled even more. You can still see the tears on the cheeks of the baby girl at the end of the video.
4 September 2009, on 10:42 pm
“Most kids like swings, trampolines, merry-go-rounds and other things that fling them this way and that, experiencing changing G forces. Granted, kids are usually several years older before they engage in such play.”
Steve, these aren’t kids; they are infants. They do not have the head control for such activities. No sane individual would jostle a child this young in this manner. As Stardust pointed out, much like shaken baby sydrome, you can cause coup-contra-coup injuries, damaging the spinal cord, brainstem, rear and frontal lobes, all while shearing the brain from the meningeal layer in the skull which can lead to intracranial hemhorrages. And at any rate, this is not trampoline play; it’s religious insanity.
“Depends on the kid and his/her perception of what was happening. At least the bastards don’t drop them face down, to experience maximal horror.”
Thank allah for small favors, huh. Children this age do have the neural development to perceive falling. They do not, however, have the ability to comprehend the concept of being caught at the bottom. To them, they are falling far enough to prompt a great deal of terror.
“They’ve been doing it for centuries…”
Slavery was practiced for centuries, women have been considered chattel for millenia and people continue to be killed, as they have been since time immemorial, for not buddying up with the correct invisible friend. The argument from tradition will get you nowhere here.
You seem to understand that such religiously motivated practices are insane: why do you attempt to defend them on the other hand?
5 September 2009, on 12:28 am
Stardust, Fritzy – Steve already qualified his statement, twice in fact:
AND:
So I don’t think he’s talking about doing this to a newborn, or a toddler.
9 September 2009, on 1:20 pm
KA, thank you for pointing out that I’ve explicitly denounced this superstition-driven practice of risking the health of infants and toddlers. Stardust, you need to read more closely if you think that I’ve condoned this practice.
If anyone tried to do this to my grandkids, they’d have to do it over my dead body. Is that clear enough?
My only point was that it looks worse than it is. News reports I’ve read haven’t mentioned any children suffering serious injury or death. So either a large number of serious injuries or deaths are being covered up, or it’s not “totally dangerous” to do this (i.e., not as high-risk as one might initially think).
Blindly tossing a javelin over a wall into a large courtyard where one child is playing might only be a 1:10,000 risk of hitting the kid, but most rational people would agree that even that is unacceptable.
9 September 2009, on 1:43 pm
Stardust, you need to read more closely if you think that I’ve condoned this practice.
Steve, while you denounce this practice, you still defend it as “looking worse than it is”. Just because the news media (that most of the time cannot be trusted to do a proper and credible job of reporting) does not mean that there aren’t any ill-effects from such a practice. While you tell me that it is I who needs to read more closely, maybe it is you who should re-read what you have written and see how it seems as if you are contradicting yourself, saying two things at the same time. Condoning, yet defending at the same time.
If there is even the slightest chance that a child can be killed or maimed, it is a dangerous practice and should not be defended at all.
If you make an argument and use the word “but” then you are contradicting your stance that you denounce this practice.
10 September 2009, on 1:45 pm
Steve, while you denounce this practice, you still defend it as “looking worse than it is”.
Stating a fact about a practice is not defending that practice.
I could say that the Muslims I know haven’t tried to behead me. That isn’t a defense of Islam, just an observation which runs counter to what some might suggest.
…it seems as if you are contradicting yourself…
“Seems” is subjective. It may seem to you that I’m chewing bubble gum while writing this.
*shrug*
If there is even the slightest chance that a child can be killed or maimed, it is a dangerous practice and should not be defended at all.
Good thing I didn’t do that.
Nor should one exaggerate or misrepresent the danger. Be accurate.
If you make an argument and use the word “but” then you are contradicting your stance that you denounce this practice.
Rather, I’m denouncing the practice as well as cautioning against exaggerations and overreactions.
10 September 2009, on 1:53 pm
Nor should one exaggerate or misrepresent the danger. Be accurate.
The harm that can come to a child through being dropped from high places, shaken, etc has been explained by Fritzy above who works in the medical field.
One must also do their research on this topic before claiming it to be “not as bad as it looks.” You do not know that. Absence of stories in the media stating the infants are being harmed does not mean that some of these children are not being harmed. Harmful effects stemming from this activity may not show up till well after the incident is over and I cannot find any studies done on this one way or the other. But what we do know is that this type of activity is extremely dangerous to be doing to a small child who isn’t fully developed yet.
11 September 2009, on 2:37 pm
I’ll see your cite and raise you one of my own:
Please note that my statement came before Fritzy’s. And, I didn’t need any formal medical training to come to that conclusion. I’ve seen or heard about innumerable injuries caused by a human body hitting a surface in a position which causes injurious or fatal torquing or stress, whether it’s breaking one’s neck on a trampoline or falling off a horse, or if it’s spraining an ankle from a fall of less than a foot. I’ve also been told a thousand million times more than was necessary to support an infant’s head to avoid spinal injury. Etc., etc..
My subjective opinion (the word “know” is your word, not mine), from looking at the video and reading the initial reactions, was that the overwrought horror expressed by comment authors was likely due to a miscalculation of the basic physics of deceleration by a blanket. It stands to reason that the elasticity of the cloth and the timed lowering by those people holding the blanket drastically cuts the amount of force felt by the child on impact, compared to hitting solid ground, for example.
When you say:
how do you know that it is “extremely dangerous”? Which begs the question, can you quantify “extremely” in this statement? You could also say that walking down the street pushing a stroller is “extremely dangerous” if the statistical occurrence of serious injury or death to infants in such situations is above your threshold.
11 September 2009, on 3:44 pm
Steve, walking down the street is not the same thing as tossing infants off rooftops and having them dropped into a blanket. Taking your physics into account, the practice is still dangerous to the child’s neck and developing brain. We don’t know for certain how these children are affected since the reporters leave after the circus show is over and no one bothers to follow up.
The issue is that this government is allowing these practices to go on instead of educating people about children’s health.
If we fluff it off as “oh, it’s not as bad as it looks” then you are lessening the seriousness of the overall problem. And we must also take into account the rights of the child to NOT be dropped off rooftops by crazyass parents. India’s children’s rights activists are right here.
I am sure you will agree with that.
And I will stand firm that it is extremely dangerous to be shaking a child as they are doing before they drop them, and then the drop itself does cause more jostling of the child’s brain inside its skull.
Shaken baby syndrome
Shaken baby syndrome can occur from as little as 5 seconds of shaking.
No reporters hang around long enough to see what long-term effects might happen to any of these children after their traumatic experience is over.
This is all I have to say on this subject and I do read that you find the practice superstitious bullcrap, but it’s also more dangerous than you may think it is.