IT IS ABUSE TO GIVE GOD TO CHILDREN
WHEN YOU KNOW THAT CHILDREN ARE
EAGER FOR FANTASY FRIENDS
To encourage a child to have God when you know they are prone to fantasy friends is wrong. It is abuse. Let your child be a child.
HARMFUL IDEA THAT WE MUST LOVE GOD ABOVE ALL
The doctrine that God comes first which was taught by Jesus (and which is still
taught by the Church) urges you to do what you find harmful as long as God
commands it for God knows best.
If I avoid my father who wants to convert me to paganism so that my faith in God
is safe from him then I am doing this for my faith and am trusting in God. But
what if there is no God? Is it right to hurt and disown my father over a
collection of beliefs? Of course not. Children are hurt and damaged merely by
being taught that God exists. The doctrine that God comes first means that you
have to enshrine God’s laws in the law of the land so it is undoubtedly true
that religion is a threat to freedom.
Even a child finds out easily that there are as many views of God as there are
people. The Church wants the child to accept its view and its interpretation of
what God wants which really means that the child is being encouraged to let the
Church think for her. This can cause a grave defect in self-confidence and
indeed is meant to so that the child becomes a mind-slave of the Church. Whether
you like the beliefs or not you have to accept them and beliefs are valued above
people.
When you say with Christianity and Islam that God comes first what you mean is
belief in God comes first and matters more than human beings. You are saying
that what the leaders say about God matters and is the truth. It is really man's
ideas about God that are being put first - God is another matter. You are saying
that we must bring in rules from another world that sees a purpose in them that
we can never understand on earth when we are deciding about right and wrong. A
nasty universe means God's plan simply has to be nasty too in many respects.
This can be used as an excuse for bringing in bad rules. Rules like this are the
reason we have seen women dying because those who they depended on did not give
them an abortion to save their lives because God had forbidden it.
In religious faith, you are to believe that goodness is not just an abstract but
is God. That means that God must come first. That means that if you have a doubt
or even disbelieve you are committing a grave wrong and doing harm. As a child I
had doubts and I was persecuted by the very concept of God a concept that
incites to prejudice and discrimination against atheist and agnostic people and
often doubters as well.
HIDDEN DOCTRINES
There are lots of little evil things in Church teachings they prefer to say
nothing about. For example they approve of God making the Virgin Mary pregnant
when she was almost a child herself and childbirth was horrendous for girls her
age due not only to age factors but also to the malnourished state of poor women
in general. They approve of and recognise the Virgin’s marriage in childhood to
Joseph so they condone paedophilia. Marriage is for sexual rights and Joseph by
marrying Mary even if he never slept with her was still declaring that it was
his right to do so. The Church however praises them for allegedly not having sex
which means basically that their wedding was a lie.
The people are never properly informed about problems about the philosophical,
ethical, scriptural and historical accuracy of the religion. The clergy lies.
They censor books to ensure the faithful only read what they want them to read.
DOCTRINES HARMFUL TO CHILDREN
If a doctrine is harmful, it is empowered by being made non-testable or if it is
rigged so that if the victim sees through it she will not have the confidence to
trust her judgement. A non-testable doctrine is harmful in itself for it
disrespects your right to look at the evidence and be confident in the truth.
An example is how you are told that certain prayers always make you a better
person. If they don't work you are accused of failing to see that they have. You
are told that God has a plan and is working for good and if you can't see it
then God works in ways we cannot understand. Or you are accused of not really
being sincere.
There is no concern for young people who may find out that their religion is
man-made and not from God or that their saviour did not save anybody and how
they may end up feeling like they have been hugely betrayed and unable to trust
anybody ever again. They feel betrayed at how they were given a best friend such
as God or Jesus or a saint who turned out to be anything but friends.
The fundamental Christian doctrines that Jesus died to pay for our sins to let
us off with our sins and rose from the dead to verify this doctrine accuses the
child of killing Jesus by being a sinner and the Hell doctrine is terrifying for
obvious reasons.
The Eucharist or Mass depends on the notion that Jesus died for sins so it is
bad for children.
A child sees things in a very concrete way and it is not right to make a child
feel she has engaged in cannibalism by eating Jesus' body and drinking his
blood.
People should do good because they want to and not to avoid the everlasting
tormenting punishment of Hell so Hell is a corrupting doctrine. A child will do
good to avoid Hell which will cause the child to see morality as something scary
and freedom and something bad and that he or she has no right to. Hell implies
you have the right to accuse yourself of being bad enough to stay in a place of
torment forever. You do not have the right to demean yourself like that and it
will impact on other people too for you are not an island. Innocent until proven
guilty. And you hypothetically judge others - "If you commit certain sins and
die you will suffer Hell forever and it is all your fault." The if does not make
it non-judgemental. I
These doctrines scare children and are cruel for that reason. They are child
abuse.
A child does not know the way the world and universe works. Thus the child is
prone to thinking she sees people and entities that are in fact not there. The
child lives in a world of miracle and magic. Suppose a child reads the Bible
which speaks of people going into furnaces and not getting burned. What if the
child risks putting her hand in the fire? It is natural for a child to feel
magic is true, but that does not mean you must encourage that feeling. Religion
does and takes no responsibility for the potential damage.
ASKED TO ACCEPT YOUR DEATH
In religious faith, you are taught to accept your death as your due at the hands
of God and to trust him. No being however great has the right to ask you to
trust him that far. The message this gives is that when you can encourage your
own death by accepting it from God then murdering a person because your faith
tells you to cannot be wrong either.
NEVER ALONE
A young child thinks in very literal ways. A child can be freaked out by the
thought that God sees her or him going to the toilet. We all need to be alone.
Sometimes we want to feel totally responsible for what decision we are going to
make. We want to be literally on our own. A child might want to be totally alone
and unwatched and telling him or her that there is a God who is everywhere and
who sees all and who keeps all things in existence is robbing the child of that.
God judges a nice person as fit for everlasting torment on the basis of one or
two "sinful" acts. For example, you go to Hell no matter how much charity work
you are doing if you have sex with somebody else's spouse. To tell a child to
befriend a God like that is child abuse pure and simple.
FINALLY
The potential harm and the actual harm to children done through religious education is real though it can be hard to pin down. All of us have been damaged which is why religious damage gets lost in the confusion. But read. Read things like page. Don't filter your words. Challenge for the sake of children.