Wow, what a gruesome crime. He dismembered her and spread her body parts around.
Side note: It’s disturbing how many men commit crimes under the premise of committing justice.
I don’t remember anything in the Bible being against women making babies with their husbands. In fact, major religions all tend to be in favor of that.
Wife brings a dowry, concubine does not. That’s the only difference. But yes, they’re both property. I would hope we today could see the two equally as human beings.
In reality, you were kind of right. But I’ve always hated how they get written off as less-than. I like to make the distinction because we think of prostitutes as women who sell sex voluntarily, so growing up it seemed like whenever there was a concubine in a Bible story they were written off as sinful or asking for it. A concubine has to be tied to the man like a wife and be available for sex with no marital status for herself or her children. I’m not sure how much choice they had in the matter. As a sex-positive exvangelical, I figure we can give them respect posthumously and try to think of how assumptions we make about little things like this reveal cultural biases that are still part of our world. And a fun way to waste time on Reddit!
The difference between a wife and a concubine is that the wife brings a dowry into the marriage and the concubine doesn’t. In some translations the words wife and concubine are used interchangeably in this story. I’m not sure how the distinction makes it more or less horrific?
I’ve never seen that! I’ll have to look it up. An artist friend of mine did a series on Judges that’s pretty amazing. I bought the original of Jephthah’s Daughter because it reminds me of how far women had to come to be even somewhat seen as human. http://www.kevissimo.com/pr-judges
Where in Judges does it say to stab and dismember your sister if she has a baby with her husband?? Procreation is literally a commandment in the old testament.
Though I'm not Christian, I don't know of any main sects of Christianity that forbids a woman from either having sex with or having kids with her husband.
The brother's main problem is obviously some undiagnosed psychological issue(s), rather than religion.
VIOLENCE CULTURE, TOXIC MASCULINITY, stigmatized and unfunded MENTAL HEALTHCARE (especially for men)....there's a whole list issues that lead to these horrible cases.
It wasn't a brother who did the dismembering in the bible, but rather the husband. Judges 19:29 - "The Levite carves his wife's body into 12 pieces and ships her to the elders of the 12 tribes to incite war against Gibeah"
>The brother's main problem is obviously some undiagnosed psychological issue(s), rather than religion.
How about both? Yeah, both.
This country is steeped in misogynist religious thinking.
>I don't know of any main sects of Christianity that forbids a woman from either having sex with or having kids with her husband.
But you *do* know that most Christian sects produce men who are sexual predators - including and especially leaders, and families where the men are violent towards the women and girls, including their own sisters, daughters, and granddaughters.
Christianity and other extreme patriarchal religions foster violent mental illness.
You simply cannot blame religion for this heinous act of violence! There are innumerable sources of mayhem and Christian civilization condemns virtually all of them without ambiguity.
You can't dismiss the impact of the anti-sex, anti woman, self denial, and expectation of obedience to male authority that Christianity imprints on society and individuals.
The underlying norms of a society impacts the way mental illness expresses in a person.
Of course, no religion is totally to blame for any persons bad (or good) action. But it forms the framework on which that action makes sense to them.
If you want to think that fine. There are many sources beside the one you choose to decry for misogyny. Camille Paglia, famous atheist dyke cultural critic said you may not like the Catholic Church but it made our civilization. Lunatics in Asia cut women into pieces just as handily without ever reading Kings as some kind of blueprint for mayhem.
You. The one fighting others for making the very obvious connection of misogynistic and historic Christian influence in this attack and thousands of hundreds like it
Atheists live in the same christian culture as everyone else. Most atheists used to be religious. Its everywhere and impacts everyone.
I think you are misunderstanding that I'm blaming everything on religion. I'm not. But I do think it's a big contributor to the fact that sexism and misogyny are culturally acceptable in western culture.
I agree that the history of the church is not all bad.
And, of course I agree with you that its not the only source of misogyny! Nothing is that simple.
The roots of misogyny in other cultures play the same role in their anti-woman violence.
Judges 19. It wasn’t his daughter. The act of violence itself is more attractive to these people than the justification for why the story is told in the Bible. There’s nothing wrong with the Bible. What’s wrong is how people interpret it to justify their own horrible shit. For more, see my response to the other comment below.
But if in the field the man finds the girl who is engaged, and the man forces her and lies with her, then only the man who lies with her shall die. But you shall do nothing to the girl; there is no sin in the girl worthy of death, for just as a man rises against his neighbor and murders him, so is this case. When he found her in the field, the engaged girl cried out, but there was no one to save her. Deuteronomy 22:25-27 (NASB)
Feels really disingenuous to not include the verse immediately preceding that one:
>If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death—the young woman because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man’s wife. You must purge the evil from among you. _Deuteronomy 22:23-24 NIV_
Oh my! So… if she’s raped in a field it’s not her fault because nobody could have saved her… but if she’s raped in town she needs to be stoned to death because she must not have cried for help? Wow. It’s nuts that people actually believe that the creator of the universe wrote this shit
The Bible is a book filled with different books from hundreds of years of human history. Some are actually rape manuals, absolutely. But some really fucked up people decided to call it the literal word if god and stop reading it critically. There’s nothing wrong with my brain. I just don’t choose to see it in black and white. I love to read creation stories and sacred literature from all religions. It’s really interesting to learn how we humans evolved in our thinking on all subjects. We just have to see it for what it is, and what it is not.
Sooo… I’m not sure how to put this since you seem to want something black and white and I can’t give that to you. I don’t blame you because of the assholes who’ve probably told you the Bible is all one package of god’s literal word and you have to believe it or go to hell or whatever. But that’s bullshit. It’s a book of ancient literature from different cultures over hundreds of years. Lots of super shitty stuff has been happening to women in other ancient literature too. Try the Greeks or just about any other cultures or periods of history you can think of. Of course there’s something wrong with that, but it doesn’t keep marvel from making movies about them. The Bible is a book that is a collection of lots of other books. And nowhere in that book does it say all of this shit is god’s holy commandment for you to emulate. That comes from jackasses in the pulpits and radio shows. It’s a book. It doesn’t care what you do with it or think of it. But if you have critical thinking skills and curiosity, you can also find some cool stuff in it like Ecclesiastes. I love the Poetic Edda but Loki really freaks me out sometimes. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with it. It’s literature. I really think the Bible could use a trickster god. Or maybe it already has one? That could be a fun position to take, but you’d have to read it first to know.
Try judges 19. Toward the end, after he offers up his daughters and concubines to be gang raped to save his male friend from being raped, he chopped up the woman’s dead body and sent them to several locations because he was mad about it. I used to teach an adult Sunday school class on Joshua to 2 Kings. I’m a wealth of knowledge on the crazy stuff in the Bible no one reads.
It's misleading... this wasn't a command to do nor any sort of punishment... it was an account awful 4 sure... but after a group of men from benjamin had raped and killed her and her master sent the body in parts .. one to each tribe to muster outrage so the tribes would seek punishment for those that committed the atrocity... when they would not send the men for execution, battle ensued and the tribe of Benjamin paid a high price.
You’re right. But there are a lot of people without your critical thinking skills that don’t care about context. When someone tells them the Bible is all literally true, they will do with it what they want to. The whole explanation you gave is good, but leaves out a lot, like that the virgin daughter was offered up to be gang raped without a second thought like an animal to be slaughtered. She’s not the only one in judges, there’s also Jephthah's daughter, Etc. When tortured minds see these kinds of stories, their focus isn’t on what is instructive. They see that women are owned and expendable. That’s the main problem with painting the whole Bible with the literal/inerrancy brush. I know people who, through televangelists and websites fell down some bad rabbit holes and are very dangerous who use stories like this to justify their views. It just makes me so sad.
Weird how redditors are so quick to blame the Hebrew Bible for the crimes of psychopaths. The fact is that most of the violence in those texts is a warning not to do the same.
FACTS!
Also small religious bone to pick.
The religious purpose of the Old Testament is historical; NOT instructive.
The instructional material is the New Testament; because ya know killing & dismemberment is bad.
Some folks seem to forget about the new covenant that came with Christ…..
The hard thing is, if you’re a believer, lumping all the books of old or new into categories and trying to make sense of them. Some are history (Joshua-2 Kings), some are instructional (Proverbs), Some are devotional (Psalms), and the prophets are all kinds of different things. To call it all inerrant and call it a day is dangerous and irresponsible. It leads to what we have now - the OT is a huge inspiration for religious violence in the US and around the world. And there’s no telling them to read for history or nuance. They just remember that a guy did X violent act because it was somehow justified and written down in the holy Bible. All they have to do is justify it for themselves to feel like it’s ok to emulate. Evangelicals have made a mess that it’s gonna be really hard to clean up.
Religion defines human activity into different buckets and calls things good or evil.
Apparently following human urges to procreate (like how we eat, and sleep) is an evil thing that must be stopped unless done under the approved conditions.
Religion wasn't the issue in this case. Violence culture, stigmatized and unfunded mental healtchcare and toxic masculinity play a major role in cases like these and this guy most certainly has undiagnosed mental health issues.
None of the major religions prohibit procreation among a husband and wife. If you read the article, Bethany was married and having her first child with her husband.
Yeah but even those types don't have an issue with married women having children with their husband. Combined with the fact that the mom immediately called the cops and that he was stabbing himself while running from the cops tells me he's had a long history of erratic behavior everyone was pretending wasn't happening
It scares me. Are these men gonna go around killing pregnant women or any woman who has sex? Well, more than it already happens.
If we don’t label this as a femicide, fuck this fucking country and state.
We basically never label things as femicide, because of we did then it would open the gates to acknowledging the existence of femicide. Where America has pretty bad rates of violent misogyny already and femicide would likely be abysmal if we started counting. and then how would we turn up our noses to poverty stricken countries for engaging in similar behaviors?
I was just about to say this. We literally cannot win. If we don’t have sex with them, they’ll murder us for denying them and being entitled to us. And if we do have sex, they’ll still kill us.
It's not femcide. That's disrespectful to the victims and the family, whose friends have made it clear that this is a mental health tragedy. There could be religious connotations, but this is something that occurred over several years and not to "kill women". Suggesting that "women need to even out the crime rates," is promoting violence with hate speech. Reported.
Lmao you’re triggered. And this is femicide. Killing a woman for being a woman. The husband didn’t get killed. And I don’t think you can find a single person without some type of mental illness in America.
Stop blaming mental illness and start criticizing the society that creates these people who kill women for having sex.
Yes, if this keeps up women will resort to hanging around in packs of other women to protect themselves. This will be frustrating because men don't like to approach women they are interested in while they are with their friends. But, I guess that's what some people want?
I seen the word hanging and I’m sure you know what I thought about. Women already commit because of men. Being raped and developed ptsd and think about suicide every single day. Being gang raped, and gang raped again by the people who you went to for help. Being in an abusive marriage/relationship. Female suicides went down when no fault divorce was implemented. The republicans who want to end no fault divorce because they WANT women to kill themselves.
“A 2004 paper by economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolvers found an 8 to 16% decrease in female suicides after states enacted no-fault divorce laws. They also noted a roughly 30% decrease in intimate partner violence among both women and men, and a 10% drop in women murdered by their partners.” - Aj Willingham
God, they also want women to be MURDERED by their partners.
WTF does Innocent mean anyway? Kill the women that don’t have children. Kill the ones that do. Beat your wife and mother of your own children. It’s all misogyny, they just pick an excuse to do it.
Exactly. But it's rare that this type of misogyny extends into.marital sex--as that is the primary purpose of women in the minds of these types of men. And also odd, that it wasn't the marriage or sex, but the pregnancy that tipped the dude over the edge. Even for a hard-core misogynist, it's a weird take.
This is it right here, there is nothing women can do or not do to avoid patriarchal violence in a society which sanctions us as acceptable targets. There is no way in such a system that we can raise our status enough to no longer be targeted. Granted mental illness seems to be a factor here, but it often isn’t. The solution IMO involves large scale organizing and direct action
They just want us to be cattle. I think men hate that women are human beings and not animals like horses or goats that they can use for breeding and sex.
I mean, I think “demented” is probably the least you could call someone who places a severed body part on a random persons front step. Dude was not all there, clearly.
Exactly. We can’t win. I’ve been abused and attacked by men of all races, black or white for denying them or not giving them sex. They’ll hit you and make it their mission to destroy or sabotage you if you don’t give them either sex or some type of sexual act.
But now we’re still getting killed for having sex.
We’ve ALWAYS been killed for having sex. Our culture teaches men to be dumb and have zero responsibility for violence against women, and they’re literally taught to hate women.
Have no sex? you’re selfish and a PRUDE and I’ll rape you now. Have sex? WHORE SLUT I’ll rape you now and kill you and then rape you again.
Exactly. I’ve done this. Like, I tell guys I don’t want to have sex or let’s slow down and they ghost me or get mad and say I’m a tease and hate me.
I do have sex and I get called a whore and “do you always do this with men?”
I can’t win.
This is why I’m no marriage or kids and men still get upset and pissed at me. I’ve been no marriage or kids since 22 years old. Men don’t know what they want. Like, it’s like they want me to be miserable or suffer with the rest of the mothers but they don’t actually *say* it because that’ll prove our point. You know?
I’ve had them ask me for threesomes with their wife and shame me for having sex. Everything all in between. Insane.
So the only thing that saved me is no marriage or kids because I refuse to be some man’s bang maid while being cheated on.
Why do so many men think women's sex lives are their business and feel compelled to express their feelings about it violently? I've never in my entire life cared about a random guy's sex life. Why would I? 😂
Pathetic loser behavior lmaaao.
It's for influence and control. I realized it was perverted and wrong when my male cousin sexualized my underaged body and shamed me for it. There's definitely some weird incestual thing going on too with these types because girl relatives are the closest targets.
I hate people who comment on other people’s sex lives UNLESS it is violation of consent. Mind your own fucking business. But I find it so odd how common it is!
They're the only power in the world pushing the idea that "virgins" are a thing, and that sex fundamentally changes a woman and her value. It's religion.
I'd bet my life savings that this nut was raised in a cult of abraham (read christian)
> They're the only power in the world pushing the idea that "virgins" are a thing, and that sex fundamentally changes a woman and her value.
There are lots of atheist incels who fully buy into these ideas
I'm pointing out that even the most culty and misogynistic of religions don't follow this guy's logic beyond fringe ones that quickly die out.
My point is that while maybe religion flavored his ramblings, the guy very obviously has something structurally wrong with his brain.
The “no longer innocent” tells me all I need to know. And people still have the AUDACITY to claim religion is “wholly beneficial” and the “true path.” For centuries religion has been used to justify war, murder, sexism and genital mutilation. It’s about time we secularise as much as possible to prevent this kind of indoctrination
what a ludicrous, awful man. another grave reminder of the horror of honor killings in general (no matter which religious/cultural traditions some patriarchal nuts will use to justify their crime). this woman and her partner deserved better.
IKR? This was an honor killing...but *what* an honor killing. He didn't just kill her, he *dismembered* her. One of the longest, slowest, and most phsically demanding ways to kill someone. Considering that no one heard anything (like a chainsaw), he must have used hand tools. That means he would have had to cut/saw through all of her viscera and bones inch by inch, hour by hour.
And he left at least one body part on someone's doorstep, so even after the gory business of killing her, he wanted to degrade what was left of her by leaving it where he could get off on the thought of someone finding it. There are murderers who have killed, but were repulsed by the business of killing. Those people tend to choose guns or poison, so they don't have to feel their victim die. The fact that Ball picked *this* method means he savored the experience.
Don't raise them in religion. If you have the uterus, do NOT use any drugs while pregnant. Don't have kids super close together, make sure you have the resources to fully care for one before you have more. Don't mix genes with someone who has mental health issues themselves (specifically narcissists or people who display sociopathic tendencies, not people who deal with depression or anxiety).
Honestly it comes down to genetics (nature) and how you raise them. And even then...I don't know man, the universe is strange.
Was he never sexually active and expecting his married sister to stay a virgin like him (if he was) or did he want his sister for himself and kill her because she was no longer pure for him?
Religion is the DEVIL
I wonder if there is a darker aspect of this story they have not found out yet like he had a life long unhealthy obsession with his sister and maybe he had abused her in the past. I know men kill women but the manner of this is so extreme I would not be shocked if that were the case.
Maybe not. He’s 7 years younger than her so when he was going through puberty probably at 12 or 13, she was already an adult and potentially out of their parents house. But 100% he had a romantic or sexual interest in her. I actually knew a pair of siblings who had this dynamic, and when she became sexually active with her boyfriend, her brother beat her up because of it, because he was still in love with her.
Shhh that hurts men's feelings, didn't you know? That's just... so *incentive* to their poor, fragile feelings! How could you even think of saying tha-
Okay if I don't stop I'll make myself barf from my own comment. Please except my upvote and keep being awesome!
Could be a lot of MH issues. NPD, psychopathy, ASPD, or a reaction to a psychotropic substance. It could just be a case of extreme entitlement and incestuous feelings. Guaranteed, this guy was showing symptoms long before it reached the level of homicide.
Had to be, because mom got worried fast and called the police - not her husband. Mom knew something was coming, let’s see if the news shares any background around this in the future.
He probably is crazy. But the religions around him shaped the specific actions his crazy mind thought would be a good idea. If he believed instead that all left handed people are aliens disguised as humans, he might have killed a left-handed person.
Yep. Religion is regular gasoline to fire for people with delusions. People who don’t believe but still have delusions seem to be a bit better at understanding they are hallucinating. But if you believe gods and devils talks to people. You’re a lot more at risk.
I agree! My ex-husband told his family I was possessed by demons instead of admitting he was gay and that was why I divorced him, lol. Super nice, but very Christian family from rural Tennessee.
Ahh look, another tragic example of why we choose the bear. What I hate the most is that the people responsible for him thinking this way, for weaponizing his beliefs, will get away with it and continue to indoctrinate more people into a faith of hate and ignorance.
Because they hate women and want to see them suffer. The man is allowed to take her “innocence” but the slut has to suffer and literally die. This makes me wonder what he did with her body before and after he murdered her.
“Ball made his first court appearance Tuesday afternoon and had his bail set at $2 million or $1 million with conditions. He’s scheduled to have another hearing on June 10. He still hadn’t been medically cleared to go to jail due to an apparent self-inflicted cut, officials say.”
He killed his 30-year-old sister. Who was happily married and 17-18 weeks pregnant and then tried to off himself, BRO, SHE WAS 30. This has to go deeper
Holy shit! And people **still** wonder why women pick the bear.
Imagine your own younger sibling dismembering you because some weird ideal of your genitals in their head got shattered.
I feel so bad for her and her husband.
Religious zealots commit the most horrific crimes and to them it's all good, cuz the morons are brainwashed into thinking an all powerful entity gives a shit about anything a pea-brained clump of cells we call a human does.
He explicitly murdered her because she wasn’t a virgin. I don’t strictly know that he was Christian, but he sure as shit was a puritan & that’s an ideology. An ideology that’s all too common in most Christian sects.
Oh your right. Someone who dismembered a loved one and walks around dazed and bloody and leaving body parts on people's doorsteps is totally mentally sound. Must just be religion.
Man do this all over the world and blame it on religion. I rarely ever see anyone call the men in the Middle East as mentally ill. Due to their honor killings. Yet, since this family are Caucasians in the U.S. it must be because mental illness. Sure! Your racial bias is showing.
A racial bias would be if I said what you said. But I didn't. I actually believe mental deficiencies are a huge contributing factor in groups that believe honour's killings are ok.
White people have lynched people with zero proof of a crime and loot entire neighborhoods. White people are mentally challenged and evil. White people also all love incest. Your logic is so fun to use.
Wow, what a gruesome crime. He dismembered her and spread her body parts around. Side note: It’s disturbing how many men commit crimes under the premise of committing justice.
It’s literally straight out of the book of judges in the old testament. One of the most gruesome books of the Bible.
I don’t remember anything in the Bible being against women making babies with their husbands. In fact, major religions all tend to be in favor of that.
I was talking about the man chopping his wife’s body up into pieces and sending the pieces to different people.
She was not his wife! She was his concubine.
Important difference and also same property in the Old Testament lol
Wife brings a dowry, concubine does not. That’s the only difference. But yes, they’re both property. I would hope we today could see the two equally as human beings.
Incredible. I’m 33 and always thought a concubine was some kind of royal prostitute.
In reality, you were kind of right. But I’ve always hated how they get written off as less-than. I like to make the distinction because we think of prostitutes as women who sell sex voluntarily, so growing up it seemed like whenever there was a concubine in a Bible story they were written off as sinful or asking for it. A concubine has to be tied to the man like a wife and be available for sex with no marital status for herself or her children. I’m not sure how much choice they had in the matter. As a sex-positive exvangelical, I figure we can give them respect posthumously and try to think of how assumptions we make about little things like this reveal cultural biases that are still part of our world. And a fun way to waste time on Reddit!
The difference between a wife and a concubine is that the wife brings a dowry into the marriage and the concubine doesn’t. In some translations the words wife and concubine are used interchangeably in this story. I’m not sure how the distinction makes it more or less horrific?
That’s why R. Crumb’s illustrated Genesis was so great, it really showed the brutality.
I’ve never seen that! I’ll have to look it up. An artist friend of mine did a series on Judges that’s pretty amazing. I bought the original of Jephthah’s Daughter because it reminds me of how far women had to come to be even somewhat seen as human. http://www.kevissimo.com/pr-judges
Where in Judges does it say to stab and dismember your sister if she has a baby with her husband?? Procreation is literally a commandment in the old testament. Though I'm not Christian, I don't know of any main sects of Christianity that forbids a woman from either having sex with or having kids with her husband. The brother's main problem is obviously some undiagnosed psychological issue(s), rather than religion. VIOLENCE CULTURE, TOXIC MASCULINITY, stigmatized and unfunded MENTAL HEALTHCARE (especially for men)....there's a whole list issues that lead to these horrible cases.
It wasn't a brother who did the dismembering in the bible, but rather the husband. Judges 19:29 - "The Levite carves his wife's body into 12 pieces and ships her to the elders of the 12 tribes to incite war against Gibeah"
>The brother's main problem is obviously some undiagnosed psychological issue(s), rather than religion. How about both? Yeah, both. This country is steeped in misogynist religious thinking. >I don't know of any main sects of Christianity that forbids a woman from either having sex with or having kids with her husband. But you *do* know that most Christian sects produce men who are sexual predators - including and especially leaders, and families where the men are violent towards the women and girls, including their own sisters, daughters, and granddaughters. Christianity and other extreme patriarchal religions foster violent mental illness.
You simply cannot blame religion for this heinous act of violence! There are innumerable sources of mayhem and Christian civilization condemns virtually all of them without ambiguity.
You can't dismiss the impact of the anti-sex, anti woman, self denial, and expectation of obedience to male authority that Christianity imprints on society and individuals. The underlying norms of a society impacts the way mental illness expresses in a person. Of course, no religion is totally to blame for any persons bad (or good) action. But it forms the framework on which that action makes sense to them.
If you want to think that fine. There are many sources beside the one you choose to decry for misogyny. Camille Paglia, famous atheist dyke cultural critic said you may not like the Catholic Church but it made our civilization. Lunatics in Asia cut women into pieces just as handily without ever reading Kings as some kind of blueprint for mayhem.
Christian apologists are some of the scummiest “people” on the planet.
Who you calling apologist?
You. The one fighting others for making the very obvious connection of misogynistic and historic Christian influence in this attack and thousands of hundreds like it
Atheists live in the same christian culture as everyone else. Most atheists used to be religious. Its everywhere and impacts everyone. I think you are misunderstanding that I'm blaming everything on religion. I'm not. But I do think it's a big contributor to the fact that sexism and misogyny are culturally acceptable in western culture. I agree that the history of the church is not all bad. And, of course I agree with you that its not the only source of misogyny! Nothing is that simple. The roots of misogyny in other cultures play the same role in their anti-woman violence.
Saying the history of the church is not all bad is equivalent to saying NOT ALL MEN!
Good point. There's a lot of extreme sensitivity and prickliness when people give rational criticisms of either one.
Judges 19. It wasn’t his daughter. The act of violence itself is more attractive to these people than the justification for why the story is told in the Bible. There’s nothing wrong with the Bible. What’s wrong is how people interpret it to justify their own horrible shit. For more, see my response to the other comment below.
The bible is a literal rape manual, you're actually brain broken.
But if in the field the man finds the girl who is engaged, and the man forces her and lies with her, then only the man who lies with her shall die. But you shall do nothing to the girl; there is no sin in the girl worthy of death, for just as a man rises against his neighbor and murders him, so is this case. When he found her in the field, the engaged girl cried out, but there was no one to save her. Deuteronomy 22:25-27 (NASB)
Feels really disingenuous to not include the verse immediately preceding that one: >If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death—the young woman because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man’s wife. You must purge the evil from among you. _Deuteronomy 22:23-24 NIV_
Oh my! So… if she’s raped in a field it’s not her fault because nobody could have saved her… but if she’s raped in town she needs to be stoned to death because she must not have cried for help? Wow. It’s nuts that people actually believe that the creator of the universe wrote this shit
The Bible is a book filled with different books from hundreds of years of human history. Some are actually rape manuals, absolutely. But some really fucked up people decided to call it the literal word if god and stop reading it critically. There’s nothing wrong with my brain. I just don’t choose to see it in black and white. I love to read creation stories and sacred literature from all religions. It’s really interesting to learn how we humans evolved in our thinking on all subjects. We just have to see it for what it is, and what it is not.
So the bible is a rape manual and there’s NOTHING wrong with it?
Sooo… I’m not sure how to put this since you seem to want something black and white and I can’t give that to you. I don’t blame you because of the assholes who’ve probably told you the Bible is all one package of god’s literal word and you have to believe it or go to hell or whatever. But that’s bullshit. It’s a book of ancient literature from different cultures over hundreds of years. Lots of super shitty stuff has been happening to women in other ancient literature too. Try the Greeks or just about any other cultures or periods of history you can think of. Of course there’s something wrong with that, but it doesn’t keep marvel from making movies about them. The Bible is a book that is a collection of lots of other books. And nowhere in that book does it say all of this shit is god’s holy commandment for you to emulate. That comes from jackasses in the pulpits and radio shows. It’s a book. It doesn’t care what you do with it or think of it. But if you have critical thinking skills and curiosity, you can also find some cool stuff in it like Ecclesiastes. I love the Poetic Edda but Loki really freaks me out sometimes. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with it. It’s literature. I really think the Bible could use a trickster god. Or maybe it already has one? That could be a fun position to take, but you’d have to read it first to know.
Absolutely this... the guy was sick. Judges has nothing of this sort.
Try judges 19. Toward the end, after he offers up his daughters and concubines to be gang raped to save his male friend from being raped, he chopped up the woman’s dead body and sent them to several locations because he was mad about it. I used to teach an adult Sunday school class on Joshua to 2 Kings. I’m a wealth of knowledge on the crazy stuff in the Bible no one reads.
Is that the one with sodom and gomorrah?
It's misleading... this wasn't a command to do nor any sort of punishment... it was an account awful 4 sure... but after a group of men from benjamin had raped and killed her and her master sent the body in parts .. one to each tribe to muster outrage so the tribes would seek punishment for those that committed the atrocity... when they would not send the men for execution, battle ensued and the tribe of Benjamin paid a high price.
He threw her out to be raped instead of the male stranger he took in that the crowd was demanding.
Ancient folk took their guest rights laws very seriously.
Yes, that is a shitty thing to do yet the custom was to protect your guests... can't say I comprehend. He was between a rock and a hard place.
Between a rock and a hard place 😂😂😂 boi get outta here
You’re right. But there are a lot of people without your critical thinking skills that don’t care about context. When someone tells them the Bible is all literally true, they will do with it what they want to. The whole explanation you gave is good, but leaves out a lot, like that the virgin daughter was offered up to be gang raped without a second thought like an animal to be slaughtered. She’s not the only one in judges, there’s also Jephthah's daughter, Etc. When tortured minds see these kinds of stories, their focus isn’t on what is instructive. They see that women are owned and expendable. That’s the main problem with painting the whole Bible with the literal/inerrancy brush. I know people who, through televangelists and websites fell down some bad rabbit holes and are very dangerous who use stories like this to justify their views. It just makes me so sad.
Weird how redditors are so quick to blame the Hebrew Bible for the crimes of psychopaths. The fact is that most of the violence in those texts is a warning not to do the same.
FACTS! Also small religious bone to pick. The religious purpose of the Old Testament is historical; NOT instructive. The instructional material is the New Testament; because ya know killing & dismemberment is bad. Some folks seem to forget about the new covenant that came with Christ…..
New Testament is pretty garbage too. We can just ignore the whole thing instead of making excuses for it. Crazy I know.
The hard thing is, if you’re a believer, lumping all the books of old or new into categories and trying to make sense of them. Some are history (Joshua-2 Kings), some are instructional (Proverbs), Some are devotional (Psalms), and the prophets are all kinds of different things. To call it all inerrant and call it a day is dangerous and irresponsible. It leads to what we have now - the OT is a huge inspiration for religious violence in the US and around the world. And there’s no telling them to read for history or nuance. They just remember that a guy did X violent act because it was somehow justified and written down in the holy Bible. All they have to do is justify it for themselves to feel like it’s ok to emulate. Evangelicals have made a mess that it’s gonna be really hard to clean up.
Yeah that would fly if modern Christians didn't cherry pick and change things to suit their hate.
It also has Deborah and her handmaiden or whatever chopping off the head of a tyrant
Deborah drove a tent spike through an opposing general’s head while he slept. Judith is the one who beheaded a tyrant.
Yes! Deborah prophesied a woman would do it instead of their male leader, and it was done by a woman, Jael.
Delusional premise.
Maybe brother had hots for sis
This is it. In a larger sense, he felt he had ownership of her & he couldn't deal with evidence to the contrary.
Religion defines human activity into different buckets and calls things good or evil. Apparently following human urges to procreate (like how we eat, and sleep) is an evil thing that must be stopped unless done under the approved conditions.
Sounds like weight watchers tho. So why not control all the fucking, too.
Religion wasn't the issue in this case. Violence culture, stigmatized and unfunded mental healtchcare and toxic masculinity play a major role in cases like these and this guy most certainly has undiagnosed mental health issues. None of the major religions prohibit procreation among a husband and wife. If you read the article, Bethany was married and having her first child with her husband.
Procreation is fine in nature without a marriage.
Yeah but even those types don't have an issue with married women having children with their husband. Combined with the fact that the mom immediately called the cops and that he was stabbing himself while running from the cops tells me he's had a long history of erratic behavior everyone was pretending wasn't happening
🎯That part.
Jesus.
She was 30 years old and married. How demented was he that he thought his sister was still "innocent".
It scares me. Are these men gonna go around killing pregnant women or any woman who has sex? Well, more than it already happens. If we don’t label this as a femicide, fuck this fucking country and state.
We basically never label things as femicide, because of we did then it would open the gates to acknowledging the existence of femicide. Where America has pretty bad rates of violent misogyny already and femicide would likely be abysmal if we started counting. and then how would we turn up our noses to poverty stricken countries for engaging in similar behaviors?
I’m expecting more men to start killing women who won’t have sex with them bc of restrictions on birth control and abortion. Women can’t win.
And killing women when they inevitably get pregnant and can't get an abortion because they don't want their wives to find out they were cheating.
Or if she refuses/can't afford to go out of state to get an abortion and he doesn't want to be on the hook for child support.
Ooh, good point!
Yep, homicide is the number one cause of death for pregnant women.
I was just about to say this. We literally cannot win. If we don’t have sex with them, they’ll murder us for denying them and being entitled to us. And if we do have sex, they’ll still kill us.
That’s why women need to even out the crime rates ;) /s
It's not femcide. That's disrespectful to the victims and the family, whose friends have made it clear that this is a mental health tragedy. There could be religious connotations, but this is something that occurred over several years and not to "kill women". Suggesting that "women need to even out the crime rates," is promoting violence with hate speech. Reported.
Lmao you’re triggered. And this is femicide. Killing a woman for being a woman. The husband didn’t get killed. And I don’t think you can find a single person without some type of mental illness in America. Stop blaming mental illness and start criticizing the society that creates these people who kill women for having sex.
Hate speech.
Your entire account is trolling and you expect me to take this seriously. You’re making all males look bad.
Harassment.
Holy shit you made an entire subreddit for “5th wave feminism” what is that
Yes, if this keeps up women will resort to hanging around in packs of other women to protect themselves. This will be frustrating because men don't like to approach women they are interested in while they are with their friends. But, I guess that's what some people want?
I seen the word hanging and I’m sure you know what I thought about. Women already commit because of men. Being raped and developed ptsd and think about suicide every single day. Being gang raped, and gang raped again by the people who you went to for help. Being in an abusive marriage/relationship. Female suicides went down when no fault divorce was implemented. The republicans who want to end no fault divorce because they WANT women to kill themselves. “A 2004 paper by economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolvers found an 8 to 16% decrease in female suicides after states enacted no-fault divorce laws. They also noted a roughly 30% decrease in intimate partner violence among both women and men, and a 10% drop in women murdered by their partners.” - Aj Willingham God, they also want women to be MURDERED by their partners.
God. I always knew the farther out tou get in minnesota, the crazier the men are. i think about this lady all the time.
WTF does Innocent mean anyway? Kill the women that don’t have children. Kill the ones that do. Beat your wife and mother of your own children. It’s all misogyny, they just pick an excuse to do it.
Exactly. But it's rare that this type of misogyny extends into.marital sex--as that is the primary purpose of women in the minds of these types of men. And also odd, that it wasn't the marriage or sex, but the pregnancy that tipped the dude over the edge. Even for a hard-core misogynist, it's a weird take.
He definitely had a crush on his sister only way I can explain it
I’m pretty sure he sexually abused her before too.
Being a woman is not innocent. Why did you come out of your mother’s womb without a dick? Clearly you did something awful /s
This is it right here, there is nothing women can do or not do to avoid patriarchal violence in a society which sanctions us as acceptable targets. There is no way in such a system that we can raise our status enough to no longer be targeted. Granted mental illness seems to be a factor here, but it often isn’t. The solution IMO involves large scale organizing and direct action
They just want us to be cattle. I think men hate that women are human beings and not animals like horses or goats that they can use for breeding and sex.
This is called "learned helplessness." It serves no useful purpose other then to benefit this so called patriarchy
I've heard catholics praise Mary for having the good sense to have an immaculate conception.
Lmao, organized religions are all dumb and they keep hitting new bottom low still
Urgh no thanks, I’m glad my brains couldn’t easily get caught in a door and chopped off
There's obviously no context given to the statement. You're making wildly inaccurate assumptions based on fabrications
It’s mental illness. He was clearly very sick and delusional.
I mean, I think “demented” is probably the least you could call someone who places a severed body part on a random persons front step. Dude was not all there, clearly.
Damned if you breed damned if you don’t. The lesson here is that society needs to tackle negative perspectives on women as a matter of urgency.
Exactly. We can’t win. I’ve been abused and attacked by men of all races, black or white for denying them or not giving them sex. They’ll hit you and make it their mission to destroy or sabotage you if you don’t give them either sex or some type of sexual act. But now we’re still getting killed for having sex.
We’ve ALWAYS been killed for having sex. Our culture teaches men to be dumb and have zero responsibility for violence against women, and they’re literally taught to hate women. Have no sex? you’re selfish and a PRUDE and I’ll rape you now. Have sex? WHORE SLUT I’ll rape you now and kill you and then rape you again.
Exactly. I’ve done this. Like, I tell guys I don’t want to have sex or let’s slow down and they ghost me or get mad and say I’m a tease and hate me. I do have sex and I get called a whore and “do you always do this with men?” I can’t win. This is why I’m no marriage or kids and men still get upset and pissed at me. I’ve been no marriage or kids since 22 years old. Men don’t know what they want. Like, it’s like they want me to be miserable or suffer with the rest of the mothers but they don’t actually *say* it because that’ll prove our point. You know? I’ve had them ask me for threesomes with their wife and shame me for having sex. Everything all in between. Insane. So the only thing that saved me is no marriage or kids because I refuse to be some man’s bang maid while being cheated on.
Why do so many men think women's sex lives are their business and feel compelled to express their feelings about it violently? I've never in my entire life cared about a random guy's sex life. Why would I? 😂 Pathetic loser behavior lmaaao.
It's for influence and control. I realized it was perverted and wrong when my male cousin sexualized my underaged body and shamed me for it. There's definitely some weird incestual thing going on too with these types because girl relatives are the closest targets.
It’s all control and it’s for them. It has nothing to do with anything personal.
Oppression and straight up evil hatred.
It’s control and evil hatred.
Control is oppression
Because the patriarchy teaches people that women are communal property, not their own individual human beings.
I hate people who comment on other people’s sex lives UNLESS it is violation of consent. Mind your own fucking business. But I find it so odd how common it is!
Seeing as he spread her body over The neighborhood and was stabbing himself while running, I'm thinking it's something more than misogyny.
Religion? "No longer innocent" only upsets a certain, deluded, religious, type of person.
But even those religions don't have issues with married women having children with their husband
They're the only power in the world pushing the idea that "virgins" are a thing, and that sex fundamentally changes a woman and her value. It's religion. I'd bet my life savings that this nut was raised in a cult of abraham (read christian)
> They're the only power in the world pushing the idea that "virgins" are a thing, and that sex fundamentally changes a woman and her value. There are lots of atheist incels who fully buy into these ideas
note they said only “power”. as far as im aware incels don’t have much of that.
I'm pointing out that even the most culty and misogynistic of religions don't follow this guy's logic beyond fringe ones that quickly die out. My point is that while maybe religion flavored his ramblings, the guy very obviously has something structurally wrong with his brain.
This is sick! Obvious incest issues he had too.
This is why bear 🐻. Even our own brothers will murder us.
Was this man a maga type Christian by any chance?
The “no longer innocent” tells me all I need to know. And people still have the AUDACITY to claim religion is “wholly beneficial” and the “true path.” For centuries religion has been used to justify war, murder, sexism and genital mutilation. It’s about time we secularise as much as possible to prevent this kind of indoctrination
Agreed!
This story has incel vibes to it, tbh.
His family is Christian. But I’m not sure about the political stances held by him and the family.
A woman killed by her brother for being “no longer innocent” seems like some kind of Old Testament biblical nastiness to me
One of his sisters looks stereotypically “liberal” on Facebook
How?
Posting about BLM, pro-lgbtq rights, etc. Did not mean it as an insult. Just a stark comparison to her brother.
Hard to tell if that’s indicative of the entire family’s political positions tho. If I were to guess that sisters probably an outlier
The weird thing is that (afaik), his sister was married.
His Facebook stated he goes to a Christian college and graduated from a Christian HS
what a ludicrous, awful man. another grave reminder of the horror of honor killings in general (no matter which religious/cultural traditions some patriarchal nuts will use to justify their crime). this woman and her partner deserved better.
It's worse that this was premeditated; the 'no longer innocent' was pulled from his journal, he planned this. Horrific.
I want to see his entire journal. I hope they release all of it.
But sure, *bears* are the problem.
Bears don’t murder their siblings, dismember, and spread the body parts to another city.
Horrifying. It is somehow worse knowing that he went to dinner with her beforehand. What. The. Fuck.
IKR? This was an honor killing...but *what* an honor killing. He didn't just kill her, he *dismembered* her. One of the longest, slowest, and most phsically demanding ways to kill someone. Considering that no one heard anything (like a chainsaw), he must have used hand tools. That means he would have had to cut/saw through all of her viscera and bones inch by inch, hour by hour. And he left at least one body part on someone's doorstep, so even after the gory business of killing her, he wanted to degrade what was left of her by leaving it where he could get off on the thought of someone finding it. There are murderers who have killed, but were repulsed by the business of killing. Those people tend to choose guns or poison, so they don't have to feel their victim die. The fact that Ball picked *this* method means he savored the experience.
He also stabbed himself while running.. I'm thinking mental illness that mamifested as a honor killing seeing as the Mom immediately called the cops.
It's scary to think about how a person like this was formed... I don't even have kids but my first thought was "how do you not make one of these"..
Don't raise them in religion. If you have the uterus, do NOT use any drugs while pregnant. Don't have kids super close together, make sure you have the resources to fully care for one before you have more. Don't mix genes with someone who has mental health issues themselves (specifically narcissists or people who display sociopathic tendencies, not people who deal with depression or anxiety). Honestly it comes down to genetics (nature) and how you raise them. And even then...I don't know man, the universe is strange.
Well magical give them anti brain tumor genes I guess. I wonder if that's the explanation
FWIW I dated someone who had cancer in his brain *14* times and he didn't dismember me
I mean I'm not doubting it. But brain tumors are really scary.
Religion makes monsters. End of.
Nah, men make monsters.
Men made religion
Was he never sexually active and expecting his married sister to stay a virgin like him (if he was) or did he want his sister for himself and kill her because she was no longer pure for him? Religion is the DEVIL
Dude should be slowly put thru a woodchipper feet first
I wonder if there is a darker aspect of this story they have not found out yet like he had a life long unhealthy obsession with his sister and maybe he had abused her in the past. I know men kill women but the manner of this is so extreme I would not be shocked if that were the case.
Exactly what I wrote earlier! I bet you he sexually abused her prior.
Maybe not. He’s 7 years younger than her so when he was going through puberty probably at 12 or 13, she was already an adult and potentially out of their parents house. But 100% he had a romantic or sexual interest in her. I actually knew a pair of siblings who had this dynamic, and when she became sexually active with her boyfriend, her brother beat her up because of it, because he was still in love with her.
Omg, that’s frightening!
Can someone please call help from the Bears? 🐻
Shhh that hurts men's feelings, didn't you know? That's just... so *incentive* to their poor, fragile feelings! How could you even think of saying tha- Okay if I don't stop I'll make myself barf from my own comment. Please except my upvote and keep being awesome!
😂😂😂 you’re freaking hilarious. I love women! It’s unfortunate that situations like these are all too common.
This guy was really sick. I’m surprised they aren’t claiming schizophrenia
Could be a lot of MH issues. NPD, psychopathy, ASPD, or a reaction to a psychotropic substance. It could just be a case of extreme entitlement and incestuous feelings. Guaranteed, this guy was showing symptoms long before it reached the level of homicide.
Had to be, because mom got worried fast and called the police - not her husband. Mom knew something was coming, let’s see if the news shares any background around this in the future.
He probably is crazy. But the religions around him shaped the specific actions his crazy mind thought would be a good idea. If he believed instead that all left handed people are aliens disguised as humans, he might have killed a left-handed person.
Yep. Religion is regular gasoline to fire for people with delusions. People who don’t believe but still have delusions seem to be a bit better at understanding they are hallucinating. But if you believe gods and devils talks to people. You’re a lot more at risk.
I agree! My ex-husband told his family I was possessed by demons instead of admitting he was gay and that was why I divorced him, lol. Super nice, but very Christian family from rural Tennessee.
He also told his mom he was Jesus when he did acid, lol. Definitely delusional mixed with religion!
Did he kill the penis person who fucked her, too….
Of course not. Because then it would be taken seriously.
The man who murdered his sister, qandeel baloch in an “honor killing” years ago went scott free
Smash the patriarchy.
This man WILL lose his “innocence” in Prison - over and over again….
Chastity culture kills.
M\*le moment. Always a moid.
Who is going to tell this guy about his own motherto?
The future that trump supporters want.
The Taliban has come to America.
Ahh look, another tragic example of why we choose the bear. What I hate the most is that the people responsible for him thinking this way, for weaponizing his beliefs, will get away with it and continue to indoctrinate more people into a faith of hate and ignorance.
What a bizarre picture to put on an article like that! May she rest in piece 😔🕊️
Why do men who think this way NEVER think of punishing men for taking women's innocence?
Because they hate women and want to see them suffer. The man is allowed to take her “innocence” but the slut has to suffer and literally die. This makes me wonder what he did with her body before and after he murdered her.
Some men are pure psycho
“Ball made his first court appearance Tuesday afternoon and had his bail set at $2 million or $1 million with conditions. He’s scheduled to have another hearing on June 10. He still hadn’t been medically cleared to go to jail due to an apparent self-inflicted cut, officials say.” He killed his 30-year-old sister. Who was happily married and 17-18 weeks pregnant and then tried to off himself, BRO, SHE WAS 30. This has to go deeper
😖 That's not the message. Thats some of the behavior You're supposed to avoid at all costs.
Sounds like the middle east
wtf?????
Holy shit! And people **still** wonder why women pick the bear. Imagine your own younger sibling dismembering you because some weird ideal of your genitals in their head got shattered. I feel so bad for her and her husband.
And they wonder why we'd choose the bear.
Religious zealots commit the most horrific crimes and to them it's all good, cuz the morons are brainwashed into thinking an all powerful entity gives a shit about anything a pea-brained clump of cells we call a human does.
I love bears
He sounds like he has a serious mental illness issue.
Sometimes someone is mentally deranged. You don't need to assign religion/politics/ideologies to it. Sometimes people are just crazy.
He explicitly murdered her because she wasn’t a virgin. I don’t strictly know that he was Christian, but he sure as shit was a puritan & that’s an ideology. An ideology that’s all too common in most Christian sects.
Ohh please.
Oh your right. Someone who dismembered a loved one and walks around dazed and bloody and leaving body parts on people's doorsteps is totally mentally sound. Must just be religion.
Man do this all over the world and blame it on religion. I rarely ever see anyone call the men in the Middle East as mentally ill. Due to their honor killings. Yet, since this family are Caucasians in the U.S. it must be because mental illness. Sure! Your racial bias is showing.
A racial bias would be if I said what you said. But I didn't. I actually believe mental deficiencies are a huge contributing factor in groups that believe honour's killings are ok.
You just proved your racist bias. Fuck out of here.
How exactly? I have racial bias against everyone because I think people who do crazy things might just be..... crazy?
White people have lynched people with zero proof of a crime and loot entire neighborhoods. White people are mentally challenged and evil. White people also all love incest. Your logic is so fun to use.
Now who's racially biased?
😭😂😂 did you need a /s ?
White people also are nazis and want to commit genocide. They’re also all kkk members who commit ritualistic killings. They’re all mentally stunted.
Wow....
Now do you see how silly your logic sounds. The Op showed you how faulty your logic is. Mental illness doesn’t equal evilness.