Geoff's Miscellany

A common claim on the internet these days is that raising children in a religious tradition is child abuse.

This same notion comes with a related notion that being religious is a form of brain disorder.

If you do not believe me, look this up. Richard Dawkins has claimed that raising children religiously is worse than pedophilia. Sam Harris says that being religious is worse than rape.

I challenge atheists who actually think this way to stop being lazy and perform their civic duties:

1. To report child abuse in the form of religious education and religious upbringing to appropriate government authorities.
2. To attempt, as is the duty of any reasonable citizen, to prevent acts of such child abuse as they occur. Who, in his right mind, would sit back as a child is beaten in public?
3. To treat religious persons as mentally deficient rather than mocking them, find ways to seek treatment for mental disorders connected to being religious.

Until atheists start to do this, it will be clear that their posturing, insinuating of mental inability on the part of the religious, and their accusations of child abuse are empty rhetoric. My hypothesis is that atheists won't do these things because despite how many of them possess poor social skills due to an inability to imagine how another person experiences the world, (this might also explain why certain Calvinist types have no personal warmth despite espousing an ethical system based on the command to love God and neighbor) they still have self-preservation skills and don't want their little tribe to become utterly intolerable.

But if billions of children are being abused by being raised religiously and billions of people have psychological problems for which medication and treatment are required, then there is a huge problem in the world and the best solution that has been offered by Richard Dawkins and company is mockery and ridicule.