Baby Maddox: Dad Says He Asked God For Sign Not To Kill 21 Month Old Baby With Bat, But It Never Came
Many Christians – especially the conservative ones – are so infatuated with parenthood and marriage, they act as though anyone who is single or childless is “second class” or some type of failure.
Some Christians, depending on their branch of theology, actually teach Christian adults to marry young and have lots of children, because their children will later be an “army of God” to turn America back to God.
It does not seem to bother the people who teach this and believe in it that the Bible does not teach this concept, especially not under the New Testament, where Paul said it is better to remain single (and hence celibate and hence childless). The New Testament does not advocate “bedroom evangelization.”
It remains there are a lot of Christians who conflate being married, having sex, and/or having children with being an adult. They cannot conceive of anyone being a mature, functioning, full-fledged adult without a marriage license or a kid. They seem to think being a parent (or having a spouse) automatically makes a person more ethical, loving, and so on. Stories like this one, which I feature on my blog every so often, disprove these views.
I do wonder, if there is a God, why did he not speak to this guy, or send this guy a sign, when the guy said, “God, if you are there and don’t want me to kill her, send me a sign.”
I know about free will, I do (and I don’t mean how Calvinists define “free will” – I disagree with Calvinist theology). I know this guy made a choice, but God could have easily intervened by sending that sign, all to spare the girl’s life. But he chose to remain silent and do nothing. I don’t get it.
Anyway, I don’t see how fathering a child made the guy in this story any more loving, mature, godly, or responsible. Quite the opposite.
Baby Maddox’s father, Ryan Lawrence, a New York man accused of battering his 21-month old baby with a baseball bat, burning her body and dumping it into a harbor entered a guilty plea for the gruesome crime, NY Daily News is reporting.
According to investigators, the 25-year-old man had taken Baby Maddox to an isolated location where he struck her repeatedly with a wooden baseball bat. Lawrence then “placed her body and the baseball bat in a prepared fire pit for three hours” before dumping the little girl’s remains into the Inner Harbor which connects to the Syracuse Onondaga Lake.
A Daily Mail report revealed that the New York father admitted beating Baby Maddox to death because he got pissed over the attention she got after surviving eye cancer. The Onondaga County District Attorney Bill Fitzparick said it was a possible motive for Ryan Lawrence to commit murder.
However, a Syracuse News story paints a different picture of a financially struggling Ryan Lawrence who had a history of mental illness. Syracuse police had been called to deal with his mental issues before, even though they never arrested him. Police say the message that Ryan also left for his wife, Morgan when he disappeared with Baby Maddox suggested that he was suffering from “mental impairment.”
Ryan Lawrence met Morgan Forster in a tea store where they both worked. Morgan got pregnant with Baby Maddox and they got married. Before Baby Maddox’s first birthday, the couple saw that one of her brown eyes was turning dark.
A trip to the doctor revealed that she had cancer of the retina. For months, the couple drove the little girl into New York City, where she went through grueling six-hour chemotherapy treatments to fight the tumor and the blood vessels feeding it.
After she pulled through, Ryan Lawrence killed Baby Maddox, whose life he had battled to save less than a year before. An Amber alert was issued for Baby Maddox, February last year when Morgan said she was missing along with her father. Morgan had appealed to her husband on television to return Baby Maddox home.
…Baby Maddox had been dead for more than two days. She was pulled out of the water February 23. Ryan’s family is still baffled over how a doting father they thought they knew could kill his own daughter in such a brutal way.
“What we saw of Ryan is that he loved Baby Maddox immensely and so we are struggling to make sense out of this tragedy, but we are not successful and know that we will never be.”
…Ryan Lawrence said he had prayed to God to give him a sign not to go through with what he had planned, but he didn’t.
“God if I’m not meant to kill her, make her stumble.”
Christian Pundit 