Religion as Child Abuse?

My husband and I watched Richard Dawkins‘ The Root of All Evil last night.  I think it is a chilling yet fantastic documentary. What interested me the most was Dawkins’ suggestion that religious indoctrination is a form of child abuse. One of the greatest attributes of my kid, and I’ll say all kids in general, is their innate ability to ask why; organized religion doesn’t allow a free thinking future. 

 

In school I was annoyed by religious classmates who would tell me I’d go to hell if I didn’t believe in God. I’d rather think my actions hold more weight in ethics than simply a belief in something far beyond my grasp of comprehension. Small town German living has presented my daughter with similar comments by classmates, some dismissing her from their friends list. Her best friend though is Muslim and has shown her more respect than any German she’s met.  Being American, I find it a compliment that the Muslim family has been very supportive of their friendship, and I appreciate their kindness to my husband and me. My daughter has learned a bit about their religion and the influence on their lives.  Interestingly, she is amazed at how the females are segregated from the males and found that is, as she says, “very unfair” to the girls in the household in which the girls outnumber boys two to one and who seem to exist in second class status even in their own home. 

 

The Muslim girl has religious classes separate from school while all of the other kids take either Catholic or Evangelist class.  My daughter gets to come home early those days. For several years after I first arrived in Germany my kid was involved with the local church group because while they taught Evangelical theology, they also played games.  It was a chance to practice German, make friends and have fun.  Eventually the group got a new leader and the games lessened while bible study increased and she left the group.

 

Last year she decided to take the Catholic class with her friends because she didn’t want to be excluded from something she “might be missing” and I encouraged her to take it because she was beginning to ask questions about God.  While I’d love for my kid to take my position on the matter, I expect for her to question even me. That is a free mind; never taking someone’s word for it and always searching for truth. After a few months she decided religion class was “story time” and she dropped it.  Religion hasn’t made a good impression on her.

 

Spirituality is personal and no one has the right to refute one’s personal beliefs even if they are shared but when others begin to infiltrate the word of God into a child’s mind without providing sound arguments or consistent evidence, weighing the entire human existence of meaning and morality based off of the words written thousands of years ago by men, from a time when knowledge was almost abolished, then I must ask what good does this do for children?  Rather, religious indoctrination limits their knowledge and exploration as beings of this world. I agree with Richard Dawkins, that’s a form of child abuse*. Sadly that’s the accepted norm. 

 

Bertrand Russell** said, “So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the gospels in praise of intelligence”.  Is it that intelligence breeds self-power and independence while religion breeds minds to control and imprisonment? Being that children are used to being “controlled” by adults, many have no idea they are being indoctrinated into a philosophy that confines their chances to ask why more often because religion packages past philosophy into modern criteria for living and it affects the morality, social and personal belief systems and laws in the world; they particularly affect female freedom, i.e, abortion, HPV vaccine.  God philosophy demands the worship of God’s word; don’t defy Him. Sounds like arrogant patriarchal dictatorship. 

 

Times were tough thousands of years ago but education wasn’t what it is today.  I would have expected more people to educate themselves out of religion but tradition is far too difficult to sever, as Dawkins touched on in The Root of All Evil.  Religion preys on the weak and vulnerable.  I just got out of that stage, the weak and vulnerable.  I didn’t find God though; I found something much more valuable and that is the power of “owning” my Mind.  Those who end up being owned by a religious God only sell themselves short from their potential of freedom they cannot attain and I have learned that while we all walk this path, only some escape in metaphor, the hell Sartre presents in No Exit.

 

Seneca the Younger said “religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful”.  Now imagine the “commoner” in power. The root of Dawkins’ effort is about exposing the theory which appears to be more false than its counterpart so society can get one step closer to truth. He wants to expose what is untrue through intelligent information, documented and consistent scientific data and logical thought. Religion is the only place where such criteria are irrelevant. 

 

Will humanity thrive or will it stagnate into millennia of Dark Age thought?  The latter doesn’t offer a very bright future for children nor does it allow Consciousness to evolve.  Many people need a philosophy as a guide to life but I think religious philosophy in general is well suited for those who don’t know how or refuse to take responsibility for the weight that lightness of being brings. Religion is a tool of control, disguised as beautiful, as “freedom”, a connection with the mystery of life but there is little beauty in a Mind which is unable to be free.  Religion is abuse of the Mind, any mind, which wants to be what it is and not what it is expected to be.

 

Namaste,

Tatiana von Tauber

 

**quotes taken from Richard Dawkins dot net.

 

*Particularly organizations such as Teen Mania and their Battle Cry rallies.  Below is a link to three CNN videos taken from a special documentary series they ran about this organization. I disagree with Teen Mania’s philosophy. 

 http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/08/22/gw.teen.christians/index.html#cnnSTCVideo