You are finding confirmation for what you want to believe, not for the facts presented.
Apparently you are.
Let us start with your beginning:
This is the last sentence of the article: "Ifaka hears these stories and shakes his head. "Yesterday, the African family would fight to keep their children," he says. "Now, they are throwing them away."
So throwing kids away due to them being seen as witches is a new thing even though poverty is a very old thing.
No, believing in witches is a very
old thing, this
extent of poverty isn’t! Where do you get your
“so” from?
CSM: Peace has brought its own challenges, as refugee families flow into the capital, Kinshasa, and find they cannot feed themselves. Out of survival, many are using witchcraft as an excuse to expel their most vulnerable members: children.
"Witchcraft has been there for a while, but it was never used against children in the past. Families that have old people used to accuse that old person of being a witch, when they were no longer productive," says Javier Aguilar, a child protection officer for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Kinshasa.
I don’t get it! Is this quotation so hard to understand? Don’t you see it at all? Or do you deliberately choose to overlook it? Don’t you read the whole article? Do you just read the last sentence?
And what about this?
CSM: Congo's desperation
Only desperation could force families to cast children into the streets, and, as a nation, Congo is one of the most desperate places in the world. With 80 percent of the population earning less than $1 a day, Congo has one of the poorest populations on the continent.
Only desperation, it says, and I tend to agree! So much, actually, that I suspect the CSM of being responsible for the stupid title that the journalist probably would not come up with. I don’t have any hard evidence to back up my suspicion, however.
You continue:
I think that the Christian Science Monitor may believe that poverty is the problem-
The CSM appears to
know that this is indeed the case, but it prefers to
believe that witchcraft and superstition is the problem, which is why it comes up with the stupid title:
CSM: In Congo, superstitions breed homeless children
-but poor people in most cultures seem to make their children work when they are impoverished--not accuse them of being witches.
That is true – to some extent: In some
cultures, i.e. the very poor ones, people sell their children to work in factories or even as sex slaves. That depends on the kind of buyers they find and on the kind of money they may bring. Sometimes working, begging, stealing or doing ‘campaign work’ -
CSM: In every marketplace, children are busy, sweeping up stalls, carrying water and soda for sale, shining shoes. They are also prime recruits for gangs engaged in theft, and during the recent election campaign that ended Oct. 29, street gangs were used by political parties to cause civil unrest, pelting cars with stones and burning tires.
- hardly brings in enough to even support the ‘working’ children themselves – let alone leave a rest to provide for the other members of the family, and having them work in the house or in the fields is an option that depends on the usefulness of that sort of work. If you don’t have any fields or if you yourself don’t have a job and an income, there are a very limited number of dishes you can have your children do.
But you would rather talk about
superstition, wouldn’t you?
Of course the bible says you can turn out witches and it was used as an excuse to kill many a woman for over 1500 years... but the bible is a book of superstition. Moreover, it is the Christianization of these people that makes them have children they cannot afford--because the missionaries teach abstinence not birth control. I think they owe it to the people to take in surplus children when their doctrine is part of the problem.
I am not sure that I understand your
but, but you are, of course, right when you say that the Bible is superstition. You seem to be very sure, however, that the problem you have in the USA with teenage pregnancies and Christian fundies teaching abstinence is exactly the same problem they have in Africa. In that case, of course, you would be right about the Catholics being part of the problem and thus owing it to the children with children to take care of them. I, however, would not be happy to see these children left in the care of
that kind of people, i.e. to give the Christians this extra opportunity to teach them their superstitious gospel …
And have you considered that if you haven’t got enough to eat, you probably don’t have enough money to buy a condom to protect yourself from both AIDS and teenage pregnancies, i.e. that
poverty, and not superstition, could be the problem again? The article in CSM only tells us
that teenage pregnancies seem to be a problem among the children living in the streets:
CSM: The government responded to the violence by rounding up street children in the hundreds. The move provoked an outcry from child advocacy groups - among those arrested were 87 young women with babies of their own -
And another one:
CSM: Sometimes he (one of the homeless children. dann) thinks of joining an older sister, who, like him, was thrown out onto the street by their grandparents. But she now has children of her own, fathered by another street teen.
But let’s get back to your own words:
And even if poverty was the problem (which you've provided no evidence for and lots of cultures have been very poor) -- the quickest way to make a group of people more prosperous is to facilitate family planning and birth control.
I base my argument primarily on what the article itself tells us! You don’t, so where is
your evidence? Why do you think that facilitating
”family planning and birth control” is
”the quickest way to make a group of people more prosperous”, and not the other way around: that prosperity tends to facilitate family planning? (Unless you happen to be a very rich
church, that is.) I would very much like to see your evidence! But I think that what is happening here is simply that
You are finding confirmation for what you want to believe, not for the facts presented.
And that is not the
skeptical way of doing things, is it, articulett?! Or is it the Darwinist, Dawkinsist and Randi-ist way after all???
I'm so glad that you and dann have made me see the light! [sarcasm off]
