CHRISTIAN BIGOTRY - Ivory tower pontifications don't help victims!

A British college professor, writing in the Times of London, claims syncretistic practices of African immigrants to England are being used as excuses for child abuse. He claims African asylum seekers have blended ancient African beliefs with "fundamentalist Christian" practices in order to torture kids in the name of God. The practice he refers to is exorcism ... hardly a "fundamentalist" practice.

The author's anti-Christian bias bleeds all over what is otherwise an extremely serious issue. Using the broad brushstroke of anti-Christian bias, Professor Hoskins manages to get everyone under the appellation "Christian" painted dark, nefarious, and "fundamentalist."

I wonder if it has ever occurred to the rather self-absorbed professor that maybe, just maybe, the immigrants are poor, frightened, horribly ignorant, and easily misled sheep without a shepherd. Statements like the following do nothing but incite irrational thinking and the propagation of misinformation.

Exorcism in Britain is a product of the fundamentalist Christian movements sweeping Africa and African communities worldwide.

Editors at the Times should have purged this "sweeping" statement; such broad strokes only inflame ill-informed anti-Christian passions.

Hoskins further states ...

... these scenes are enacted in church, or what passes for church, by professional exorcists, often itinerants who wander from Christian splinter group to charismatic church, casting out demons from helpless and terrified children.

The essence of this may be true, but the use of "professional" and "itinerants" in the same reference is oxymoronic. If he is the expert he claims to be in the Times article, he knows the precise identity of the groups involved and could have named them. However, his bias took opportunity and blasted away at the guilty as well as the innocent.

And again Hoskins incites ...

The fundamentalist Christian groups they serve meet in warehouses and private homes and garages. There is no check on their activities. It is a Frankenstein religion that nobody knows how to control.

Duh! We have six thousand years of history revealing the continuous and repeated emergence of aberrant cults and their propagators ... in all that time, no one has been able to prevent them, control them, or predict their next eruption. And this is revealing ... because Hoskins knows this, and so his real agenda is to smash the church by painting us all as crazed religious fanatics who get our jollies by hurting kids.

Guys like this won't be happy until it is Kristallnacht all over again. They long for the day when they hear, "Get your torches, Frankenstein and his followers are in that church, burn it to the ground!"