Do Christian Parents Abuse their Children?

[shadow]

Not my assertion but Richard Dawkins believes that bringing children up to believe that their parents religion is true is tantamount to child abuse. The argument is that by doing so the child is ill equipped to make their own way in the world when they go out on their own.

I have a personal story about this. My oldest daughter went to a catholic primary school for the first 2 years of her schooling. The intention was to enrol my younger daughter in the catholic school as well when she was old enough. One day my older daughter came home from school and started talking to me about the 14 stations of the cross. Anyone know what that is? I didn't at the time so I googled it. What I found shook me to the core. These intellectually handicapped adults were brainwashing my child to become as intellectually handicapped as them - in short, child abuse!

I had to think quickly here. I couldn't tell my daughter that this is a load of crap because that would push here even further away from me and closer to a demented mentality. So I taught her critical thinking. Firstly, I defined ethics as any thought, word or action that causes harm or death to any living being (I have to thank the Buddhist texts for that definition). Then I asked her to show me some of the other xtian texts that they taught at school and sat with her to analyse whether the thoughts, words or actions described in those texts was ethical. Lo and behold, she identified a number of unethical actions and I could see the light bulb literally switching on in her head. I won! I had just grabbed my child from the clutches of these demented people!

At the end of that year, she was out of the school and out of the catholic system. The bizarre thing is, when we told the school, they were shocked that we were taking her to a non catholic school and asked us if we had considered taking her to one of the other catholic schools. They wanted to keep her in the lunatic asylum called catholicism!

After my experience, nearly losing my child to this demented mentally abusive system, I understood what Richard Dawkins meant when he said that teaching religion to children is child abuse.

Anyone have similar experiences?

Anyone think that it's ok for xtians and muslims to teach their religion to their children and that it's not child abuse?

I agree that this is an awful thing to do to a child. 'Abuse' might imply some intent, though, and I don't think most religious parents want anything but the best for their children; they simply have a flawed understanding of how to achieve it. The way you phrased this might be what's upsetting some of the theists and other posters, though.

Personally I can tell that one of the best things that ever happened to me was being raised secularly and to critically think. The fact that so many children are denied this opportunity makes me sad; they are at a point in their life where they have not yet had a chance. I strongly believe that the education system should be secular.

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The argument is that by doing so the child is ill equipped to make their own way in the world when they go out on their own.

This is such a monumentally stupid argument that it's hard to know where to begin.  If it were true, then atheists would have to be more successful than believers, with a concomitant issue of believers having more of a struggle to 'get ahead'.  Since neither of these are evidentially true, Dawkins should get his head out of his arse at least long enough to look about and see things as they are.

Maybe that stroke affected him more than we thought.

Boru

Why do you assume that many theists could not be more successful than they are had they been raised with a better ability to critically think? I consider this a very valuable skill. This argument is a little like when people say 'when I was a kid we didn't have ______ and I turned out just fine'. Fill in the blank with a good number of things: seatbelts, mental health awareness, the internet, renewable energy, higher education for women, cell phones, vaccines. Just because someone 'turned out fine' doesn't mean that they couldn't have turned out better, or that all of the influences of their childhood were positive.