If we truly care about and appreciate children, we should do everything we can to help them. We need to not only help them to thrive, we must first help them to survive. Deists are in a special advantageous position to protect children from death via the "revealed" religions. This is because Deism unapologetically embraces and highly values and uses our gift from The Supreme Intelligence/God of innate reason. Anyone who values reason must apply their reason to absolutely everything, including religion.
The innocent and priceless little girl pictured above is Jessica Mast from Missouri. When she was only four-years-old, in December of 2020, her Bible believing Christian parents, James and Mary Mast, and her parent's Bible believing fellow Christians, Ethan Mast (no relation) and Kourtney Aumen, believed Jessica was possessed by a demon. Mistakenly believing the Christian Bible is the Word of God, they knew an exorcism was required in order to free Jessica of the demon they religiously and falsely imagined was possessing her. The attempts at exorcising the imaginary demon from Jessica included beating the demon out of her with a belt. Ethan Mast hit her so hard and so often she had bruises and blisters all over her little body. After they did that and felt the demon was still in Jessica, Ethan Mast repeatedly dunked Jessica in a cold pond. This killed the helpless and innocent four-year-old Jessica. On Thursday, February 24, 2022 Ethan Mast agreed to a plea agreement admitting to lesser charges of a single count of second-degree murder and a single count of first-degree or attempted assault involving serious physical injury on a special victim. He has not yet been sentenced.
The root cause of the religious killing of Jessica is the false belief that the Christian Bible is the Word of God. I frequently run into this when I'm trying to persuade people that Satan and demons are not real, that they are merely imaginary creatures the clergy created to help them control people through fear. Christians often reply, "But the Bible says that Jesus exorcised demons from people and that Satan tempted Jesus." The only solution to this too often deadly problem is to help people realize that the Bible is not the Word of God. (The harm done by people believing the false belief that the Bible is the Word of God spills over into other areas of life, as is evident regarding this case of a Christian clergyman promoting the killing of gay people. His defense is that it's in the Bible, which is a truthful defense, as the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament at Leviticus 20:13 claims God commanded that gay men should be killed.)
True faith-based Bible believers can become so strongly convinced of the existence of Satan and demons, they they actually believe by preemptively killing their children they are saving their souls from being taken to Hell by Satan, as was the case of Andrea Yates and her five children. Belief in the Bible being the Word of God also caused another Christian mother, Deanna Laney, to kill by stoning two of her little boys and to permanently handicap her third little boy, all based on her sincerely held religious belief in the ungodly and cruel Bible story of God commanding Abraham to kill his son, Isaac, found at Genesis 22:1-12. Here's a page about both of these Bible believing Christian mothers and their children.
The false belief that the Bible is the Word of God has caused many children to be harmed and to be killed. The sincerely held religious belief in the promises in the Christian Bible of faith healing causes some Christian parents to actually withhold needed medical care from their sick and injured children. This often causes the death of the children, as this page makes clear. (For an in-depth discussion of this preventable religious attack on our children, listen to our Deism Podcast with Rita Swan, the founder of Children's Health Care Is A Legal Duty. Click here for part one of this informative and important interview.)
The root cause of the problem of billions of people still believing the Bible is the Word of God is Deists and other freethinkers not taking action to educate people to the reality that the Bible is NOT the Word of God, and that the true Word of God is the beautiful and wonderful Universe we are all living parts of. In The Age of Reason Thomas Paine did a beautiful job of pointing out why man-made written books are not the Word of God and why the Universe/Creation IS the Word of God when he wrote:
"I believe it is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a Word of God can unite. The Creation speaks a universal language, independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various as they may be. It is an ever existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other. It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this Word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God."
We need to not only imagine what a beautiful world we will have once people drop their belief in a man-made ungodly book being the Word of God and embrace the realization that the true Word of God is the Creation/Universe that is all around us and that we are all living and thinking parts of, we need to work towards making that a reality. Our actions right now determine what kind of future we will have. Let's make it a future based on our innate God-given reason and Deism!
