Death Opens Doors on Group

[MountainLaurel]

Interesting look at the line between faith and delusion.

Members of One Mind Ministries drew little notice in the working-class Baltimore neighborhood where they lived in a nondescript brick rowhouse.

But inside, prosecutors say, horrors were unfolding: Answering to a leader called Queen Antoinette, they denied a 16-month-old boy food and water because he did not say "Amen" at mealtimes. After he died, they prayed over his body for days, expecting a resurrection, then packed it into a suitcase with mothballs. They left it in a shed in Philadelphia, where it remained for a year before detectives found it last spring.

Tomorrow, five of the group's alleged members -- including the boy's mother, Ria Ramkissoon -- are scheduled to be tried in Baltimore on murder charges. Sources and Ramkissoon's mother said Ramkissoon, 22, has agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge on one condition: The charges against her must be dropped if her son, Javon Thompson, is resurrected.

Psychiatrists who evaluated Ramkissoon at the request of a judge concluded that she was not criminally insane. Her attorney, Steven Silverman, said the doctors found that her beliefs were indistinguishable from religious beliefs, in part because they were shared by those around her.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/28/AR2009032801936.html

[patrice]

1. How? Oh, HOW? to get more Americans to read Hannah Arendt.

[MountainLaurel]

4. Have some blonde bimbo celebrity reading it

In 30 second increments between commercials for cheap plastic crap?

[patrice]

5. or what's-'s-name . . . Fabuloso . . . ? Sad to say, I'd settle for at least that!

[cosmik debris]

2. Sounds like "crazy" is a function of

How broad your circle of friends is and how many of them agree with you.

[patrice]

3. That function is a probability that depends upon the definition of "you".

[rrneck]

6. Or how

easily you are preyed upon by someone who pretends to be your friend.

[MountainLaurel]

7. Update

How interesting -- she plead guilty, but charges will be dropped should her child come back from the dead. What's next? A case rule allowing a schizophrenic to be released should he prove that he is indeed Jesus Christ?

Accepting a plea bargain that her attorney described as unprecedented in American jurisprudence, a 22-year-old Maryland woman yesterday agreed to cooperate in the prosecution of other defendants in the death of her son under the condition that charges against her be dropped if the child rises from the dead.

"It also is specifically noted," Baltimore Circuit Court Judge Timothy Doory said in court as he described the plea bargain to the boy's mother, "that if the victim in this case, Javon Thompson, is resurrected, as you still hold some hope he will be, you may withdraw the plea, and the charges will be nolle prossed against you."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/30/AR2009033002931.html

[dmallind]

8. ..b.b.b..but religion never hurt anybody!

No doubt this too like other religious atrocities will be twisted into being about power or politics by the usual DU apologists for lunacy-as-long-as-it's-godly-lunacy.