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IS INDOCTRINATION CHILD ABUSE?

If you ask Dawkins, Hitchens and others, childhood indoctrination in any religion is a form of child abuse. By pushing a religious ideology on a child, while their brains are rapidly developing, you cause children to ignore logic and critical thinking. I don't see this as much of a problem today as it probably once was, because we are living in the information age. At one point, everything you knew came from your parents, teachers and pastors. There really wasn't any way to get information other than through authoritative figures in your immediate circle. Today, however, information is available to us at the push of a button. Any questions you have about your religion have been discussed thousands of times on the internet with perspectives from all walks of life. Getting answers is easy. Perhaps asking questions might be the hard part? If you are indoctrinated early in life, what would cause you to want to go outside of your circle to seek answers? I mean, if you have a problem with your religion you should just ask your pastor, right? What made me (and many of us) lucky enough to see through the bullshit answers and go look for answers on our own?
Perhaps it is a form of child abuse, but as with all generalizations, some forms of religions are worse than others when it comes to affecting the way a child develops reason and logical thinking.

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Permalink Reply by ryan cameron on February 8, 2010 at 11:24am

Agreed, the only way we could truly enforce this kind of thinking as "child abuse" is by going after religion as fraud and making the very act of being religious illegal. Fighting delusion with oppression never works as we see over and over in various mental institutions. It often has the opposite effect. The only way we can effectively fight this indoctrination is by widely disseminating alternative view points and keeping information as free and open to all as possible.

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Permalink Reply by Tom Thompson on February 8, 2010 at 5:17pm

"Fighting delusion with oppression never works as we see over and over in various mental institutions."

That is an important point to make, I think. I cringe when I hear calls for government intervention to enforce "what we believe" in favor of "what they believe". Forcing someone to your point of view at gunpoint is never the right answer. In my opinion a healthy society should be able to transform itself without oppression from above. The solution you prescribe is how this can happen.

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Permalink Reply by Jo Jerome on February 11, 2010 at 1:46pm

In that case, it seems to me ... "Fighting delusion with oppression is a clear sign that the oppressors themselves are deluded."

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Permalink Reply by David Curry on March 28, 2010 at 9:09pm

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Permalink Reply by David Curry on April 2, 2010 at 7:54am

If you become an atheist and still feel that way, I'll be amazed.

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Permalink Reply by David Curry on April 2, 2010 at 9:02am

Then I doubt you'll ever understand the true horrors of indoctrination. ^_^

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Permalink Reply by Skeptic on April 2, 2010 at 2:19pm

That's a little confusing....you have the Atheist "A" as your avatar, on the Atheist Nexus forum...yet you are happy about your religous indoctrination and doubt you'll ever be an atheist?