The Knucklehead of the Day award

Today's winner is The Thawee Kara Anant Buddhist temple. They get the award for the following.

BANGKOK (Reuters) - A Thai Buddhist temple has been reprimanded by religious authorities for selling amulets containing the ashes of cremated infants to raise money for a plot of land and a crematorium, an official said on Tuesday.

The bodies of 28 foetuses or infants who died of natural causes were cremated legally at the temple's ageing incinerator, they said, as Thailand's craze for Jatukam Ramathep amulets promising wealth showed no signs of easing.

"It is not illegal, but it is inappropriate," an official of the local office of Buddhism told Reuters.

"The chief provincial monk has submitted a formal reprimand letter to the temple's abbot," said the official, who declined to be identified.

The Thawee Kara Anant temple in a northern Bangkok suburb was taking advantage of a craze for the amulets that promise to make their owners "super rich" or "rich without reason" sweeping across predominantly Buddhist Thailand.

In July, it made 140,000 disc-shaped amulets about the size of a coffee-cup lid from a variety of herbs and human ashes and had sold most of them, a monk at the temple said.

I'm pretty open minded so far as religion goes. What the temple did involved was superstition and nothing to do with worshiping Buddha. A dead child's ashes is not something to be sold. The local Buddhist authorities condemn what the temple is doing, and that's good enough for me. I make The Thawee Kara Anant Buddhist temple today's Knucklehead of the Day.

Linked to- Adam, Big Dog, Bright & Early, Cao, Conservative Thoughts, Dumb Ox, Mad Pigeon, Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson, Pirate's Cove, Planck's Constant, Right Voices, Right Wing Nation, Rosemary, Webloggin,