Debating atheists, addendum 1: Thoughts on child religious education
Here are some remaining thoughts from the three-post saga about my arguments with atheists over on We Hunted the Mammoth. Specifically, I'd like to address points raised by commenter Lea about parents instilling the fear of hell in their children and missionaries using fear and need to proselytize. I have direct experience with the former situation and am living in a heavily Christianized non-European society, so I wanted to talk about these issues in more length than I had previously. This post will deal with the part about religious education, while the next will deal with missionaries.
Lea's comment, originally posted to this thread and reproduced here in screencap and text, was as follows (emphases mine):
Pussypowertantrum,
Yes, the pushback against atheists can be that bad. Though it depends on where you live. The US is very different from state to state and even county to county.
I agree with EJ. Telling kids they'll only go to heaven instead of hell if they believe in a magical being isn't fair to those kids. To my mind the only difference between God and the Easter Bunny is that the kids won't grow up trained carefully from the cradle onward to be afraid of losing faith in the magical bunny for fear of damnation. There is a great deal of emotional manipulation that goes into raising kids to be theists. Some of it is cruel.
I also don't think it is fair for missionaries to go disrupt established cultures and push their beliefs on indigenous people. It's usually done with fear-mongering and things like food, education, medicine and other badly needed aid being used to "persuade" people. The effects can be devastating. Look what missionaries did to Uganda.
Calling me "like Stalin" is incorrect and just plain mean. Stalin also wore shoes, as do I. That doesn't make me anything like a mass murdering shithead.
To address the first emphasized point about religious instruction, I know a little about having the fear of hell being instilled in me. As I discussed in a post about my religious background, it was one of my major childhood anxieties that I would be found unworthy and condemned to eternal torment. It didn't help that my relationship with my parents, and indeed my whole family, was shadowed by the fear of my capricious and sometimes cruel father. So I would never deny that religious instruction can be manipulative, abusive, and cruel. To do so would erase the experiences of many who have suffered, including my own.
That said, I also object to the painful experiences of those raised religiously being attributed to all religious people and families, for several reasons. For one thing, my own upbringing contradicts the idea that a person's religiosity is directly tied to their cruelty. My father, the parent with whom I had the more conflicted relationship, was the less religious of my parents; my mother used to be the only person in the world with whom I was at total ease, whom I trusted totally and implicitly.
She was also clearly the more devout of my parents, firmer in her beliefs, more adamant about church attendance, and more active in church. Though she had the misguided belief in hell, she was not a cruel or manipulative person; it was my frequently-doubting father who did more to instill fear in me of my own worthlessness and God's rejection. When my father rejected me at times for my perceived faults, why wouldn't God? Why wouldn't God, the all-seeing, see into what a fraud I was as my father so easily did, and decide he didn't want anything to do with me?
See, I don't think it was the intellectual idea of hell that was emotionally damaging for me; such things are abstractions, and a child who is otherwise happy and secure with herself is likelier to find it just that, an abstraction. I suspect the harm arises rather from the intent of the adults and their interactions with the child, how much or how little they model the idea of the abject rejection that hell embodies. In my case, at least, it wasn't the remote idea of hell that froze me in fear; it was the much closer possibility of my dad coming home and yelling at me for reasons I neither understood nor controlled, that left me feeling cold and alone and afraid.
Therefore, in my experience it wasn't religious instruction that hurt me but emotional abuse, which was mostly at the hands of a man who was as conflicted about religion as his daughter would grow to be. It was my very religious mother who was the rock of my life, and I reject the idea that she was a cruel or manipulative parent just because she taught me what she sincerely believed and practiced. If anyone wants to call that emotional manipulation feel free, but don't expect my agreement. You can dismiss my reaction as you like as Stockholm Syndrome or just a daughter missing her late mother, but I know my own life and don't particularly care if others think I don't.
Second and more importantly, Christian theology is far from monolithic on the idea of hell. Is it a place, an infinite torture chamber? Is it a state of being cut off from love? Is it a result of exercising human free will, or purely God's choice? Is it eternal damnation or temporary suffering before attaining redemption? The answers to these questions differ between and within denominations, and I get the sense that when anti-theists talk about the evils of teaching children about hell they have one fixed idea of it in mind, likely an eternal torture chamber there is no way out of, and which one can stumble into by being gay or watching porn.
Critics of this type are unlikely to be unaware of conceptions of hell beyond the fire-and-brimstone variety, such as Alexandre Kalomiros' River of Fire (via
chordatesrock) where, to very crudely summarize a work of astounding depth and beauty, hell is not a place but God, that is to say, Love. Those who have opened themselves to love will experience the outpouring of God, the river of fire, as eternal bliss, while those who have closed themselves off to it will know unending torment from that same fire. God does not discriminate between the righteous and the wicked, He does not send them to different places; He pours His love out on everyone equally, and how each person experiences it depends entirely on who they have chosen to be.
My point is that it leaves out a lot to flatten the idea of Christianity down to what essentially seems like sects of fundamentalist Christianity. In fact, anti-theists frequently have this problem of taking critiques of certain fundamentalist Christian and Muslim sects and applying them to religion in general. So on the one hand anti-theist critiques have the problem of taking things that aren't actually religious and calling it religious as I pointed out in the first objection above; and even when these critiques do address religion itself, they suffer from the flaw of attributing the wrongs of a minority to all people of religious faith.
In fact, liberal and tolerant religious people seem to be dismissed by many anti-theists as religious in name only (due to the frequent anti-theist conflation of fundamentalism with all religion), vaguely-defined exceptions to the "rule," or even dangerous sleeper agents who normalize the idea of religion and will contribute to the perpetuation of this evil institution. Or, evidently, if an atheist particularly likes a believer and can't bear to lump them in with the irrational hicks who believe in a sky wizard, a crypto-atheist.
In sum, I agree religious instruction of children can be cruel and manipulative. We as a society need to talk about the issue, prevent cruelty and manipulation, and help victims. On the other hand, calling religious instruction universally cruel and misguided takes both an overbroad view of religion--by attributing everything bad believers do to religion--and an overly narrow view, by treating fundamentalism as representative of all religion.
These blanket characterizations of religion on the one hand, and the erasure of liberal and moderate religionists on the other, not only present a distorted view of the variety that exists in religious experience; they don't even help those children who are legitimately hurt by religious education. Such help is unlikely to come from those who refuse to face the phenomena of religion, religious education, and upbringing in religious families in all their variety.
Dreamwidth entry URL: http://ljlee.dreamwidth.org/64107.html
Lea's comment, originally posted to this thread and reproduced here in screencap and text, was as follows (emphases mine):
Pussypowertantrum,
Yes, the pushback against atheists can be that bad. Though it depends on where you live. The US is very different from state to state and even county to county.
I agree with EJ. Telling kids they'll only go to heaven instead of hell if they believe in a magical being isn't fair to those kids. To my mind the only difference between God and the Easter Bunny is that the kids won't grow up trained carefully from the cradle onward to be afraid of losing faith in the magical bunny for fear of damnation. There is a great deal of emotional manipulation that goes into raising kids to be theists. Some of it is cruel.
I also don't think it is fair for missionaries to go disrupt established cultures and push their beliefs on indigenous people. It's usually done with fear-mongering and things like food, education, medicine and other badly needed aid being used to "persuade" people. The effects can be devastating. Look what missionaries did to Uganda.
Calling me "like Stalin" is incorrect and just plain mean. Stalin also wore shoes, as do I. That doesn't make me anything like a mass murdering shithead.
To address the first emphasized point about religious instruction, I know a little about having the fear of hell being instilled in me. As I discussed in a post about my religious background, it was one of my major childhood anxieties that I would be found unworthy and condemned to eternal torment. It didn't help that my relationship with my parents, and indeed my whole family, was shadowed by the fear of my capricious and sometimes cruel father. So I would never deny that religious instruction can be manipulative, abusive, and cruel. To do so would erase the experiences of many who have suffered, including my own.
That said, I also object to the painful experiences of those raised religiously being attributed to all religious people and families, for several reasons. For one thing, my own upbringing contradicts the idea that a person's religiosity is directly tied to their cruelty. My father, the parent with whom I had the more conflicted relationship, was the less religious of my parents; my mother used to be the only person in the world with whom I was at total ease, whom I trusted totally and implicitly.
She was also clearly the more devout of my parents, firmer in her beliefs, more adamant about church attendance, and more active in church. Though she had the misguided belief in hell, she was not a cruel or manipulative person; it was my frequently-doubting father who did more to instill fear in me of my own worthlessness and God's rejection. When my father rejected me at times for my perceived faults, why wouldn't God? Why wouldn't God, the all-seeing, see into what a fraud I was as my father so easily did, and decide he didn't want anything to do with me?
See, I don't think it was the intellectual idea of hell that was emotionally damaging for me; such things are abstractions, and a child who is otherwise happy and secure with herself is likelier to find it just that, an abstraction. I suspect the harm arises rather from the intent of the adults and their interactions with the child, how much or how little they model the idea of the abject rejection that hell embodies. In my case, at least, it wasn't the remote idea of hell that froze me in fear; it was the much closer possibility of my dad coming home and yelling at me for reasons I neither understood nor controlled, that left me feeling cold and alone and afraid.
Therefore, in my experience it wasn't religious instruction that hurt me but emotional abuse, which was mostly at the hands of a man who was as conflicted about religion as his daughter would grow to be. It was my very religious mother who was the rock of my life, and I reject the idea that she was a cruel or manipulative parent just because she taught me what she sincerely believed and practiced. If anyone wants to call that emotional manipulation feel free, but don't expect my agreement. You can dismiss my reaction as you like as Stockholm Syndrome or just a daughter missing her late mother, but I know my own life and don't particularly care if others think I don't.
Second and more importantly, Christian theology is far from monolithic on the idea of hell. Is it a place, an infinite torture chamber? Is it a state of being cut off from love? Is it a result of exercising human free will, or purely God's choice? Is it eternal damnation or temporary suffering before attaining redemption? The answers to these questions differ between and within denominations, and I get the sense that when anti-theists talk about the evils of teaching children about hell they have one fixed idea of it in mind, likely an eternal torture chamber there is no way out of, and which one can stumble into by being gay or watching porn.
Critics of this type are unlikely to be unaware of conceptions of hell beyond the fire-and-brimstone variety, such as Alexandre Kalomiros' River of Fire (via
chordatesrock) where, to very crudely summarize a work of astounding depth and beauty, hell is not a place but God, that is to say, Love. Those who have opened themselves to love will experience the outpouring of God, the river of fire, as eternal bliss, while those who have closed themselves off to it will know unending torment from that same fire. God does not discriminate between the righteous and the wicked, He does not send them to different places; He pours His love out on everyone equally, and how each person experiences it depends entirely on who they have chosen to be.
My point is that it leaves out a lot to flatten the idea of Christianity down to what essentially seems like sects of fundamentalist Christianity. In fact, anti-theists frequently have this problem of taking critiques of certain fundamentalist Christian and Muslim sects and applying them to religion in general. So on the one hand anti-theist critiques have the problem of taking things that aren't actually religious and calling it religious as I pointed out in the first objection above; and even when these critiques do address religion itself, they suffer from the flaw of attributing the wrongs of a minority to all people of religious faith.
In fact, liberal and tolerant religious people seem to be dismissed by many anti-theists as religious in name only (due to the frequent anti-theist conflation of fundamentalism with all religion), vaguely-defined exceptions to the "rule," or even dangerous sleeper agents who normalize the idea of religion and will contribute to the perpetuation of this evil institution. Or, evidently, if an atheist particularly likes a believer and can't bear to lump them in with the irrational hicks who believe in a sky wizard, a crypto-atheist.
In sum, I agree religious instruction of children can be cruel and manipulative. We as a society need to talk about the issue, prevent cruelty and manipulation, and help victims. On the other hand, calling religious instruction universally cruel and misguided takes both an overbroad view of religion--by attributing everything bad believers do to religion--and an overly narrow view, by treating fundamentalism as representative of all religion.
These blanket characterizations of religion on the one hand, and the erasure of liberal and moderate religionists on the other, not only present a distorted view of the variety that exists in religious experience; they don't even help those children who are legitimately hurt by religious education. Such help is unlikely to come from those who refuse to face the phenomena of religion, religious education, and upbringing in religious families in all their variety.
Dreamwidth entry URL: http://ljlee.dreamwidth.org/64107.html