Grecorivera5150 wrote:Can religion be considered a form of child abuse??
Yes, if the beliefs and teaching methods of the parent are radical enough, then certainly it could be considered child abuse... but this is certainly no less true for parents who teach atheism.
Grecorivera5150 wrote:The use of fear tactics and imposed guilt on a young mind in a coercive way can have debilitating affects.
There does seem to be some truth to this statement. Hollywood movies portray the myth that serial killers are highly oversexed types, with Porn photos on the wall, etc. The truth is pretty much just the opposite. They may think about sex a lot, but if so they were probably raised in a very strict family where any discussion or expression of sexual desires was strictly taboo. As adults, they are conflicted. Torn between the guilt of wanting sex and the belief that they are doing wrong--and killing is (basically) the way they obtain sexual gratification.
This, of course, is a generalization and an oversimplification... But it tends to be a universal psychological phenomena that we see repeated over and over in many different ways. For example, radical women feminist who (like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon) promote censorship to a radical degree. Women like them write books portraying the pornography they oppose to demonstrate what people should not be exposed to. Some of these radical censorship feminist have been known to spend many days using microscopes to search the pictures in school text for subliminal (i.e. microscopic) images of pornograpphy--which they claim to find imbedded in the pictures. In other words, they use the excuse of what they claim to abhor, to satisfy their need to obsess about sex.
Similarly, radical Muslims practice a form of religion that places severe taboos on sexual practices--and in much the same way, they use these taboos as an excuse to do great evil against those they perceive as promoting these practices.
So yes, there are many ways in which out-of-control... irrational and immoral religious beliefs and behavior can cause deviant behavior, of various kinds.
On the other hand, it is also true that teaching a child to feel guilt when they act 'badly' is a valuable tool for teaching them to be good citizens. When I was younger, I used to steal things on a fairly regular basis. One day I saw a GI Joe doll in someone's back yard and I took it home with me. When my mother saw it she demanded to know where I got it, and she took me to return it and appologize. It's a lesson I've never forgotten, and I've never stolen since.
Now, I'm certainly not suggesting that athiests parents are incapable of doing the same thing my mother did--and thus teaching the same lesson without a religious framework--however, religion does provide an organized way of instilling social values into a child. And learning these social values is (essentially) the process of building the child's conscience.
Among poor people, the biggest factor that determines the future welfare of the child (whether they'll stay on welfare... or end up in prison) is probably whether or not they have a father who lives in the home and actively participates in raising them. But this statistic also appears to be tied to how religious the parents (particularly the mother) is.
For example, consider the following Princton study:
blog.heritage.org/2012/05/01/family-fac ... ell-being/...study finds that mothers’ religious attendance was associated with lower risk of displaying aggressive and delinquency behaviors among five-year-olds. Compared to no religious attendance, even a moderate level of attendance (e.g., several times a year on average) was associated with reduced risk of behavioral problems in children.
Moreover, single mothers’ religious attendance was also linked to their being more involved in their children’s lives, more support from the children’s fathers, less parenting stress, and lower likelihood of using corporal punishment.
Given findings such as these, I think it's reasonably safe to assume that there is a direct correlation between an individual's upbringing (degree of parent's religious attitudes) and the likelihood that the child will end up in prison--or even just in a bad job, or no job.
Given this, I think it is quite clear that a child would have far more grounds for claiming child abuse against a parent who raised them as an athiest than they would against a parent who raised them with a religious background.
Grecorivera5150 wrote: Throw in familial pressure to conform on top of the emotional coercion and you have a potential recipe for massive amounts of existential angst during critical years of human development.
This is not totally without merit. I've long believed that it isn't (sexual) abuse of children that causes the most damage in such cases, but rather the child's perception that what they've done (or been forced to do) is wrong. In other words, it is the media's obsession with the utter wrongness of child abuse that causes the child the MOST damage, because they see that and are negatively affected by it. Years ago, children often got married by the time they were 13--and I strongly suspect that they generally suffered no significant psychological difficulties because they had sex that young. It was a perfectly natural and socially acceptable thing to do.
The important thing to understand, however, is that this same "learning" process that wracks sexually abused children with guilt is the same "learning" process that tends to prevent a child from committing crimes in general. Traditions (including religious ones) are the social glue that holds a society together and keeps it strong, because a society that has a strong religiously based moral compass is one where most of the children have developed (i.e. learned to have) a strong conscience... which tends to prevent them from doing wrong. When that same society looses that moral compass, social rot creeps in, and the society inevitably becomes more and more corrupt.
It's not that an atheist CAN'T have a strong moral fiber, or that a religious person can't developed a warped and twisted one... but on average, the statistics favor those who have religion in their lives to guide them.
-- Updated Tue Jul 03, 2012 5:54 pm to add the following --
Tyler Durden wrote:Religion is child abuse in a way that you don't leave a child a free decision. It's indoctrination, forcing the local believes onto the child.A child doesn't have the ability to differenciate from right or wrong, or to have the courage to tell their parents that they don't like the believes of their parents or friends to be forced on them ,in the end , let your children develope their own oppinions .
This doesn't make a lot of sense. How many children do you know who would choose to go to school, if given the choice? So is it child abuse to force a child to go to school?
How many children would choose to brush their teeth, or take a bath? Is it abuse to force them to do these things? Or to make them eat their vegetables, and other healthy foods? Is it abuse to make them wear a coat when it's cold and snowy outside? Is it abuse to make them stop hitting their little brother or sister?
You yourself exposed the fallicy in your own logic when you said, "A child doesn't have the ability to differentiate between right and wrong." This is something they need to develop through the guidiance of parents, teachers, society, religion and so forth. And organized religion tends to be one of the more effective means of instilling this guidiance.
- By Fried Egg
- By Pattern-chaser