Nearly 800 infant remains found in septic tank at nun-run Irish unwed mother and baby home

But she paid a huge price for being too early :(

It's worth mentioning that Joe Pesci did SNL the following week and said "I would have gave [sic] her such a smack. I would've grabbed her by her ... eyebrows." AFAIK he has never apologized for this.

Religion is a social cancer. Sometimes it's benign and the host reabsorbs it. Other times it's spreads and kills living tissue

There's only two religions in the planet that do this kind of fucked up shit with any frequency, and it's only because they're the norm in both of those regions. Don't make yourself sound like a literal Reddit atheist. You're here exactly because Reddit sucks. Don't bring it back.

Many people are religious without doing this kind of shit.

If you're not religious why are you upset that some people didn't get a proper burial?

There were death certificates so it's unlikely there's foul play, unless there's some details this poorly written article is missing. It's just they didn't observe proper religious ceremony on the disposal of the deceased.

So your argument is that religious people are bad because some religious people don't always follow religious ceremonies? Like if you don't think religion is good, why would you be upset over improper disposal of the deceased?

If we do shit like this, imagine what they could do!

Understood, I will go and punch a nun.

My main issue in discussions on religion is that either side generally claims that either "it makes us civil", as you say, or that "it's the cause of evil". In reality it's neither. Religion has traditionally been (still is, I'm afraid) a powerful form of crowd control that in past times has steered some believers into doing better deeds by the duality of the hell-heaven system, and likewise has twisted others into extremism and using religion as justification for evil acts. Most of the time it's just a simple way of life that rids you of the need to question the universe and to carve your own path. As a "Muslim" I sometimes, in some ways, envy those that simply view the etiquettes, laws, and traditions that govern their lives as unquestionable truths. There's no need to search for purpose, you're already born with it.

Humans are flawed and evil. That is true with or withour religion.

Sorry for rambling.

I’m pretty sure it’s more like: religions define what we find civil as a society. Personal spiritual beliefs define what people find acceptable and unacceptable. Religion align spiritual beliefs among social groups.

All inequality creates abuse.

Your last paragraph reminded me of Ashton Kutcher… I can’t watch that 70s show anymore. It was my favorite tv show of all time.

The rosy romanticisation of what should be a humanitarian entity is probably worst with Buddhism. The Buddhist majority-Burmese oppressing the Rohyngian Muslims, some Buddhist monks advocating for dominance in South East Asia, and even pre-CCP Tibet where the dalai lama and his ilks were decadent and corrupt, seem unfathomable for many who view Buddhism as the most secular and least dogmatic religion. There was an article I have read lamenting this corruption in Buddhist communities, and I was like "they are still humans, what do you expect?"

Look into any situation where there is a massive disparity of power between some people and other people and that's were you will find the most abuses and I totally agree it's for the reasons you said of there being far less risk for the abusers due to their "status" and that such places actually attract the worst people in society so it's a bit of self-fullfilling prophecy that putting too much power and not enough transparency and accountability in a position will invariably end up with it being abused, even if you start with the purest of people and the purest of intentions.

This is also probably why there was (and only time will tell if that's still or not the case) so much child sexual abuse in the Catholic church: adult in high standing in the community and implicitly trusted by all vs child (generally from a poor background).

Thinking about this over the years (mainly for Politics, but it applies to other areas) has led me to conclude that the "good" exercise of power is impossible to get from a static situation (i.e. the idealistic idea that "give power to honest people" solves it) and instead it has to be setup as a dynamic mechanism with frequent rotation of people and multiple unrelated (ideally, competing) people watching over each other other (which is probably where the ide behind the Three Pillars Of Democracy) and whose power balances.

One of the selling features of Christianity is that you just need to ask Jesus forgiveness and it will be granted.

Catholic Islam is a radical sect

Sorry *Christianity

Because they didn't allow abortion. That's how

Buddhist temple, tibetan monks, the dali lama? or are they on that list too?

Religion is the last mental illness you can't call out or treat. When you have Mike Huckabees et al going around ushering in the End Times, we should have the power to medicate these people into a barely functional stupor.

They can exist - if they pay taxes.

Sure but you might be making some assumptions that don't really apply here.

the idea of banning religion is painfully tyrannical, like how could you do that without instituting a thought police or a state sanctioned belief system...

however, in reality, they most toxic part of religion of organised religions, when they are big institutions fighting for political power rather than maintaining their beliefs and communities.

possible solution: progressive tax on religious institutions based on their size, a small community of 50 to 100? tax free, you have 1000s of congregants? start rising, megachurches with 1000 thousand people? 95% tax...

Well, some things. Science and medicine are two of the things that I count as consistently bettering our lives.

The disease / pre-existing condions being "born out of wedlock" and "being in a catholic children camp".

Since the excavations just happen now as survivors and the general public wont shut up about the atrocities, and ITT there are still plenty of apologist I'm not sure how thick the veneer of better is.

dna gives you parent gives you when they were there? assuming they kept records of who lived there.

The article is crap. The DNA is used to ID siblings, relatives. That's however not the only thing they got wrong

See here for example: The true horror of Irish mother and baby homes | ARTE.tv Documentary

So you think they "care" so much about these single women and their babies that they would kill their babies and hide their remains in a septic tank?, what's wrong with you. Don't you think the more humane thing would be to promote contraceptives and safe sex and safe abortions in case of accidental pregnancies, and run proper orphanages for the unwanted kids. But of course the actual church is against all of this, cause the idea that religion has anything to do with morality is ridiculously stupid. All religions are cults full of dumb fucks desperate to matter in this meaningless existence.

Yeah to me it sounds like the babies died of such causes and weren't intentionally killed. I can imagine that trying to get rid of the bodies in other ways (burial, cremation, dumping elsewhere) would make the many deaths too visible or obvious, and would lead to questioning. But they could be hidden in the sewage.

Article says

DNA analysis found that the ages of the dead ranged from 35 weeks gestation to 3 years.

A major inquiry into the mother-and-baby homes found that in total, about 9,000 children died in 18 different mother-and-baby homes, with major causes including respiratory infections and gastroenteritis, otherwise known as the stomach flu.

So basically just Dysentery, yeah. The nuns were no saints (lol) either, though, because they punished the unmaried mothers and put them through hard labor (lol).

This is a terrible time for jokes, I'm so sorry about that. I always make sure to ask for forgiveness (lol).

There’s a behind the bastards episode about it if you’d like to actually educate yourself on why so many of the children died and why they were so callously thrown in the septic and stop sounding so ignorant

It actually does, telomeres shorten, this is one of the most important reasons why we, you know, age.

Your DNA sequence is generally pretty stable, but other characteristics do. Epigenetics is the field. Another example is methylation, which is basically like your cell putting a post-it note that says "don't use this" on a particular region. By looking at a bunch of different methylation sites an age can be estimated.

But in this case, it appears that the article is just mixing up "genetic testing was performed" and "the ages were determined" (separate statements from previous articles.)

Thank you. I asked myself same. Telomeres I guess you would need to know the length after birth. But we only have one sample (moment of death). Plus the victims bodies are probably not very good preserved. My best guess is, the text is just not accurate and they might used DNA testing for different things (sex, etc).

Telomere length is the only thing I can think of, but that's totally a guess and I don't know much about it. Telomeres, as I understand it, are padding at the end of DNA and shorten as you age.

Wow, thinking religion is bad just because there are more babies than you can really comprehend looking at in this septic tank, and you had to ask yourself 'wait I've read this one before'?

Bigot.