Hellfire preaching: is there a right solution?

[eclective]

So a petition went up recently on the 10 Downing Street website, associated with a site called Stop The Nightmares. (You can Google those things if you're looking for it: I was going to post the link, but now that I've thought about it more, I don't want to encourage people to impulse-click.) I feel very strongly about what it's petitioning against

Comments

[seika]

But I have a lot less of a problem with parents teaching their children to be religious than parents putting so much emphasis on the fire and the brimstone that children suffer from nightmares and horrible existential fears. (A lot of children may not inherit the religion of their parents, true, but a lot of them who were subjected to extremely heavy-handed religious views also take a long time getting over it and do suffer emotionally, even if they eventually learn to choose their own path. Again, it's not the religion but the way it's taught.)

Although I agree with fiatknox's point that children shouldn't be asked to have a religion until they're old enough to understand it, I also don't have so much of a huge problem with it as I do with the method of teaching that scares kids-- and adults, too, really, because then they can't get over that fear later.

Trying to scare kids into believing probably doesn't make them likely to be religious for the right reasons, anyway, but for the wrong ones-- fear and worry, not because they really want to be. And, as you've said, if kids are scared and traumatised by it when they're little, they're going to have a lot more trouble figuring out what they think about it as adults, whether that turns out to be a positive embracing of it or a realisation that it's not the right path for them.