I am about to ask a serious but utterly reprehensible question

[Whateverist]

I'm so disgusted with religious people right now, I can't even separate them from their faith.

Don't worry.  Many have tried but it just isn't that easy to do.  Even when you succeed they just whine about how unhappy they are and how much they miss their warm, cozy faith.  If you like a religious person leave them as they are, unless they try to start up an inquisition, crusades or witch burning.  But the peaceable ones can be safely left to live out their lives in their current state.

[robvalue]

I never understand the combination of claiming an omnipotent being is your pal, and that you're being unfairly persecuted. What the dickens? If I have twenty Michael Jordan's on my team, I'm not going to be whining if I start losing. I just won't ever be losing.

[Whateverist]

I never understand the combination of claiming an omnipotent being is your pal, but you're being unfairly persecuted. What the dickens?

Rob!  God doesn't 'persecute' his chosen, he tests them.  Like Job.  He was tested like a sonofabitch - and passed!

[AceBoogie]

Telling a child they'll be tortured for eternity if they don't follow some rules written thousands of years ago by men in a land far away is emotional child abuse. Period.

You're a piece of shit if you tell this to a kid. Period. I don't care how right or justified you think it is... it's wrong.

[robvalue]

If you have to tell them, let them get to like seven years old so they can learn how to think.

Then see them laugh in your face.

You know they would. That's why you have to attack the vulnerable young mind, isn't it? You bully. You damager of innocent minds.

[Astonished]

Drich, I am sick to fucking death of your incapability to understand that you are also using interpretation and a 'straight reading' of your equivalent of ancient toilet paper is literally impossible, the point being that you can justify whatever fucked-up things you do because the entire idea is irrational, hence why even YOU, a theist, can't convince another theist they are wrong about their interpretation or that X part of the bible is literal and Y part is allegorical. You are a textbook case of every intellectually dishonest tactic theists use in defense of their beliefs, and the psychological flaws created by having to look at the world believing two and two make five. I am truly sorry but you're going to need a better person than me to cure you. I've given you far too many chances to be intellectually honest for once in your life and it's just not happening. I think putting you on ignore is the best thing for both of us since I seem to be having the opposite effect and making you retreat further into your mania rather than making you see reason.

[SteveII]

If you have to tell them, let them get to like seven years old so they can learn how to think.

Then see them laugh in your face.

You know they would. That's why you have to attack the vulnerable young mind, isn't it? You bully. You damager of innocent minds.

You have your head in the sand. The rate of adult conversions to Christianity destroys any dopey reasoning that somehow only vulnerable minds are susceptible. I especially like this section of the Wikipedia article:

• According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, approximately 2.7 million converting to Christianity annually from another religion, World Christian Encyclopedia also cited that Christianity rank at first place in net gains through religious conversion.[7]
  
  
• Studies estimate significantly more people have converted from Islam to Christianity in the 21st century than at any other point in Islamic history.[8] Conversion into Christianity have also been well documented, and reports estimate that hundreds of thousands of Muslims convert to Christianity annually, significant numbers of Muslims converts to Christianity can be found in Afghanistan, Albania,[9]Azerbaijan,[10][11] Algeria,[12] Belgium,[13] Bulgaria,[14][15] France,[16] Germany,[17] Indonesia,[18] Iran,[19][20][21][22] Kazakhstan,[23]Kyrgyzstan,[24] Malaysia,[25] Morocco,[26][27] Netherlands,[28] Russia,[29] Saudi Arabia,[30] Tunisia,[31] Turkey,[32][33][34][35] Kosovo,[36] The United States[37] and Central Asia etc.[38][39] Many of the Muslims who converts to Christianity faces social rejection or imprisonment and sometimes murder or penalty, for becoming Christians.[40]
  
  
• Data from the Pew Research Center that as of 2013, about 1.6 million adult American Jews identify themselves as Christians, most are Protestant.[41][42][43] According to same data most of the Jews who identify themselves as some sort of Christian (1.6 million) were raised as Jews or are Jews by ancestry.[42] Data from 2013, show that 64,000 Argentine Jews identify themselves as Christians.[44]According to 2012 study 17% of Jews in Russia identify themselves as Christians.[45][46]
  
  
• It's been also reported that conversion into Christianity is significantly increasing among Korean,[47] Chinese,[48] and Japanese in the United States.[49] In 2012, the percentage of Christians of these communities were 71%, more than 30% and 37% respectively. [50]
  
  
• Due to conversion, the number of Chinese Christians has increased significantly; from 4 million before 1949 to 67 million in 2010.[51][52]
  
  
• Due to conversion, Christianity has grown in South Korea, from 2.0% in 1945[53] to 29.3% in 2010.[51]
  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_...Conversion

[Astonished]

In what way is any of that relevant? If they're converting from other faiths then they're already dyed in the wool, so what's the real difference? Besides which, those are the kind of people who are going to end up making the decision about whether to subject their kids to this (or others' kids, FSM forbid). And if many of them have been subjected to that as children themselves, they can grow up believing it's the way to go about indoctrinating, and may have been a key factor in preventing their emancipation. Those facts don't address the problem here, maybe in some other thread.

[SteveII]

In what way is any of that relevant? If they're converting from other faiths then they're already dyed in the wool, so what's the real difference? Besides which, those are the kind of people who are going to end up making the decision about whether to subject their kids to this (or others' kids, FSM forbid). And if many of them have been subjected to that as children themselves, they can grow up believing it's the way to go about indoctrinating, and may have been a key factor in preventing their emancipation. Those facts don't address the problem here, maybe in some other thread.

I just thought it was a ridiculous notion that if you wait until a child is older, they will laugh in your face. The data do not support the often assumed assertion that children indoctrination is responsible for Christianity being the fastest growing, freely chosen religion in world. Look at the rate of growth in China--a communist country that suppressed religion for the past 50 years. 

It is further interesting to note that Pew projects:

Similarly, the religiously unaffiliated population is projected to shrink as a percentage of the global population, even though it will increase in absolute number. In 2010, censuses and surveys indicate, there were about 1.1 billion atheists, agnostics and people who do not identify with any particular religion.5 By 2050, the unaffiliated population is expected to exceed 1.2 billion. But, as a share of all the people in the world, those with no religious affiliation are projected to decline from 16% in 2010 to 13% by the middle of this century.

http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/relig...2010-2050/

You are simply not getting your word out. Further, you can't even keep your children in your camp if this is to be believed.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyath...-children/

You would think that if Christianity was so obviously wrong, then certainly children of atheists, who have been sheltered from the childhood indoctrination that supposedly makes it easier to believe would be nearly 100% unlikely to freely join a religion.

[Astonished]

I had been fairly sure that if indoctrination were to be completely halted, theism would die out in a generation, but now I'm not so optimistic. Still, even a 75% success rate would be massively instrumental in saving the world. Or if the shift were to reverse the proportion of believers to nonbelievers as it stands now, which I think is slightly less than that.