Laura Silsby - Last Baptist

Laura Silsby who dropped everything in the middle of a personal financial meltdown to do God’s work and pick up and save “33” Haitian orphans is still in jail.

All Haiti 'orphan' children reunited with parents

PORT-AU-PRINCE — The 33 Haitian children at the center of a US abduction row have finally been reunited with their families, but the fact that not one of them turned out to be an orphan raised fresh concern.

SOS Children's Villages, the international aid group caring for the children since the drama erupted seven weeks ago, said Wednesday it was only right for them to be handed back to their families.

"It has turned out that all of the 33 children have parents. SOS Children's Villages is convinced that in most cases, the best place for a child to be cared for and protected is within the family," the group said in a statement…

The national director of SOS Children's Villages, Celigny Darius, suggested the high-profile case, which diverted valuable media spotlight off the massive relief effort in Haiti, had raised serious questions…

SOS Children's Villages, which has looked after the 33 since January 30, is now free to focus solely on almost 500 other children in its care, many of whom were simply handed to aid workers at the gates of the compound.

Ms. Silsby is the last of ten Baptist Missionaries in Haitian custody who arrived on a wing and a prayer to do missionary work on the natives whether they needed it or not - whether the children abducted were orphans or not.

Last Baptist held in Haiti faces new charge

Laura Silsby, a businesswoman from Boise, Idaho, and leader of the mission volunteers drawn from members of four Southern Baptist churches in Idaho, Kansas and Texas, faces a new charge of "organization of irregular trips" under a 1980 law restricting travel out of Haiti…

She already could stand trial on charges of kidnapping and criminal association in the Jan. 29 attempt to take 33 Haitian children to a temporary orphanage in the Dominican Republic without proper paperwork. According to the Associated Press, Judge Bernard Saint-Vil said he has until early May to decide whether to release Silsby or to order a trial.

This is on a more secular level where people think that “God’s law”, made up or real, trumps the laws of men and nations.

The same idea on another level is at work with the Vatican and its institutions that are currently in hot water over child abuse.

It would seem that in Christianity, that crimes against children are discounted when you put God into the equation of Charity. And at the same time, you take children and or the laws of nations and people out of the same social equation.

Christianity in theory and in practice sometimes does not appear to be uniform or the same across the board. Or at least that is how an outsider might look at it?

Eight Haiti "Missionaries" Back on US Soil

Here is an update on the ten Baptist untrained, unprepared, civil disobedient missionaries and their quest to blindly save orphans and or Haitian children in general.

The judge in the case has released the eight least guilty of the lawbreakers and sent them home. They have arrived in Miami via U.S. Military aircraft on their way home to Idaho.

American missionaries jailed in Haiti return to US

The ringleader, Laura Silsby, and her employee, a native Haitian, have been kept behind in Haitian custody to determine what did they do, who did they talk to etc. on a December 2009 scoping out trip to Haiti before the big earthquake.

All things considered, I think the Haitian Justice System, rattled by earthquake damage, has functioned admirably in dealing with this case of child trafficking from invading, law breaking Baptist missionaries on a mission for God and their own egos.

I hope that this inconvenience to pie in the sky religious from Idaho has done some good for the children of Haiti who seem here to be victims of these “well intentioned” Baptist missionaries.

I hope that hundreds and thousands of Haitian children have avoided the sharks and predators in the waters and boundaries of Haiti from the likes of the free alledged pimp, human trafficking, unlicensed “lawyer” who stepped forth to take advantage of the Silsby Rambo missionary expedition and their moral and legal problems.

Bravo Haiti!

While I think Laura Silsby is at the very least an unfocused and confused individual, I do not yet think her a total villain. Only time will tell with the ongoing investigation by Haitian authorities.

Christian Madness Vacation Tour! (sales tax extra)

I only did half a rant on the Kook who was running around Haiti shanghaiing children to populate her soon to be built orphanage in the Dominican Republic.

The other half of the rant had to – has to – do with the weird state of “Christian” people in this second world country (checked our credit ratings lately?) towards the people, mostly of a different color in most cases, and in the third world.

Add to that the bizarre threat or was it a command to “Go teach all nations” the Christian way whatever that flavor of the month philosophy is this month on (Comedy Central) TV evangelism or Capitol Hill (by way of non-profit lobbyists with loads of cash).

Apparently that same article that describes the possible criminal activities of Laura Silsby and her bunch of Baptist do-gooders out on a little adventure in the bush – is how offensive this whole thing plays in the rest of the planet.

Haiti earthquake: In God's name

If I was a Muslim, or a Buddhist or a non-believer, I would look at Haitians, poor as they are, and see that they do have a social network of relatives they can turn to in times of needs. And if not, there are the orphanages. Plenty of them. Trying to get the rest of the planet to adopt children nobody else wants.

And here is this nose up in the air white Baptist American grabbing kids and running for the border to set up shop for her own gain. Americans, to the rest of the world, no longer look like the sane providers and saviours they once did seventy odd years ago when we helped, by force of arms, to directly defeat global Fascism and indirectly Stalinist Communism.

What did Laura Silsby think she was going to do? Did God have a plan for her success? (suddenly I sound like Joel Osteen). Build a Jim and Tammy Baker Amusement Park/Orphanage and rake in the cash as she made commercials showing sad little children and give interviews on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club?

What kind of a bubble world does she live in? Where is her humanity and her old fashioned sense of dignity and self worth? Where is she in this whole freaking Jesus Christ Ponzi scam that Christianity seems to have become in the past forty years or so?

She lives in the modern American E-Van-Gel-ical Christian reality of selling Jesus as a market commodity or product. “Do you accept Jesus as your Lord and Saviour?” I have heard a thousand times from some nitwit in the streets, in the mall, at a bus stop, at my front door. And my straight man line back is - “Does he come with a guarantee or at least a ten year warranty?” You have no idea how many times I have stopped the Jesus Freaks in their tracks with that line. Amen!

But seriously folks, since the Reformation, intelligent people have built, put a challenge on themselves to both learn to read and to learn to decipher the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Somewhere along the timeline for the Americans at least, it turned into a consumer product and a “don’t worry about anything else” once you bought the Jesus Gizmo, whatever it really is. That’s why when we started a war on Iraq and Afghanistan, George Bush felt safe to tell us to “forget about it” and go to the mall and shop some more on your grandchildren’s credit.

Getting back to the article about the crazy American missionaries, there is a ending note about how the Baptists, like the rest of all corporations, have outsourced the old fashioned missionaries who tried to get to know the people they were trying to convert. (outsourcing – reduces the benefits and retirement costs of evangelism)

The way I see it on a timeline, John XXIII did more than try to put some fresh air in the Vatican that now has it windows hermetically sealed. He also set a fire under paranoid white people in the South and the Heartland that saw a threat from a word called “Ecumenical”. Scared the shit of these “good” “Christians” enough to build walls and hunker down for the “end times”. What losers some of these evangelicals be. It is truly sad.

Now religion in America is a full corrupt arm of the politics of this country in sore need of unity, love and fairness – but instead we get “NO” or latte liberals who don’t really want to touch the unwashed masses either.

I see a sad person. I feel his sadness two thousand years later. I see the great sadness of Jesus as he lived in a very sad time and place such as our own when everything had a price including one’s immortal soul.

Nowadays, why be a missionary from modern burned out humanity America? Why be a missionary when you can be a tourist missionary two weeks in the third world vacation plan to enrich you spiritually and so you do not to have to touch the rest of humanity outside your tour guided bubble – not really touch global non-Christian reality. (Take a picture of me, won’t ya, with the poor people for me to show the folks back home?)

Best Christian Vacations

The white American gated community mentality and gated on their mind and soul Christianity (madness) is one reason I am shopping around to call myself anything but a Christian, cultural or otherwise, these days.

Child Trafficking for Christ? Alleluia?

The new global equation as it now stands is not so crude to state that people, collectively or individually, are commodities to be bought and sold for profit. But in truth we are all grist for somebody else’s mill these days. Capitalism and its workings are the secret, sacred words of GOD that only a few rich people truly understand (natural law).

Case in point, Laura Silsby, a good Baptist Christian businesswoman with a long trail of stiffing employees out of their wages, civil lawsuits with customers on her online shopping service and even lawsuits with her own lawyers for non-payment of legal bills. They recently foreclosed on her home and official address of her charity for the poor children of Haiti. On her Facebook Page, she is a fan of “Politicians”: Sarah Palin – “Products”: Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience.

Last year she gets a vision of starting an orphanage in the Dominican Republic for the children of Haiti before the recent earthquake. She gets this vision not from her God but from her children’s nanny who is from Haiti. Cash flow was a problem in getting the orphanage off the ground. But the competition for bodies, I mean children, went ballistic with the likes of Bill Clinton and W started getting in on the Haiti charity thing etc. Onward and upward for “God’s holy work”.

You get some of your fellow Christians in the local Baptist church in Idaho all stirred up, who volunteer, and you start picking up small bodies in the devastated streets of Haiti. If you are the anointed of God like so many losers lately like, Governor Sanford, Senator Ensign, Sen.“Ricky Ricardo” Coburn and Sen.“Waterloo” DeMint, the laws of mankind and or Haiti do not matter. “We’re on a mission for God” as Joe Belushi said in his great movie “The Blues Brothers”.

Laura calls around, no confidentially is adhered to, gets hold of a couple in Kentucky already in the process of adopting some Haitian kids from a legitimate orphanage there when the Earthquake hit, and they tell her to bugger off – but oh no, she puts that particular orphanage on your hit list. You pose as the friend of a woman you have never met when you get to that orphanage to pick up their kids to save or ransom or whatnot.

The kids are already evacuated and then you ask the orphanage if they have any extras. Then you get parents to accept your spiel about a better life in the white world and they hand over their kids to the rich white lady and off you go - ten very odd “missionaries” and thirty three kids in a school bus - off to the border only to be arrested and rightfully so for “child trafficking”.

The rest of this grisly tale of faith, greed and insanity are illustrated in an excellent article from the Guardian by Ed Pilkington in New York and Inigo Gilmore in Callabasse.

Haiti earthquake: In God's name

What was it about the 10 Baptists that gave them the hubris to believe they would provide better care for Haitian children than those children's parents? The acknowledged leader of the group was Laura Silsby, 40, who since the arrest has maintained the line that "we simply wanted to help these children. We did not understand [Haitian] rules."

Richard and Malinda Pickett, to offer them help in extracting three children they were already in the process of adopting. She phoned three times, and on each occasion was told by the Picketts that on no condition should she try to move the children. Remarkably, she didn't stop then. Once in Haiti, Silsby turned up at the orphanage where the children were and asked to collect them. Richard Pickett told Associated Press that she had claimed to be his wife's friend. The three children had by then already been moved, so Silsby asked the orphanage managers if they had any other children she could have.

So what exactly were the Baptists up to? Were they guilty, as charged, of entering a disaster zone, when people, particularly children, are at their most vulnerable, only to exploit them? Or were they, as they have insisted, simply out to help Haiti's traumatised orphans?...

The first puzzling fact is that of the 20 children who boarded the bus at Callabasse that day, many were not orphans. They had loving, albeit desperately poor and struggling, parents. Maggie Moise, standing outside her home, described the moment she handed over her nine-year-old twin sons, Volmy and Kimley. She had been approached by Adrien, who told her some white people wanted to help her family.

"They said they wanted to go with our children. They put the names of the children on a piece of paper and asked me to sign it. A white woman told me, 'Don't worry, you will be able to access your children.' They showed me a ¬brochure of where the children would be going to live. I signed the paper."

Whether you are a giant hedge fund ponzi scheme or a lunatic entrepreneur, running around, kidnapping children for the purpose of trafficking them for charity cash flow or profit for the glory of yourself and of course for the God thing, you are still exploiting them. There are laws. There are nations. There are limits to what individuals and groups and governments can do to help the people of Haiti during this period of recovery after a disastrous earthquake.

Crazies, stay home!

Hispaniola Has Many Fault Lines

There are after shock earthquakes hitting Haiti. There are people convinced that God through his outsourced servant is harassing and punishing the People of Haiti.

Pat Robertson, a man of the old south, with southern roots, and unspoken of black ancestors prefers the old Flip Wilson line "The Devil made me do it!" or we made a pact with the devil and we live by it two hundred years later.

It is strange to hear how you need the devil to throw off the white frog atheist of Napoleon Bonapart. You would think that you would have a backed up fill of God's grace to throw off that crazy dictator lunatic and Hitler's Idol.

But oh no, let's do it all half-assed and get a minor fallen angel on our team.

Another argument running think and deep through the fundamentalist blogosphere is that if the story about the pact with a devil in not true then why does Haiti have so much misery, poverty and earthquakes.

One scientific reason is that the center of the nation, the largest city Port au Prince sits right on a major fault line - EPGF fault line on map above. (click on map for better view)

The rest is exploitation by a handful of greedy "devil" capitalists. Ignorance is born by lack of education. Jesus said the poor and the ignorant will always be with us or something like that.

Jesus' statement is born of an obeservation of human nature in his primitive times. If he were here today he would marvel that his words reflecting the world of two thousand years ago have not improved into a poverty free, ignorant free world with ample resources and knowledge at our finger tips. If we cannot imagine or hope that we can overthrow the stone age that he lived in - then we as a human race and species are truly doomed.

There are several fault lines that run through the Island that Haiti and the Dominican Republic share.

The Dominican Republic has a link to the United States after we invaded it under LBJ to "git the commies". That's part of the link to some prosperity there. That and foreign investment and tourist dollars.

There have been many earthquakes in the Dominican Republic in the last century. There was a 7.0 earthquake in 1911. A 7.5 in 1918 and a 8.1 in 1946. There have been several 6.0 scale quakes in the decades up to the present.

The one in 1918 - 7.5 - took place on October 11, 1918 on the eve of Christopher Columbus Day, the founder of Hispaniola. So tramatic was that quake that when the population found itself digging out of it on Columbus Day - a Dominican Urban Legend was born about the use of the name Christopher which is considered an unlucky name there to this day with no one willing to name their child after the founder of the country after that quake of legend. Strange but true?

Is the devil real? Ignorance is in the eyes of the beholder. Right Pat?

Heaven and Hell Can Wait until We Have Change in America

I was having bad feelings in my dreams last night. I won’t say nightmares. I practice some control in my dreams but never the less woke up and did not want to go back to sleep right away.

It all had to do with Satan and or the devil or whatever. The devil was something I used to get threatened with when I was a child. Rather abusive in retrospect to dump human insanity onto an innocent child as the justification to make threats and just because the child did not want to go to bed. I left the lights on after that when going to bed. It is some carbon footprints that ignorance leaves on the planet.

The Devil thing was related to Pat Robertson and his senile remarks about how the Haitians got into the tragedy they got into because of some pact with the devil. Believe me if the devil was worth his salt I would have already made a pact with him or her a long time ago. But where is a friend or benefactor when you need one. The devil is as useless and any other children’s myth. The alternative of good “Christians” wanting to take my soul is all I got printed on my tee shirt in this life.

Like most dreams, mine I think had its roots in a cartoon site listed by CNN on its website.

Pat Robertson Devil Cartoon

The sad thing is that the Cartoon says a lot about a lot of things in America today.

Is this my Secular moral outrage at Pat Robertson's blasphemy on the human condition for "inferior" people - inferior in his eyes - his supposedly superior christian eyes? I will let you ponder that question.

CNN which has been a stable supplier of the establishment bullshit forever expressed freedom of speech and passed long a cartoon of Pat Robinson as the Devil in no doubt luke warm editorial comment on the way Christianity, or major parts of it, has failed us in real life situations on this planet.

It is a secular swinging backlash after decades of verbal abuse from the politicians and bankers and members of Congress who use GOD like they use everybody else in the quest for a measure of power, glory and money.

When good ole Pat had to throw in the bigoted darkie joke while appealing for funds to help these black devils he finally crossed the line – a line behind which the MSM, main stream media, has been protecting these establishment figures for decades now.

There is a shift in the balance of power here in America. The religious establishment has allied itself with the politicians and the bankers and guess what - something is coming down the pike. A French Revolution to tear down churches, banks and state legislatures? I don’t know.

There is no God. Or at least no moral justice here in America. The Wall Street bonuses prove that.

We voted for change. There is going to be change come hell, high water or even earthquakes!

All I know is that the blogosphere is a powerful instrument and it is registering major disgust for all the fools in power. I am ready for a tea party! I am glad that Obama is finally proposing a bail-out or bankers devil's tax.

It is time to give the devil his due, tax him, and time to pay the piper for us all great and small alike.

Heaven and or hell can wait.

Radical Religionism or Talking For The Devil

There are fault lines across the landscape of the earth. There are fault lines across the landscapes of our culture. There used to be dividing lines between sacred and secular.

The lines of sacred and secular are sometimes blurred. When you have TV Evangelists hawking their product on TV, they the so-called sacred, are existing within the true realm of the Science of the Secular – Television.

So it becomes a bit strange when someone like the TV personality Pat Robertson - starts to spout off about the devil and how God punishes the black people in Haiti. Punishes them because they made a pact with the devil two hundred years ago to throw off their white masters, the French.

Well madness, both physical and “religious” is using a secular means of TV to spout this Medieval “religious” nonsense. And I might add while some 800 number is flashing across the screen asking you to send money to Pat to help these “friends of the devil”.

Such lunacy evokes within me the word HYPOCRIT – a favorite word used by Jesus.

My heart goes out to people in the middle of a disaster, Haiti, Katrina, 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, hurricanes, and other natural disasters. Acts of nature are not acts of God.

The Radical Religionists who use the Secular means of Television to spread superstition and reinforce hate want it both ways. They want to stand on the steps of their church on America’s town square with a bullhorn and make you listen to their bullshit. They also want to call people who do not want to be bothered with their Radical Religionist Bullshit and attack them as Radical Secularists. Give us a break.

This is not my original idea, but where are the moderate voices of religious leaders in this country who have come out and condemned Pat Robertson’s or Rush Limbaugh’s gleeful little racist inhumane diatribes against the people of Haiti???

I am listening. I can’t hear you!

The next time I hear any of these pompous for profit religious types or Newt Gingrich spout the words Radical Secularist at me or anybody else like me who cares about humanity, I will shout back at them and remind them how, that by their silence, they stood by and silently endorsed this religious bigotry.