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Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
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| Murdered! |
A Wisconsin man accused of killing his 11-year-old daughter by praying instead of seeking medical care has been found guilty of second-degree reckless homicide.
Dale Neumann was convicted in the March 23, 2003, death of his daughter, Madeline, from undiagnosed diabetes. Prosecutors contended he should have rushed the girl to a hospital because she couldn’t walk, talk, eat or speak. Instead, Madeline died on the floor of the family’s rural Weston home as people surrounded her and prayed. Someone called 911 when she stopped breathing.
Neumann’s 41-year-old wife, Leilani, was convicted on the same charge in the spring and is scheduled for sentencing Oct. 6. Both face up to 25 years in prison.
Their case is believed to be the first in Wisconsin involving faith healing in which someone died and another person was charged with a homicide…
Neumann, who once studied to be a Pentecostal minister, testified Thursday that he believed God would heal his daughter and he never expected her to die. God promises in the Bible to heal, he said. ..
Doctors testified that Madeline would have had a good chance of survival if she received medical care, including insulin and fluids, before she stopped breathing. They said the 911 call came too late.
Ignorance is a terrible excuse for killing your child.
Well atleast in Islam we are told to seek medical help and do prayers both at the same time.
Cant say that for Christians… :p
It’s not the first time God has ordered his followers to murder their own kids…
Religion and its accessories should be labeled.
To zorker:
There is nothing in the Bible that says to avoid a doctor.
This is simply another example of truly blind following of teachings that are misguided at best and grossly negligent or worse in most cases.
Jehova’s Witnesses, Orthodox Pentecostals, Baptist Brides, etc… They all need to SERIOUSLY shake their collective heads.
#1 – zorkor – Well, Hatred has a tendency of shortening the life of kids.
This type of stuff really sickens me. I feel bad for the departed child to have had such a backward and stupid family. Clearly, this is a case of prayer being harmful to the situation.
What a waste… The father should be spend the rest of his life in the slammer, or executed.
On a deeper level we’re all guilty to kill our child, just for the simple fact of having fathered them…
Maybe it’s better they are getting out of the gene pool?
This blog has already taken taken a strange twist in the first few posts..
Their are many families in North America that would have done this, unfortunately, this is the not the first case of not taking the child to a medical facility resulting in death.
And #4, I dont believe your comments are very pertinent.
Diabetes is scary! a HUGE PAIN! but, if you think you have any symptoms or feel like crap check your blood sugar… its easy and relatively painless.
It might be low or high…
Insulin injections are really painless with the tiny needles they have now..
I know. I’ve got it.
I wonder how you angry heathens would react if the family had instead chosen wholistic homeopathic ancient Vedic treatment and the girl had died.
joaoPT, I think you should go a little deeper still. By your same logic, the father who doesn’t fertilize a particular egg would also be guilty of allowing the death of that potential life.
The father of a child is only responsible to allowing a life to proceed. He can’t be guilty, having committed an offense or crime, of causing both nothing and something for the same inevitable but natural result.
I’m open to criticism from any true philosophers in the crowd.
If I was this guy I’d be feeling pretty sore. What kind of omnipotent and caring god wouldn’t help out in a situation like this ?
Three possible reasons I can see for this poor child’s demise:
1 – the family wasn’t sufficiently righteous so god made the child sick and die.
2 – the family was good but god is uncaring and was happy to let their child die.
3 – god doesn’t exist or has gone away.
It’s stories like this that make me think I might cancel my subscription to watchtower.
I hope these religious nuts all die of butt cancer.
RSweeney, I would be as deeply alarmed and disgusted at the stupidity of those parents as I am now. For diabetes, there is traditional medical treatment that is proven and works. Anything less is a gamble by the parents on someone else’s life.
If you think prayer works, even in the slightest miniscule way, pray for me to stop posting here forever.
[We’ve been doing that for years, so obviously prayer doesn’t work. – ed.]
Prayer: how to do nothing and still think you’re helping.
Hope this guy gets raped to death in jail.
One less nut outdoors.
#12
On the contrary. As death is inevitable, as you permit life to happen (or actively generate life), you are implicitly condemning that same life to death. That’s my point. It’s a chicken and egg kind of dilemma. You either are giving life or taking life. If you refrain from reproducing you’ll be out of this cycle, but then again, only death will come out of it.
There’s basically two ways humans found to deal with this:
Either believe life is something more than just flesh, or believe the individual is of less importance than the kind.
None of this relate to the post at hand, I’m just saying…
#2–Jag–I dig your comment. I even think zorkor was amused too. He’s like that. A funny Muslim.
#6–joaoPT==thats about as SHALLOW and MEANINGLESS a statement as I could come up with. Causation must be more direct in consequences and without numerous intervening events. Might as well blame the big band, which I assume you do==on a much deeper level.
NO–this issue here for all the bibble thumpers is to recognize just another of daily/constant “in your faces” religious stupidity the atheists have to put up with.
“Sad the girl had to die”==results in most religious idiots including those posting here saying “why do you hate religion” or less pugnaciously but equally stupidly saying “why are you more involved in god than religious people are?”
Hah, hah. If our country/culture wasn’t infused with religion, these parents could have long ago gotten the mental health services they needed.
Course, in the long run, we all die, the kiddie was well on her way to being another useless nutbag, so===hard to get worked up over these things==except our society is awash in the interference these outdated concepts weigh us down with.
Sad. Poor kid. The rest of you battling fools on here are kind of missing the point. Sad.
#9 – ridin the short bus
The comments were pretty much on topic.
#20 – bobbo
Yeah, it’s easy for him to point at these religious dorks… but he don’t realize that he’s representing another fucked up religion.
The idea that a mute invisible entity high in the sky would help is ridiculous.
Everybody knows you take the sick to the healing totem in the heart of the stone forest, and sacrifice a chicken (fried) to the white clad shamans of the red cross demon – sheeh, brainless pagans…
Re #15: “We’ve been doing that for years, so obviously prayer doesn’t work. – ed.”
Ooh, oooh, the pain… although… RSweeney could have zang me with that. 🙂
Let it go. When everything is God’s will, how can an outcome be wrong? All prayers are answered, but sometimes it’s no. God took this sick child to Paradise. You can’t win an argument based on someone’s faith. Damn it’s hard enough to win on secular questions.
Throughout history the vast majority of the human race has been superstitious and ignorant. We have a modern education system that continues the tradition.
#23, raster,
Oh. So that is where all that fried chicken and the occasional virgin comes from. And here I thought it was magic.
#16, skippy,
Hope this guy gets raped to death in jail.
This guy will spend the major part of his life behind bars. That, and losing his daughter, should be punishment enough. That you would even suggest a fate of death by torture signifies the same sick mindset that caused this girl’s death in the first place.
Don’t worry, puberty is a lot like the measles, you’re bound to get it sooner or later. Then you can grow up.
Mr. Fusion, wow, touchy touchy. You know the justice system, he’ll be out in 10 for good behaviour. By then, he’ll be out of prison and he can go on with his life, spreading ignorance and claiming god has forgiven him, yet his daughter will still be dead. He should be killed in a manner as painful as that which his daughter suffered.
The sick mindset that caused her death is religion, pure and simple.
And I’m wayyyyy past puberty. Although my wife still thinks I can pretty immature.
An agressive/caring legal system would name the idiot church he went to as accomplices and charge them with aiding and abetting. Their punishment? How about every Sunday reminding the flock about this case and how you can be sent to jail for thinking God is so stupid?
For once I gotta give it to zorkor. Every similar faith should be ashamed. Prayer AND science. Who’d a thunk it? Let science do all the work and give the credit to god. Thus have I spake.
Yes the guy was probably a nut. But jail? No way. I don’t like the idea of condemning people just because they believe something different. For that matter, why not jail people that feed their kids bad food, which is the #1 reason people develop diabetes in the first place.
Skippy #28 – The sick mindset that caused her death is religion, pure and simple.
Actually, the mindset is arrogance that breeds ignorance. The same problem that the far left and the far right are subject to.
And Bobbo, pragmatically, you are on the right train of thought but in practice, there is a seemingly unending supply of wrong headed logic that would make you want to scratch your eyes out after too much time.
By these peoples standards, I and many other protestants out there are writhing heathens for allowing the witchcraft of modern medicine touch our bodies. And for the total lack of scripture that would support their position, they would still ignore everything from the Bible that I would use to support common sense (As much as some here would claim is a fallacy on its own).
Jason,
“Actually, the mindset is arrogance that breeds ignorance.”
That arrogance comes from believing that praying is better than modern science. The belief that praying helps comes from religion. Hence, it was a religious mindset that killed her.