Saturday, February 12, 2011

The Questions of Faith and Conscience



Murder in England

On February 12, 1993 a small boy who was to turn three in March was taken from a shopping mall in Liverpool by two 10 year old boys. Jamie Bulger walked away from his mother for only a second and Jon Venables took his hand and led him out of the mall with his friend Robert Thompson. They took Jamie on a walk for over 2 and a half miles, along the way stopping every now and again to torture the poor little boy who was crying constantly for his mommy. Finally they stopped at a railway track where they brutally kicked him, threw stones at him, rubbed paint in his eyes and pushed batteries up his anus. They then left his beaten small body on the tracks so a train could run him over to hide the mess they had created.  What these two boys did was so horrendous that Jamie's mother was forbidden to identify his body.

Murder/Rape In Georgia

On March 4 1986, Alexander Williams, who was just 17 years old and mentally ill raped and murdered 16-year-old Aleta Bunch, who was kidnapped from an Augusta mall where she had gone to buy her mother a birthday gift. He was sentenced to death, but after serving 16 years in prison, his sentence was commuted to life in prison.  Long before his crime, Alex was suffering severe mental illness and has been the victim of repeated acts of violence and abuse. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He also endured repeated and continuous physical abuse as a child. He was also punished with 'bed restriction' where he was forced to remain on his bed for days, even weeks receiving only one meal a day.  His sister in an attempt to persuade the court for a lighter sentence wrote “My mother made him strip naked, and she whipped him with extension cords or fan belts over and over again... Once she got mad at Alex and she called him downstairs. She had a hammer in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. She made [Alex] stand still and she pounded the screwdriver into his toes with the hammer." Their mother also frequently made Alex strip naked and locked him outside the house at night as punishment.

Sexual Assault in Tennessee

In May of 2008 Scobey Sowell Jr., 64 sexually assaulted an 11-year-old boy in a bathroom at Centennial Park. Sowell is schizophrenic and has longstanding mentally illness. Brain scans shows Sowell suffers from a type of brain atrophy, which is causing his brain to shrink. 

There are stories of these 3 scenarios that are told around the world.  Each of the stories represents a horrific experience that the victims had to endure, in which two of them did not survive.  If you are a Christian, and God forbid any of these scenarios were to happen to one of our loved ones, what would be your stance?  Would you want revenge and if so why?  Would you forgive, and if so why?  If God granted you the decision to judge how you see fit, and will not allow any law of the land be applied to you, what would you do?  Or, if you are in a position to be the sole judge on the outcome, what would you do? 

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