Are the dark ages returning ... magic "8" ball says ... stay tuned. A woman in the Boston Area is on trial for starving her infant son to fulfill a prophecy made by her sister-in-law.

A woman accused of starving her baby to death to fulfill a religious prophecy broke down in tears Friday as she listened to a defense psychologist recount her description of desperately trying to breast feed her son in the final days of his life.
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Robidoux was a member of a tiny, Attleboro-based religious sect called ''The Body,'' which rejects modern medicine.

Ebert said Robidoux told him she began withholding solid food from her 10-month-old son Samuel after her sister-in-law told her about a message she received from God: Karen was ''too vain'' and God planned to punish her by killing one of the twins she believed she was pregnant with at the time.

Several months later, Robidoux gave birth to a baby boy; she had not been pregnant with twins.
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But Ebert said because Robidoux was pregnant, she was producing only trace amounts of breast milk. She told him she continued to try to breast feed Samuel every hour, as called for by the prophecy. He said that Robidoux told him that Samuel became gaunt and weak, and was so hungry that he was literally eating flesh from her nipples.

Ebert said Samuel's starvation came after years in which Karen Robidoux was frequently berated by other members of the sect, including her husband, Jacques Robidoux. He said other sect members thought she was too thin and too pretty, and was not raising her children properly.

I'm sort of surprised they did not just cut out the middle-man and build a giant fire-god representation and start feeding it small animals and unruly children.