The Conservative Idea Of Education

It is bad enough that the culture generally accepts childhood religious indoctrination, but this is WAY beyond the pale:

CREEPY Republican Selling Trump Propaganda To Kids

Religious Indoctrination Is Child Abuse: The Research

"Gone are the days of the unyielding God-fearing mother as the archetype of good parenting, suggests a recent article from the Los Angeles Times. According to multiple reports, research has shown that a secular upbringing may be healthier for children. According to a 2010 Duke University study, kids raised this way display less susceptibility to racism and peer pressure, and are 'less vengeful, less nationalistic, less militaristic, less authoritarian, and more tolerant, on average, than religious adults.' But the list of benefits doesn’t stop there."

Click on the link below for more:

Is Raising Your Kids Without Religion Better?

Comparing Religious Indoctrination With Other Child Abuse

The following essay is the best justification for considering religious indoctrination of children an abuse I have read:

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Is Teaching Young Children Religion a Form of Child Abuse?
© 2000 by Larry Gott

Most people suppose they know what constitutes child abuse. Abuse may generally be defined as action or behavior towards a child that causes harm. But what, exactly, do we mean by harm? Is it always clear-cut?

Reasonable people would agree that hitting a child hard enough to cause bruising or other injury constitutes abuse. But, even though many states have called spanking abuse, many parents believe it is not. It is open to debate. Burning a child with cigarettes is clearly abuse. But smoking around children, even though it is known that secondhand smoke causes cancer, heart disease, and respiratory problems, is not so clearly abuse in the minds of many. The matter is open to argument.

Other gray areas include shouting at one’s kids. That’s just “normal” in many households, but, carried to extremes, it can be abusive, too. Belittling and shaming children, also can be called abusive. Calling children names, labeling them (“you’re stupid,” “you’re destructive”), and threatening them (even if the threats are not carried out), all are forms of abuse, depending on which experts you choose to listen to.

Admittedly the grayest of the gray areas is the teaching of children. Can the secular and religious education of children be abusive? Secular teaching may be more or less effective in preparing children for their adult lives; more in cases where children are taught how to think, to reason for themselves and derive answers from evidence; less where they are taught what to think and the conclusions at which they should arrive.

I've come to believe that teaching religion to children is a form of child abuse. Parents quite naturally think that their children should be taught whatever the parents believe. In a seemingly never-ending cycle, parents who were themselves brainwashed as children pass along to their own children the religion they were taught. It never occurs to them to examine what they’ve been taught to see whether it has been helpful or harmful.

Rather than teaching children that some behaviors are harmful, religion (Christian religion in particular) teaches them that their very natures are evil, their thoughts corrupt and their actions so vile that they deserve to be tortured for eternity unless they continually beg some implacable cosmic bully for forgiveness. Children are taught that an invisible god, or one of his minions, is looking over their shoulders at all times. While many adults resent the proliferation of surveillance cameras, they teach their children that someone who can see through walls is always watching them. It is a wonder, given that kind of upbringing, that most people are not schizophrenic.

Stuffing immature minds full of dogma when they haven't the means to sort through it critically damages the developing psyche. No amount of post-adult reason ever completely liberates the subconscious from all that ecclesiastical baggage. The pain it creates is lifelong and debilitating.

Teaching children religion is abusive because it creates confusion and discourages critical thought. Further, it fosters guilt, which is particularly destructive, because it remains in the subconscious long after the reasons for it are recognized and understood.

It needs to be said that, while some teaching may ultimately be harmful, it does not constitute abuse in the sense that the parent or teacher intends harm or is indifferent to the consequences of the teaching. The harm done is the end result of a cycle that started eons ago. Unfortunately, relatively few people as adults thoroughly examine what they’ve been taught. The whole idea of “faith” is designed to repress critical thought and to encourage acceptance instead. The result is that faulty thinking is passed on from generation to generation. Anything that makes the mind work less well, or causes emotional pain may be characterized as harm, and its inculcation is abuse. 

Religious Indoctrination Of Children: A Harm Society Denies

"I shall probably shock you when I say it is the purpose of my lecture today [is] . . . to argue, in short, in favor of censorship, against freedom of expression, and to do so moreover in an area of life that has traditionally been regarded as sacrosanct.

"I am talking about moral and religious education. And especially the education a child receives at home, where parents are allowed—even expected—to determine for their children what counts as truth and falsehood, right and wrong.

"Children, I’ll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas—no matter who these other people are. Parents, correspondingly, have no god-given license to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children’s knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith."

Click on the link below for support for the above:

A superb article against the religious indoctrination of children

Childhood Indoctrination: The Evil

I have posted many times on the harm of indoctrinating children into any religion (link). In essence, calling subjective experience/intuition evidence of a god to a young impressional mind blunts the reasoning ability of the child and makes the victim malleable to harmful ideology (link). 

Please take a half-hour of your time and click on the link below for a video exposing the thinking and actions of Christian apologists regarding how and why they poison young minds into unsupported and harmful dogma.

Brainwashing of children exposed

A Parent's Guide To Teaching About God

Virtually all theists with children indoctrinate them into their religious dogma as soon as they can. Why? Are they so weak in their faith that they want to shelter their children from thinking for themselves? Answer: OF COURSE!!! Click on the link below for a guide to raising children to be loving, responsible, and independent thinkers.

10 Reasons You Shouldn't Tell Your Children About God

Science Does NOT Indoctrinate Like Religion

There is a false equivalency coming from the religious in reaction to atheists stating the harms of religious indoctrination. James Hicks, in a Facebook comment, clearly and succinctly presented the difference between religious indoctrination and instruction on science-based thinking:

• "- - - There are proper epistemic paths to cognition and value judgments that fortify reason and epistemic integration, executive functioning, self-reflection, locus of control and social planning. Religion stultifies these areas of cognitive functioning, development and concept formation by means of specific and observable psychopathologies that induce hyperactivity in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex and Hypothalamic Pituitary adrenal axis. This instills early hyperactivity in the child's stress response by hijacking his or her amygdala which in turn impedes frontal cortex activity and development.

          I consider religious indoctrination child abuse."

Child Abuse

Really, would this make sense if you were an adult and were told this for the first time?  Is it not child abuse?

Welcome to this world 

 

(www.infantgoldresearch.org)

The Case For Making Religious Indoctrination Of Children Illegal

“An appropriate analogy of religion is that’s it’s kind of like porn—which means it’s not something one would expose a child to.”

Question for religious people who defend this present practice:  if you are so sure of the truth of your religion, why would you be against this reasonable, science-based change?

Some Atheists and Transhumanists are Asking: Should it be Illegal to Indoctrinate Kids With Religion?
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Childhood Religious Indoctrination: A Form Of Abuse