Teaching Children to believe IS abused.

Recently I overheard a parent:

“Kids have great faith! Not like teenagers. When I said uncle Bob is in heaven looking down on us, my kids accepted it. Isn’t that great?!”

No! It’s not great- it’s vomit inducing!

Richard Dawkins presents the idea that teaching children to believe in one faith as they’re growing up is child abuse. I have to agree with him.

There’s a lot of things wrong with bringing your child up with faith. To start with children ARE NOT able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality until they’re roughly eight years old. So it’s not faith, they just believe you, they know no better.

Have you ever wonder how come kids have such great imaginations? How they can be  amused with the simplest things for hours?

 

It’s simply: children don’t have the mental limitations of adults, they haven’t experienced enough of the world to know any limitations. They can make a complete and unreal story about a shoe. The key word being “unreal”.

 

There’s a documentary called Jesus Camp. I can embed it. I can’t even watch it myself, like I mentioned above… it’s vomit inducing. So here’s Bill Maher’s take on it:

Dawkins’s argument is that as a society it is wrong to believe that just because a child has Christian parents that it is a Christian child.

The way it should be is that a child is taught about all religions, and then at some age is asked to pick. Can’t be done in most religions. Not least because when a child is exposed to all religions, they will see through them, they will not be brain-washed. But also because religions have ways of settling a child into the religion; Christians have baptism, Jews have circumcision.

“But how will children accept death if there’s nothing higher to believe in?”

The same way adults do: they just accept it, it’s a fact of life. Most adults have a hard time accepting death and for children it must be worse. But that is still no excuse. No excuse for telling children lies and fairytales just so you can avoid the hard talk about death. People have told countless stories that, when they were children, they would spend sleepless nights contemplating if they were going to hell, if their friends or family were going to hell; to burn in the eternal flames.

Your telling me that isn’t child abuse?

Here’s a spin of the coin. We often say that we will miss a loved one but that they’re waiting for us… well, what about them missing us? Imagine your cat Bingo. Floating around for decades waiting to be re-united with it’s beloved owner.

It’s all fucked up!

Faith is wrong. Death is real. So we enjoy life. We love life. 

Teaching children faith IS abused.

Teaching them to love and accept others IS the only true message.