Religious Abuse... Damned to Hell

[mrmody]

http://carolyngage.weebly.com/2/post/201...-hell.html

[Naomi]

Interesting, but comes off as armchair clinical psychology, and I really doubt it's in any way clinically useful/accurate.

[lucrezaborgia]

That article didn't make much sense for me

[DaisyDeadhead]

Gage = rather annoying Second Waver, used to be a lesbian-feminist fixture. Don't get me started on that whole faction.

My question, how would I explain the concept of "religious abuse" to atheists/agnostics who think all (most) religious training is abusive already? How could I make the necessary distinctions? "No, this is bad, but THIS is the abuse!" I am not sure I know where the line is crossed myself.

I am having an ongoing discussion about this with young people who have little experience with Western religion... how can I communicate that all religion is not the same? To them, it all sounds equally crazy. (And to them, the *craziest thing* is automatically regarded as the most abusive... since it asks you to be illogical.) I want them to understand that there might be crackpot religions in which the kids are treated okay, and there are mainstream religions (I talked about Opus Dei on my radio show today) that have abusive factions and practices.

Maybe I need to start with first principles: What would you all define as religious abuse? How is that different (to you) from simply a "strict religion"? Or do you believe all strict religions are abusive?

Discuss.

[JeseC]

What do you mean by "strict", exactly? For me, the primary damage came from religion insisting on telling me what talents and abilities I had, and that I had to behave a certain way regardless of whether that life was suited to *me*. You know, because a woman with abilities in scholarship and teaching adults just wasn't possible.

I think that might be the heart. Religion becomes abusive to the degree that it forbids us to develop as individual humans. Of course that's an incredibly vague comment.

[DaisyDeadhead]

Hm, Jese that is a good question. I think to secular people, any religion would be regarded as "strict" that would interfere in what you really wanted to do as an individual. Like what you are describing certainly qualifies. Telling a boy he should not enter ballet, would be a similar example. Those things are not about the "faith" itself but about customs and practices *within* the faith. If that makes sense..

Most any faith that would cause actual guilt would be considered "strict" by the kids I am in dialogue with. To them, religion is like window dressing. They are astonished that it actually succeeds in keeping people from doing things they really want to do, i.e. dancing or going to movies or sex.

The fundamentalists and secularists in this country are talking to each other across this wide abyss. Sometimes I wonder if we can even communicate with each other. There are lots of things people say on this forum that I do not understand at all, but I keep plowing onward. Eventually, if I work hard enough, I start to get it... then I am even MORE upset when I do. So far, all that corporal punishment stuff just linked on the other thread (ATI, etc) has been the most difficult to get through... next up would be the bizarre rewrites of history. For example, someone on Facebook sent me this link to a book claiming Thomas Jefferson was a Christian! Are they serious? Jefferson clearly wrote and said he was a Deist at every possible opportunity. I mean, as derisive and nasty as he could be about Christianity in his correspondence, even writing his own version of the Bible? How could anyone claim such a thing in good conscience?

Outlandish. That is criminal, to teach kids wacko history.

It is increasingly difficult for secular people to communicate with fundamentalists (and vice versa) who have been given this faulty history. I always assumed we were all operating on an objective reality that we could appeal to... and now I learn that there are people teaching totally gonzo versions of this reality. When people emerge from fundamentalism, they are also emerging from these faulty histories.

To me, that would the definition of "strict"--a version of reality that supersedes and seeks to change the real world to suit dogma.