The malnourished and badly bruised son of a parenting advice YouTuber politely asks a neighbor to take him to the nearest police station in newly released video from the day his mother and her business partner were arrested on child abuse charges in southern Utah.
The 12-year-old son of Ruby Franke, a mother of six who dispensed advice to millions via a popular YouTube channel, had escaped through a window and approached several nearby homes until someone answered the door, according to documents released Friday by the Washington County Attorney’s office.
Crime scene photos, body camera video and interrogation tapes were released a month after Franke and business partner Jodi Hildebrandt, a mental health counselor, were each sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. A police investigation determined religious extremism motivated the women to inflict horrific abuse on Franke’s children, Washington County Attorney Eric Clarke announced Friday.
“The women appeared to fully believe that the abuse they inflicted was necessary to teach the children how to properly repent for imagined ‘sins’ and to cast the evil spirits out of their bodies,” Clarke said.
Friendly reminder to everyone that the rest of the world has signed on the United Nation’s Connvention on the Rights of the Child; the US doesn’t like that it could prevent children from being spanked, because God wants us to spank our children (spare the rod, spoil the child).
Religion is often a basis for the suffering of children.
The US doesn’t like the idea of taking responsibility for its actions ever.
There’s that, but mostly some states don’t want minors to be exempt from the death penalty or life imprisonment, which would be a consequence of ratification.
(Also, the Venn diagram of those states and the ones where children can be married but can’t get a divorce due to lacking standing in court, another consequence of non-ratification, is probably a circle.)
Religion is a horrible cultural disease that causes unmeasurable harm, sure, but the USA has a well established tradition of treating children as subhuman and brutally abusing them in a vast variety of ways, many of which aren’t directly linked to religion.
Don’t forget they don’t want child marriages to end either
Christianity doesn’t advocate abusing children at all. And most children that suffer are for non religious reasons, usually mental illness or sex trafficking. Religious people who are mentally ill just use it as a veil.
Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.” Genesis 22:2
If there is anyone who curses his father or his mother, he shall surely be put to death; he has cursed his father or his mother, his bloodguiltiness is upon him. Leviticus 20:9
Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock! Psalms 137:9
“If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then whatever comes out from the doors of my house to meet me when I return in peace from the Ammonites hshall be the LORD’s, and iI will offer it up for a burnt offering.” Judges 11:30-31
When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are. If she does not satisfy her owner, he must allow her to be bought back again. Exodus 11:7-8
“Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof.” Genesis 19:8
As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. Deuteronomy 20:14
The fact that you quoted Judges clearly shows that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Judges is never prescription. It’s a documentary of the horrors the Israelites committed when there was no authority. It literally ends with
"In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes."
Anyway, your Isaac story, you forgot the part where Abraham literally doesn’t sacrifice Isaac. It was merely a test of loyalty. God tells him not to.
Psalm 137 - That’s a poem by King David who was rather upset about the Babylonians ruining his kingdom. The last verse is eye-for-an-eye and imprecatory - where David was like “you murdered our children, blessed is the day when we can exact our revenge”. Of course that wouldn’t make it moral, as we know how Jesus spoke on the eye-for-an-eye doctrine.
Leviticus - These were laws for keeping order in a strained and threatened society in a deeply immoral world. That’s why there’s need for strictness and lack of tolerance, especially with the Israelites constantly rebelling as they did throughout history.
Exodus 21 (not 11) is about fair treatment of slaves in the time of the Exodus. We know Moses made concessions to keep them pleased. That’s why he required that slaves were treated fairly.
Genesis 19 shows Lot compromising with evil whenever people of Sodom. Lot was being threatened to have his house guests raped. Sure, him offering his daughters weren’t any better, but this is straying into victim blaming. Sodom got rightfully destroyed in the end. Again, this is description, not prescription. You cannot act like everything protrayed in the Bible is someone doing the right thing. It’s far from it.
Deuteronomy 20:14, the alternative was letting them starve in the ruined city.
Yes, and all of that is still pure fucking evil, no matter how hard you wanna spin it. You said there was no child abuse. Well there it is. I do not care at all how you want to explain it away. Sounds like nothing but devil worship to me.
The context is that a bunch of primitive desert nomads wanted to kill their neighbors, steal their land, loot their cities, rape and terrify their children, enslave the survivors and still feel like they were good, moral, chosen people. So they made up excuses about how the man in the sky said that what they did, and planned to keep doing, was all ok. So were they listening to God, the Devil, or were they just a bunch of men making stuff up? That’s the only context that matters.
The basis for your belief system is that these assholes had life figured out. You and I both seem to agree that they didn’t. So why do you keep defending them? Why do you believe in the religion built on their terrible foundation?
There’s no child abuse prescribed. Doesn’t mean that there are no descriptions of it happening.
I believe in the religion because a person called Jesus was Prophecied about, was actually born, performed miracles and fulfilled prophecies, claimed to be God, then died and rose again back to life, was physically seen by many, before ascending into heaven.
And yet despite your protests, it absolutely does prescribe child abuse, genocide, slavery, rape, kidnapping, murder, and torture. It calls the men who committed those atrocities righteous. Christians only began to consider them crimes in the last century or so. You claim that followers of Yahweh should have just read between the lines to know that these were lessons for what not to do. But instead, for some 4000 years, followers of those scriptures enthusiastically did all of those things, because they wanted to and scripture said it was okay. The fact that you now believe those things are wrong is proof that you do not get your morality from those scriptures, but rather from the modern, secular culture in which you were born.
🤣 and where did this culture get their morality from?
It’s absolutely obvious that you’re not supposed to use the book of Judges as “what to do”. The Bible isn’t entirely a list of instructions or commandments. It’s a record of God’s people.
Murdering and raping children has been a crime since… Forever. To claim that such a thing was permissible until the last century when “secular culture” stepped in to save it is incredibly unhinged historical revisionism. But of course that’s what you need to conclude something as mad as atheism. Scripture NEVER said what happened in Judges was okay. NOT ONCE. Israel literally got split in half over it. The Bible also makes it clear that NOBODY is righteous.
Romans 3:9-31 ESV
Except that Christians have been doing all that stuff the entire time. Because the book said they could.
Modern secular society looked at all the harm done by religion and decided those things were wrong all by ourselves. That’s the power of democracy for you. It’s so much better than taking life advice from ancient people who beat each other to death with rocks.
So I’ll ask you again. Why do YOU think genocide, slavery, rape, child abuse, and torture are wrong? Is the Bible the word of God? Is it just another book written by men? Or did Satan write it pretending to be God?
And how do you know?
I do think that there are a lot of good branches of Christianity out there, where the main focus is on loving thy neighbor and opening the way to God to all people, not being exclusionary.
My experience of religion, like so many others though, hinged (more and more strongly over the years) on a literal interpretation of Genesis. One in which eating a bad piece of fruit causes inseparable rifts between parent and child; one in which the creator of all, the knower of all, created rules that unless I grovel and beg and pledge constant devotion, I deserved eternal conscious torment for existing. That’s an abusive belief. Especially to teach children.
That’s before the curse of Eve, for eating the bad fruit first, causing the pain of childbirth, hereditarily (the biggest cause of death in women throughout history), as well as god-sanctioned subjugation of women. (For example, a woman doing everything right knows not to try to teach a high school group–those are men that she’s not qualified to minister to. She knows it’s better not to vote in church matters, even if she’s allowed, because the head of household, her husband does that). This creates social structures that disempower women as a point of culture, another abusive trait.
Children also deserve subjection. They are to be obedient at all times, it’s literally one of the commandments. Our denomination taught that “Obey thy father and thy mother” also applied to all earthly authority over us. Authority and structure mattered more as a culture than understanding and insight.
And the social culture of church can feel toxic or stifling. Often outright sinning, even as a repetitive behavior is tolerated in church spaces (especially in cases of child or domestic abuse), but someone who has reason to think a little differently (like believing in Jesus without believing in Genesis, being queer, being progressive) is shunned or made to be quiet. They know from a young age that their voices can never be respected in those spaces, the number of sermons I heard about how evil/misguided/ other awful stereotype that non believers were supposed to be… It teaches othering, it teaches people to reduce other people to stereotypes of what the pastor says instead of what the person’s lived experience is.
This isn’t unusual for Christianity, especially in the States. My experience with abuse patterns in Christianity may truly not apply to you. But I think they apply to many.
And I’m not even going to touch on the abuse that happens to homeschooled children, often strongly correlated with religion.
I’m sorry you had a bad experience. However, it’s not that one deserves torment for existing, it’s that one deserves punishment for sin. If you look at the state of the world, it’s filled with sin. Societies cannot function because of greed, people are oppressed, madmen have nuclear bombs capable of destroying the world, and the constant suffering in Gaza and Ukraine, humanity is inherently evil. And we all have participated in that evil in some kind of way. Asking for forgiveness and trying to do the right thing isn’t a bad thing, it’s the correct thing.
With churches being toxic - every environment is. It doesn’t make it right. What people identifying as Christian do and act doesn’t represent Christianity as a whole. People will abuse children regardless, whether it be in schools, etc. I don’t live in the United States, I live in the United Kingdom, so I cannot speak for there.
Homeschooling isn’t a Christian doctrine. I personally think it is cringe retreatism and a good way to create an atheist.
I mean, religions are what people define them as, use them as. If two million people use the Christian Bible to prop up child abuse, slavery, and sexual, then that is part of the tradition of that faith. Perhaps you didn’t ascribe to faith that seeks to sever people from God via thoughtcrimes. Perhaps the church you attend works to alleviate those injustices, and that seeks conservation of the planet we were gifted. But I know when I asked about racism at church, when I asked about what we as a congregation were doing about it, I was told that was a heart issue that we just had to pray people would resolve on their own. Women, again, could not hold positions of authority because that was against God’s will, gay people were sent away, but racists, what can you do? Again, my experience isn’t unique. There was never any talk of care taking the planet. Fair bit of talk about the dude who buried his Talent vs the one who invested it, though.
I think you identify a lot of real evils in this world, and people really do create a lot of problems. I fundamentally don’t believe we are overwhelmingly evil, and I think teaching people they are evil is more likely to create people who grow up to be evil. People live up to what those around them believe them to be. When people believe to their core that they are truly evil and cannot trust themselves, that they instead must trust the human layers between themselves and God., that’s gonna come up as trauma and/or abuse somewhere down the line.
And while any environment can become abusive, churches preach truth and morality; tied in with that is a strong sense of community and family. Trying to call out abuse from an elder or a pastor often results in the pastor getting moved and ‘prayed for’ and the victim pressured to forgive before is appropriate. They’re bullied to say they forgive when they are not actually ok. And the abuser gets to move on and find new victims. We’ve all seen the scandals about the Catholic Church over the last couple decades. The Southern Baptist Convention had a list of 700 abusers they covered for. But still don’t be a loud lady, that’s against God. The SBC is one of the biggest evangelical denominations in the United States. I don’t think they’re what Christianity is supposed to be. But they are Christians and this is how they express their faith, so this is how I understand Christianity.
Bad theology hurts people. And to pretend there isn’t bad is to be unable to fix.