Teen Tortured Over Fortune Teller’s Claims
August 5th, 2010
|
| Share |
A truly horrific story of what happens when belief trumps reason. In this case, it’s a fortune teller.
Via NT News Australia:
Fortune teller blamed for teen ‘torture’
Nhung Tri Tran and Trien Tran pleaded guilty to assaulting Leilani dos Santos on February 17, but not guilty yesterday to threatening to kill her and depriving her of her liberty.Ms dos Santos, 18, told Darwin Magistrates Court the couple was like family to her until they believed she had stolen money from the barber shop she worked at with Ms Tran.
She was living with the couple as well, and said she returned home in the early hours of February 17 to have Mr Tran begin to strangle her before beating her unconscious.
Ms dos Santos, speaking from a “vulnerable witness” room, told the court she was tied up as the couple beat her and threatened to kill her, her boyfriend’s family and her sister.
She said Ms Tran told her a Vietnamese fortune teller told the couple the person who had stolen the handbag was close to them, and was someone they loved.
Ms Tran also allegedly told Ms dos Santos they would cut off her fingers, but they loved her and would inject her with heroin, so she would not feel it.
Ms dos Santos said Mr Tran beat her in the back with a meat cleaver, threatened her with a samurai sword and burnt her arm with a cigarette.
Ms dos Santos said the couple had a Lady Gaga CD playing loudly. “I was screaming,” she said. “I was hoping maybe somebody would break down the door and help me.”
Ms Tran’s lawyer Peter Elliott suggested to Ms dos Santos that she had embellished the story to get victim’s compensation.
Ms dos Santos told the court she escaped the ties before dawn, but could not leave the Coconut Grove house because it was deadlocked and she had no keys.
She said she was allowed to leave about 8am, and after Ms Tran said they could pretend it never happened.
The hearing continues.
Wow. One might ask whether the person(s) who committed the act or the fortune teller is really to blame here. I’d say both are, although I’d consider the two who tied up their employee the more guilty. Fortune tellers are always committing fraud whenever they do business, and in this case, providing false information resulted in very direct harm.
Still, that’s no excuse to do what this couple did. In fact, even if they had real evidence of their employee steaming that did not come from a lying fortune teller, this would be no better. If an employee steals from a business, it’s grounds for firing them and going to the proper authorities – not for tying up said employee and beating and burning them. It’s absolutely amazing that they’d even try to bring up the fortune teller’s story as some kind of mitigating circumstances.
It’s not terribly surprising to see things like fortune telling and psychics go together with such violence. People who seek out such services are not the most rational or balanced members of society. The fortune tellers themselves have no problem lying about something that may cause harm to the reputation of another or worse, get them fired or beaten mercilessly.
I really hope that Nhung Tri Tran and Trien Tran spend some real time in prison. By “real time” I mean a good chunk of their natural lives (20 years perhaps) in a real prison. Crimes directly against another human being and intentionally causing bodily harm to another crosses a line of the most fundamental kind and can never be tolerated. It should always be treated as an act that separates an individual from the greater society. To hold a burning cigarette to another person, hear the flesh sizzle and smell it burn a they scream out for mercy is not something that can be rectified with a fine and community service.
But I’m sure they won’t get any hard time, because in most industrial countries our prisons are too full with pot smokers and prostitutes to accommodate murderers and torturers. They’ll probably get sentenced to a very short period in minimum security and then be out before the formal sentence is even half done.
As for the fortune teller, I’d be happy to see them run out of business and have them have to pay for all the medical expenses for Leilani dos Santos’s treatment plus some additional pain and suffering money. Psychics and fortune tellers are criminals, but their acts are often best dealt with in civil court, since they rake in so much money.
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 5th, 2010 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Culture, Misc, Paranormal, Politics, religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
View blog reactions
August 5th, 2010 at 10:09 pm
What amazes me is this: You, as I understand it being an atheist, object very deeply to someone being harmed like this and seem to have no doubt that such behavior is never acceptable. Myself also a non-believer, I have to agree.
And yet atheists are so commonly portrayed as uncaring or downright evil immoral people.
Strange isn’t it?
Quote Comment
August 5th, 2010 at 10:23 pm
Q said:
No, typical. Rather than argue for the truth of their religious beliefs, or produce evidence that religion is useful, apologists for God often attack atheism as though it were another religion. We are told that atheism is dogmatic, intolerant, irrational, etc. This homily has the virtue of being easy to remember and reproduce—and it now reverberates ceaselessly within the echo-chamber of religious discourse. It relies, however, on a false idea about atheism: that atheism is a belief system, when in reality it is the rejection of all belief systems not founded on fact and reason.
In reality it is just an attempt at re-framing so they can claim that every fault they manifest has an analogue in atheism
Quote Comment
August 5th, 2010 at 11:07 pm
Yes, one of those really sickening things especially when you try to imagine it. Words can’t do it justice how this kind of experience must be for the young lady subjected to it.
I don’t know how much paranormal belief factors in or not. These people clearly had something very wrong with them.
By the way, I also agree anyone who commits murder, rape, torture or any crime like that, where they are knowingly doing major harm to another person is doing something outside normal human conduct and is showing a side that is dangerous, because they lack the kind of empathy that would make most of us stop. I think people who commit such crimes should always get the book thrown at them and serve very hard criminal time.
I’m going off normal topics though, because, obviously, this is more politics and social policy than science. I’m not a religious person, though. I don’t see how that’s an issue. Burning someone and tying them up and hitting them is just not something a normal person does and anyone should be left in horror by such an action, religion or not.
Quote Comment
August 6th, 2010 at 12:46 am
An Actual Scientist said:
The issue is that they did so believing the say-so of a fortune-teller, rather than look for real evidence. They acted out of the conviction that the woman was guilty, on nothing more than faith in the practice of divination, essentially as part of a religious ritual.
Quote Comment
August 7th, 2010 at 9:02 am
Truely sickening!
Off topic for this blog I guess, but I totally agree on one thing: more time in prison for those who commit violence against their fellow man or who commit other crimes that severely impact the victim! Less time (or none at all) for marijuana and other drugs, prostitution and various crimes against ‘morality,’ which are almost always direct descendants of religious-based laws.
Sure, for you or me it would be impossible to bring ourselves to watch someone suffer and continue to torture them. However, there’s a way to avoid this feeling of human sympathy and basic aversion to harm others. All you have to do is convince yourself that there is a higher power or mystical magical force that makes it all okay. If their screams and begging starts to get to you just say to yourself “this is a test of my faith to see if I have the faith to keep doing this”
Quote Comment
August 9th, 2010 at 2:47 pm
Q said:
Strange to some theists, perhaps. Not to me. I’m a Christian; I believe Jesus came to Earth not to teach us how to be moral people but to console us for the fact that we so often fail to live up to our own ideals, and to teach us that maybe we’re focusing on the wrong thing when we get all rule-bound. In my own limited experience, there is no group which has a monopoly on either morality or cruelty, and morality tends to be defined by culture, not religion. (There are cultures where religion may appear to dominate, such as Saudi Arabia, but this is an illusion; religion is always subordinate to culture. In places like Saudi Arabia, religion has simply been co-opted by the culture and forged into a weapon of enforcement. This is what usually happens when one religion dominates, and especially when it’s a state religion, and why I’m fiercely opposed to religion in government.)
I’m not clear that this was a case of religion gone horribly wrong, though. I’m seeing a story where a con-artist, in an attempt to create a story which would give the appearance of psychic knowledge and justify her fee, unknowingly but recklessly fingered a dear friend. What happened next, from the information given in the article, appears to be more a case of fury and rage than faith. Maybe there’s more that I don’t know, but it looks like as if they were convinced the girl was guilty and became enraged at the betrayal this would represent. No ritualistic aspects at all. (Not that ritual would make any more okay. It’s so far beyond the pale that it wouldn’t make a lot of difference to how horrible it is.)
I think the couple should definitely receive serious jail time (assuming, of course, that the allegations are proven — due process, and all) and that the fortune teller should be charged with making a false accusation. Only problem is that since the fortune teller didn’t finger a specific person, it can’t be proven that the fortune teller was actually wrong; what if a *different* loved one stole the purse? It might be very difficult indeed to make the charge stick.
And that’s depressing, quite frankly. I wonder if the victim could sue the fortune teller for recklessness?
Quote Comment
August 9th, 2010 at 3:06 pm
Calli Arcale said:
To be a Christian, by definition, you must accept Jesus as your personal saviour, and believe that through His one perfect sacrifice, The Lamb purchased redemption from your sins for all time. You cannot worship Christ uncrucified. (sez every church)
Calli Arcale said:
And the difference between this and someone claiming to have the power to be an intercessor between you and God?
Quote Comment
August 9th, 2010 at 4:21 pm
Calli Arcale said:
I’m not going to question your belief or say that it is immoral. Certainly, I would never say that there are not plenty of religious people of good ethics. However, are you implying that being an atheist is inherently immoral and that therefore it’s acceptable to presume a non-believer lacks morality?
Quote Comment
August 10th, 2010 at 10:23 am
DV82XL said:
That is correct. We (meaning humans, now, not just Christians) tend to torture ourselves and one another over our misbehaviors. We believe a price must be extracted for every crime. Once that attitude gets applied to morality or “holiness”, the path to madness is clear.
Christ’s death made that unnecessary. I look at it this way: by paying the ultimate price for all of our sins, Christ was basically saying “look, the price is paid. Now get over it and stop beating one another up over this stuff.” I see it as God deciding to try working by *our* rules and see if that gets through to us.
There are two big differences:
1) Intercessory prayer is generally about praying for God to intercede rather than divination, at least, it is in the mainstream monotheistic faiths, which generally teach an aloof deity; exceptions seem most common among the animist faiths and possibly also Hinduism and some forms of ancestor worship. This is straight-up divination, not asking for a deity to intercede.
2) Most significantly, the fortune teller doesn’t appear to have been a priest or other cleric. The fortune teller doubtless used a lot of superstitious mumbo jumbo to create the right atmosphere, but it looks a lot more like a run-of-the-mill con artist, who probably did not actually believe what he/she was predicting. “All it takes is a cunning imagination and a glib tongue.” That makes the fortune teller much more complicit than if they’d actually believed they had some sort of ESP.
Quote Comment
August 10th, 2010 at 10:29 am
drbuzz0 said:
No, good heavens! That’s actually the opposite of what I was trying to say.
Religions like to say that they are the source of morality. But they’re not. Religions get their morality from their followers, not the other way around. This is why it is not at all surprising to meet moral atheists. Most people are moral, regardless of their religious convictions, because they grew up in a culture which taught them morals.
A few extra points:
* There are no absolute morals. Not even “thou shalt not kill”; even our own culture permits (or even demands) certain killings.
* Everyone is raised with morals, whether this is intentional or not. It’s like being raised with language; we pick up on it as children, innately, just by being exposed to other people and having to interact with them.
* Religions make a big deal about morality, and may impose harsh penalties on violators. This is not because religions make morality. It’s because the people who run the religion want to impose a certain morality on others and realize that religion is a very effective weapon.
Quote Comment
August 10th, 2010 at 12:41 pm
Calli Arcale said:
As comforting as this might be to those that believe, (and as theological inaccurate, I’m afraid) little proof for this exists beyond the interpretation of a few mouldering, poorly transcribed, poorly translated Bronze Age texts.
Calli Arcale said:
From an atheist perspective, asking an imaginary friend to use magical powers to effect the future, and imagining that you can see into the future are both based on delusions. The fortune-teller in this story may well have believed deeply in what she was doing – as much so as the ordained that pray over the sick believe that what they are doing works.
The issue is not the type of delusion, as much as it is the unsupported belief that these actions are valid without any proof or evidence beyond faith that it is so. It is this aspect: the acceptance of something as being true, without proof, that is the issue, and the point where these two practices are similar, and is reason both should be rejected outright by rational people.
Calli Arcale said:
That the divinator was a charlatan is not implied in the story, and if you have ever been to a full-blown High Mass in a Medieval Cathedral back in the days when it was sung in Latin, it would be clear that the architecture, the decorations, the music, the incense, and the chanting in an important-sounding language that few understood, was nothing but theatre as well.
As for being a priest, I cannot see how one deluded fool placing his hands on another transmits any sort of power or authority, beyond whatever of these things any other belief system thinks its rituals do.
Quote Comment
August 10th, 2010 at 1:29 pm
I’m sorry, DV82XL, I just care about precision. And I care a great deal about skepticism. It’s easy to just toss it all in a sack and beat it with a stick, as that lovely Irish comedian suggested, but they’re not all the same thing, and if you want to effectively attack them, you need to attack them *specifically* rather than just saying “oh, you fortune tellers and religious people, you’re all the same.” It’s an efficient way to tell them off, but it doesn’t debunk them.
There is a vast and crazy range of human belief. Although there are common traits rooted in the way humans think and learn, and enough overlap that many people are in multiple categories, they are different and it is the differences that make them so fascinating. There are the religious; there are the superstitions or spiritualist; there are the conspiracy theorists; there are the denialists . . . and then there are the intentional frauds. There are subcategories to the intentional frauds, ranging from idle pranksters all the way to the full-blown con artists.
I also like to categorize their methods. Divination is practiced by all types, either by supposed communication with spirits or some sort of psychic gift. One of the more quirky versions is dowsing, which at its best, is the ideomotor effect in action. (At it’s worst, it’s fakery.) So, actually, is the laying on of hands, which you mentioned in your last paragraph. Yes, priests do it, but it is also done in the secular area, and is gaining a frightening amount of acceptance in the form of “therapeutic touch”, which is basically Reiki with a new name. It’s not limited to churches. Reputable nursing organizations are pushing it, and that worries me.
Maybe part of the reason I harp on this distinction is I have a particular interest in quackery, particularly the intentional con-artist variety. That may have made me a little more cynical than you, in that I strongly suspect this fortune teller was like most fortune tellers, out for a quick buck and knowing that details add versimilitude to the claim. The objective isn’t belief. The objective is to separate the mark from their money, and any fallout from that is completely irrelevant to the con artist.
There is a very important reason to remember that a lot of these people are *intentional* frauds rather than deluded souls, and that’s that debunking a con artist is like trying to nail jelly to a wall. Proving them wrong doesn’t dissuade them. They already know they’re wrong, and they are free to make stuff up as much as they like, which gives them the advantage in the public arena. A believer will generally be constrained by what they believe. A con artist is limited only by their own imagination, and if things get too hot, they’ll just pull up stakes and set up shop somewhere else, with fresh marks.
If this person is a true believer, he/she may be saddened at this turn of affairs and use more caution in the future, knowing that innocent people can suffer. But if, as I think is more likely the case, this person is a fraud, they will do it again, knowing that they won’t get in trouble for it and not really caring beyond that.
Quote Comment
August 10th, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Calli I have a great deal of respect for you, as you are a rational thinker, and a valued commenter on these pages. I would rather end this without resolution than get into a non-productive fight on this issue.
I agree that there is a difference between those that believe in the utility of their religious practices, and those that exploit those beliefs in others for personal gain. However I will not agree that there is any substantive difference between one belief, held without proof as faith, and another such, based on the underlying dogma of each. Nor do I think we can assume, without more facts, that the fortune-teller in this instance did not believe in the accuracy of the prediction, or the efficacy of the process used.
I will be happy to leave it like that.
Quote Comment
August 10th, 2010 at 9:36 pm
DV82XL said:
That I can actually agree with, believe it or not.
I’m just cynical about self-professed psychics and fortune tellers, so my gut reaction is to think “fraud” as the parsimonious explanation for that kind of thing. I agree, there’s nothing in the article that says he/she was *not* some sort of religious seer; I just tend to read “fortune teller” and think of “Dial a Psychic”.
Quote Comment
November 9th, 2010 at 8:05 am
And it brings tears to my eyes to read what nice thing’s youve said. I hope they will get jail.
But all both know thats a dream, plus there was 3 of them and my dog. but my dog cant be a witness which is unfortunate . Thank you all for your thoughts.
Quote Comment