Religious Indoctrination & Child Abuse

It is absolutely essential to teach children religion as cultural expression and to instill in them a proper meta-ethic from an early age. There can be no denying this. Religious ideologies saturate our cultures, and as such, it is important that children recognize and understand this. Children must learn how to act ethically, but religion is certainly unnecessary for this to occur; in fact, I consider it a hindrance.

In the same vein, it is also important for children to develop critical-thinking skills. As such, it is the parent’s responsibility to maintain a safe distance for the child from religious indoctrination and to let the child know that there is no empirical evidence whatsoever for a deity’s existence. This means that people choose to believe in unfalsifiable concepts, like a god, for no other reason than that they want to.

Now, people may believe for a variety of reasons—perhaps they had a “spiritual experience” or are emotionally invested in a particular religion—but this is different from believing something on an empirical basis. Spiritual experiences don’t prove a deity exists; they simply prove people have experiences they can’t seem to explain. All children need to know this. There’s no sense in lying to children and trying to pass off faith as fact. In fact, I think that’s akin to child abuse. It hinders critical thinking, clouds judgment, and allows the child to take anything anyone says on faith. (More on that later.)

The god concept for many people is often a “god of the gaps” concept. By this I mean that what we can’t explain, we defer to the god concept as the cause. Whether it’s a personal experience or something found in nature, this is where the concept of god originated. What we don’t know, we attribute to something, like a god, to explain.

I don’t know how many people have seen this episode of The Simpsons, but Homer is standing out in the neighborhood snapping his fingers. Lisa comes over and asks, “What are you doing?” Homer says, “Snapping my fingers keeps tigers away.” “Dad,” Lisa says as she looks around, “there are no tigers around here.” “I know, Lisa. See?” Homer responds. “It works.”

This is a fallacy of confusing cause and effect. Snapping one’s fingers will NOT keep tigers away. You and I and all other rational people know that. There is no relationship.

Now, how does this relate to theism? I think the primary problem is two-fold: said fallacy and selective observation. (And to be specific, since our society is saturated in Christian rhetoric, I’ll use Christianity as an example.)

Well, Person A says, “Jesus healed ____ in the hospital! It’s a miracle!” Down the hall in that same hospital, a little girl died of cancer. In the room next to her, a man is dying of AIDS. Across the world, 1,000 people just died in an earthquake. However, selective observation tells Person A that Jesus saved ____, even though there’s no evidence for this claim’s truth value.

When Person A sees that little girl’s mother crying in the hall, sees the man’s partner sobbing uncontrollably, or watches the news that night for coverage of the earthquake, the “Jesus healed ____” doesn’t register because it doesn’t apply to the little girl, the man, or the 1,000 dead people. “That was something or someone else’s fault,” Person A rationalizes.

Rational people know that there is also no relationship between some guy who was sacrificed to a blood-thirsty god concept 2,000 years ago and what happens today. However, those who think Jesus is working today (selectively, of course) obviously are confusing cause and effect (which brings in that contradictory premise I mentioned above). When He “doesn’t work a certain way,” a theist can hide behind ignorance (”I don’t know God’s ways”) or rationalize it to “blame” someone else since, according to that self-contradictory premise, God is blameless. (This is why Christians often attribute the “good” to “God” and the “bad” to “humanity.”)

So the little girl dying of cancer is someone else’s fault—maybe nature’s. The man dying of AIDS is his own fault. Those people across the world were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“But Jesus still saved ____.”

The more personal a situation becomes (especially any type of event saturated in emotion), the more need there is for a person to derive meaning from it, and the more intense a situation, such as those involving psychological trauma, the more likely a person will selectively observe his/her surroundings to make that meaning “stick.” Why did it happen the way it did? There has to be a reason. After all, it’s psychologically comforting to go from this to “there has to be a god,” even when there’s no evidence for it, partly because it creates a semblance of security and stability.

Humans are very good at creating relationships in order to understand their world. If there isn’t a relationship there (or if the relationship that does exist isn’t “meaningful enough”), the human brain generally has an easy enough time creating and believing a relationship (cause) that explains the phenomenon in question (effect).

My concern is that faith-based indoctrination has severe negative ramifications on both children and adults. Teaching children faith as fact is mental child abuse. It stifles creativity, hinders critical thought, opens the door for children to accept logical fallacies as truth, and most likely leads to a “crisis of faith” (read: identity deconstruction) later in life. I could never allow that in my home, and I would never want that for my child.

The theistic pipe dream has no basis in reality. Each of the five major Western religions’ “divine books” teaches a dogma that excludes others. The dogmas themselves are based on othering. They are exclusionary and have no reason for such other than willful ignorance (which is what faith is; otherwise, faith would be trust, but trust is based on empirical evidence).

Why do people still think they need supernatural magicians to explain the world, their personal experiences, and natural phenomenon? Will we as humans ever stand on our own 2 feet and take responsibility for ourselves? It’s high time we discard the idea of being born again and just grow up.

Gods were created by humans to explain the unknown and are still used to fill in the gaps. But those gaps are getting smaller all the time, which is forcing any “good theists” to rationalize, defer, deflect, or claim “ignorance of God’s ways” in order to still maintain their beliefs.

Parents, in all honesty, I ask you to enjoy your belief if it serves you, but realize that dogma and blind belief are the roots of what divides humanity, and to pass this off to children before they can critical thinking (and our neuro-linguistic pathways don’t fully develop until we’re 25!) is unethical. It’s dishonest. It’s lying.

So yes, children may very well develop a different belief system than our own. It’s quite possible given that the first glance at most religions paints a picture of niceness, fuzzy fluff, bubbles, and glitter (Let’s face it. Which is better to hear? “Sparky is dead, but we can remember all the good times we had with him.” “Sparky died, but he is in doggy heaven still chasing his tail, and yes, when you die, you’ll see him again.”), but get to the heart of the dogma, and one finds it exclusionary and need- and ignorance-based. By that time, however, often the comfort trumps the truth.

I will certainly encourage my own child to explore and research other religions, but until he/she is old enough to critically think, I will do my best to stop any faith from being passed off to him/her as truth. A mother is supposed to protect her children from abuse, not administer it or be a purveyor of it.

But when a child is older, he/she can believe whatever he/she chooses. That is the beauty and purpose of freedom. I only hope my child will be able to differentiate fact from fiction and use reason as his/her primary moral compass. Isn’t that what every mom wants for her kid?