James Tatsch was not charged with any crime. But when he was found unresponsive in an isolation cell at the Alcorn County Jail on Jan. 17, he had been locked up for 12 days. He died at the local hospital.
Tatsch was waiting for mental health treatment through Mississippi’s involuntary commitment process. Every year, hundreds of people going through the process are detained in county jails for days or weeks at a time while they wait for evaluations, hearings and treatment. They are generally treated like criminal defendants and receive little or no mental health care while jailed.
Mississippi Today and ProPublica previously reported that since 2006, at least 14 people have died after being jailed during this process. Tatsch, who was 48 years old, is at least the 15th. No one in the state keeps track of how often people die while jailed for this reason. The news organizations identified the deaths through lawsuits, news clips and Mississippi Bureau of Investigation reports. MBI investigates in-custody deaths only at the request of the local sheriff or district attorney.
Calvinism tells you/shows you everything.
Calvinism started with what sounds like reasonable religious philosophy. If God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, then God surely knows the end of history and whose souls will be saved and whose won’t be saved.
The original notion was closer to a piece of philosophy produced by preists who studied the Bible extensively, who likely assumed that as mere humans, they could not know the mind of God.
When this philosophy was passed to the commoner, however, the commoners decided it meant they could tell who was going to hell and who wasn’t, since it was already pre-determined, right?
At no point did anyone stop and yell “Blaspheme! It is blaspheme to claim to know the mind of God, a thing that is unknowable!” No, people just decided they could figure out who was going to hell and fuck what God thinks anyway.
It’s the same thing, it really comes down to something as simple as tribalism. They want a protected in-group but they also need an out-group to attack. It’s helpful to have a vague and nebulous enemy so any time someone wrongs you, you can instantly accuse them of being part of the shadow groups out to get you. It really prevents you from ever having to think about your own behavior much or at all, and focuses everything on a shadowy group or figure (Satan!) that they cannot even prove is there.
Is it any wonder most of these people are religious, specifically Christian, already? It’s like this kind of shit is baked into the religion.
It’s pretty well baked into 2/4 of the Abrahamic religions. I don’t know how Judaism is actually practiced well enough to claim that it’s baked into Judaism.