Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: more religion and child abuse

Even a mother's day sermon can be abusive. Most preachers laud mothers as being holy and deserving of love and adulation on mother's day. If you are a child who is having the crap regularly beat out of you, it can be easy to absorb the message that since all mothers are good you must be bad and mom has the right to abuse you. The most sensitive children are the most likely to turn this message in on themselves and face a lifetime of self image problems.

MOM and DAD are set up by religious figures to be all good without any checking to find out if this mom or dad is good.

I have always felt there should have been an 11th commandment: Honour thy children.

Truly sad. I just hope that their self-removal from orthodoxy is part of a larger modern trend. [sigh, insistent ignorance.]

This is so sad. I am glad though that they have each other for comfort and support. I only hope that their children also see how much harm religion can cause. Religion can be considered child abuse.

It seems to me, for someone who is singled out as being strident, Richard Dawkins is anything but. Once, after giving a talk, Dawkins had a conversation with a woman who mentioned that she was angry about her religious upbringing. Dawkins seemed genuinely surprised. He almost did a double take as she said it.

But when I heard it, I thought, of course she's angry. I'm very angry about my religious upbringing. I don't know why more people don't say it, but a Catholic upbringing is inherently cruel. Imagine saying to a child, you had better do as I say and even think as I tell you to, or else I am going to press your hand against this red hot stove burner. That's pretty much what you tell children if you are raising them as Catholics. The threat of hell is child abuse. It is a particularly vicious brainwashing method used against those who are the most vulnerable and used by the people that children depend on for their very survival. It is a trauma, and I do not use the term lightly.

Many children accept it and internalize it, but then refuse to think about the matter. The damage is done and they toe the line. But some children, the ones who are more intellectually inclined, the ones who really want to learn about the world and the way it works, are terrified by the threat.

We had an archetypal Irish fire and brimstone priest at the church my family attended. He was loud, aggressive and arrogant. He gave frightening sermons. In confession I told him that I had missed mass. He asked why. I told it was because my family had gone sailing. He told me that I was going to sail right into the lake of Hell. Nice, eh? I was eight.

I became convinced I was a dreadful sinner. I bit my nails, ground my teeth and wet the bed. And what kind of sin, I'd like to know, is a eight year old capable of doing?

By the time I was eleven, I'd thrown it all off and had become an atheist. I just couldn't reconcile the idea of an loving god with this hell stuff. And the more I examined the church, the more illogical and toxic it seemed.

My parents insisted I continue to attend mass. On the way home, I'd pick apart the noxious narcissistic sermon. More than once, my father pulled the car over to the side of the road so that he could turn around and slap me in the face.

The absurdity of it was that my father was, for all intents and purposes, an atheist. He never spoke of god. I stuck to my guns and eventually just stopped going. I preferred being hit to going to church. By the time I was about thirteen, my parents gave up EXCEPT when my father's aunt was visiting us. Then we all had to pretend that we were Catholic. But after I stopped going, the rest of my family, parents included, had stopped going. No one mentioned church. No one mentioned god. No one in my family believed a bit of it.

So why did they go at all? Why did they make me go and even become confirmed? It was the culture in which they were raised, but it was no longer the culture in which they lived. It was never about god, it was about the community and their family. It was about ethnicity, an "us versus them" tribal mindset which was NOT a good thing. It wasn't about pride in self, it was about fear of the different. And they too had been raised and indoctrinated in this system.

Being raised in a religion is brainwashing. It is a kind of hazing. It locks people into a tribe identity. And there are punishments for stepping outside of the group.

If you don't buy it, how far are you willing to go to step away, let alone stand up against it all? As Richard Dawkins says, you aren't allowed to criticize it. Well some of us do, and we are called strident. Most folks just don't dare speak up at all. The ones who do are the most determined and the ones with the keenest sense of justice. We'll take the hits in order to speak speak openly in the face of the taboo. Not allowed to question religion? Only if I agree to play their game, in which they get to make the rules. No.

Being raised in a religion, even if no one ever lifts a hand against you, ever sexually assaults you, ever denies you medical care is an experience of abuse. It is emotional abuse. It is intellectual abuse. It is not right.

Ellen, that was an excellent comment!

People have said the Book of Revelation is the Mein Kampf of the Bible. If God is so loving, then that book is an abusive threat to his "children".

So let me get this right. You (and Dawkins) want to define the teaching of beliefs to children by their parents and their cultural subgroup that you both disagree with as "abuse" because you know better what "truth" is? That sounds awfully close to what the fundies in this country want to do with my secular beliefs. To force their perception of reality upon me and upon my children and to thereby save my children from me and my (secular) beliefs.

Look, I have no problem characterizing the Orthodox as insular and fundamentalist, as sure of their ownership of "the truth" as any other fundie or Dawkins for that matter. There is a huge culture war in Israel between the ultra-religious minority and the secular majority that this video bit is just one volley in, and once Israel is no longer worried about its external threats it will be fought with cut-throat ferocity I am sure. I have no problem recognizing that parents can physically and emotionally abuse their children and even with the possibility that fundamentalist families (of any set) are at a greater risk of committing such abuse as they are certain that it is for a greater good. I have no problem with the concept that religious identities are so many granfalloons, as Vonnegut coined, like being a Hoosier, or an an Elk, part of the human condition's sad but real need to segregate ourselves into a variety of "us"es and "them"s. But the answer surely cannot be intolerance in the other direction, defining those beliefs as the "other", to be defined by their mere existence as abuse. For surely then from their POV, and their surety in the truth of it, we secularists are abusing our kids as well by denying them, as referred to in the piece, the "gold" and forcing them to live in the "garbage".

Don S.; You've gone beyond the example. Your second para. lists a lot of things you have no problem with and they are the things we posted about. This example -- which is not an isolated one -- I consider an example of institutionalized child abuse, not because of the beliefs themselves but because of how they are visited upon the children. In the 21st century there are some things that are considered abusive. Female genital mutilation may be a culturally acceptable practice, but it is still abuse, IMO. Children are helpless and dependent and subject to the absolute power of their parents. That power can be exercised abusively or not. Tolerance doesn't mean "anything goes." To tell children that if they have sex before marriage they will burn in hell or that if not following some ritual was the cause of the Holocaust or will result in the death of someone is abuse in my book. You don't have to agree.

Of course it is not isolated. We humans are very tribal creatures. We set up rules for being part of the in-group and consequences for failing to abide by the tribes arbitrary identifications. Religion is only one divider of many such tribal identities.

Child abuse has a particular meaning to me. If a child is being abused then society at large has an obligation to remove the child from the situation. We are, in circumstances of child abuse, ethically compelled to intervene even over parental rights and family autonomy. (This something I am somewhat familiar with as a mandated reporter.)

Are you seriously telling me that you believe children should be removed from homes that teach Eternal Damnation for sins, or that God may punish a people for failing to live by The Covenant? Or is the phrase "abuse" in this context a bit of hyperbole like calling an ethnic skirmish with a few deaths a Holocaust and a genocide?

Don: I am not saying either of those things. In the US this particular case would probably be considered legal child abuse because of the physical abuse that was being applied, but my point was more general. I think that the psychological abuse here and with many fundamentalist sects is real, lasting and extremely damaging and I don't care much whether it meets some legal standard. I consider it child abuse. I wasn't saying it meant parents who did this should have their children taken away. That's another kind of decision and policy that I don't have expertise in and genuinely have no opinion. But I don't consider it anything like hyperbole akin to calling a few deaths a Holocaust or calling an occasional spanking (even a really violent one) child abuse. My view is that it is child abuse in the colloquial but genuine sense, not the legal sense (note, too, that what is not child abuse in Israel -- this case being an example -- would definitely be reportable child abuse here, so this isn't some absolute criterion).

Beatis (#4)- there is such a commandment, though not in the Old Testament.

Ephesians 6:1-4 (also found other places)
1 Children, obey your parents because you belong to the Lord,for this is the right thing to do. 2 âHonor your father and mother.â This is the first commandment with a promise: 3 If you honor your father and mother, âthings will go well for you, and you will have a long life on the earth.â

4 Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger by the way you treat them. Rather, bring them up with the discipline and instruction that comes from the Lord.

This whole subject is revolting. It appears that all religions have these out dated practices. And yes, these practices all seem to involve the abuse of children, in one form or another.

It is no wonder that people are leaving the major religions for the get rich scheme happy clappies, and eventually, I hope, they choose no religion at all.

Many people are raised in religious households, go on to reject those religious beliefs, and have no lasting "issues" from their upbringing. Not true for every person, there are exceptions, but I'd say that the majority don't have any real lasting issues from the upbringing (could be wrong here, just based on my experience - and could vary with the particular flavor of religion).

On the other hand, I think it would take some work to find survivors of physical/sexual child abuse who haven't been deeply affected by the experience, whose effect lasts well into adulthood.

Parents make all sorts of mistakes that affect their children to varying degrees. I'd reserve "child abuse" as a reference to physical/sexual/extreme emotional traumas. I suppose there's cases where these are wrapped in some sort of religious packagery (e.g. priest sexual abuse), but I think we're mainly talking about raising children into the standard belief systems of the major religions. That *isn't* child abuse. It may be harmful to the kids, but there's a million ways parents harm their kids with distorted belief systems that we ALL have to endure, it's part of being human - that isn't abuse, unless we're getting really loose with terminology.

It's obviously a provocative idea that gets attention, but it ends up just lowering the bar for what most of us consider "abuse".

Victoria,

You may want to get your hands on this Economist article. http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_TD… (behind firewall, sorry, but get the issue. It is an interesting set of reports.) The idea that people are leaving the fundamentalist religions is not true. Those are the growth markets.

"In America the famously tolerant Episcopal Church (which recently elected a gay bishop) has been in decline; the Southern Baptists (who in 1988 denounced homosexuality as âa manifestation of a depraved natureâ) have jumped forward. Altogether conservative Christians now make up around 25% of America's population, compared with 20% in 1960.
Hot as hell

In global terms the most remarkable religious success story of the past century has been the least intellectual (and most emotive) religion of all. Pentecostalism was founded only 100 years ago in a scruffy part of Los Angeles by a one-eyed black preacher, convinced that God would send a new Pentecost if only people would pray hard enough. There are now at least 400m revivalists around the world. ...

... The only other Christian faith to grow at such rates is the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, again hardly an easy-going religion. Mormonism remains a favourite butt of comedians, because of its historic belief (now abandoned) in polygamy and its ban on such worldly pleasures as beer, coffee, tea and âpassionate kissingâ outside wedlock; there will be more fun poked if Mitt Romney wins the Republican nomination. But clean-living certainty sells: over the past half-century the church has grown sevenfold, with half the world's 13m Mormons living outside the United States.

The hotter bits of Islam have also gained ground ..."

But you may at least be comforted to know that "atheism is definitely part of this pluralism. The proportion of Americans citing no religious preference has increased from 7% to 14% (20% for young people)."

I would agree that it's immoral to indoctrinate children into your religious beliefs, but I think it's too strong to say that it's immoral to teach children your religious beliefs and even to socialize them so that they know how to practice the religion and assume an active role in the religious community. Dawkin's view is plausible because of extreme cases like this, but I don't think it's fair to generalize and say that *every* religious upbringing is like this. At the very least, we all get socialized into a culture, and being socialized into a culture includes learning about and perhaps coming to share the beliefs held by members of that culture. We need to make sure that Dawkin's view does not imply that *any* type of socialization is immoral -- because that would be absurd. The real question then becomes, what is the difference between education and indoctrination?