Atheism and Anti-Theism same thing?

[God of Mr. Hanky]

There's nothing innocuous about talking to some imaginary patriarch which displaces the responsibility of the actual head of household for his own actions, especially when it involves children. What involves children implies child indoctrination of nonsense, and all nonsense ideas are potentially dangerous. The same when you take them to church, sit them down in front of some grisly crucifixion scene, make them sit through songs and tales told of the strange, the morbid, and the irrational.

If you were one of these children who later came to be liberated from the forced intellectual stagnation of religion, then you would understand just how right Hitchens was - religion poisons everything!

I'm not going to lie, I laughed reading this. Overdramatic much? Honestly, indoctrinating children into believing a religion is no different than indoctrinating them to be Republican or Democrat (assuming we're talking about your average Christian family who goes to church once a week but otherwise doesn't do much religious activity.) 

Also, I was one of those children - I'm not upset about it at all. My mother is Catholic, I was raised Catholic. We went to church every Sunday, I attended religion school to prepare me for communion and confirmation. I hated going to it, but I didn't hate it because "AGH I'M IN AN ANTI-INTELLECTUAL PRISON FUCK THIS RELIGIOUS OPPRESSION!!" I hated it in the same way I hated going to school. Otherwise it didn't bother me much. And then when I reached a certain age I decided I didn't believe any of it and that was that. Not a big deal in my opinion.

Maybe you also think some forms of priestly contact with alter boys are also "overdramatized"? Just because you don't understand the degree of mental abuse which takes place, even without sexual contact doesn't give you the right to mock those who still suffer from it - what an insensitive dolt it takes to be so dismissive of shit you really don't understand, and as a Catholic, you really have no understanding whatsoever of the sort of head job which evangelical Protestants do to children who are placed in their care.

I'll spell it out for you: Catholicism (which I understand much of through family tradition, and still experience for myself sometimes) is a ritualistic sect. It teaches faith (salvation) through the practice of certain rituals (sacraments, church attendance, and confession) above conceptual beliefs (other than the need to do these in order to gain heavenly favor for your mortal soul), which generally come secondary to those who are raised Catholic. It isn't like this in Protestant evangelical sects, where they teach ideas, and constantly drum in the terror of doubting said ideas.

I have been to enough Catholic services to know the difference, including those who were trained pre-John Paul, a generation which sent many offspring of Catholics away in disgust during the 1970's. They were very good at beating their chests as the gatekeepers for healthy souls, but even they did not discuss hellfire in graphic detail. They never really did start doing this shit for any period of time until the church began to schism badly enough for Protestant ideas to gain a toehold during the Spanish Inquisition of the late 15th Century, and when the Protestants seized that idea, boy did they ever fucking run with it! As a kid in an an evangelical Accelerated Christian Education program, I got to read of Protestant history, or at least as they tell it. John Wycliffe lists among their heroes, and he died in the 14th Century, which is a very long time before Martin Luther supposedly ushered in the so-called Protestant Reformation!

In sum, Catholics really don't understand squat of the head games which are played with childrens' minds. You may have known head games aplenty, and you may have heard plenty of stupid ideas, but you cannot have understood the emphasis on belief and the real terror of dire consequences from doubting what you were told by trusted authority figures, when the difference between burning in hell forever if you die tonight and not burning is not what you do in life, but what you believe is true when you know that you cannot believe such garbage. That, specifically, is what pushes kids to the edge of insanity! That is the kind of shit which I had to endure, and fuck you oh so very much for being such a blunt asshole about it here!