Thanks for the historical insight.

There is no question that other kinds of abuse may be more virulent than the kinds covered by Riginslinger's remark, which was deklivered without parameters or qualifications.

I believe there are two modalities in which religion IS abuse. One of these is the kind suffered by the individual who is completely swept up in material perspectives, has no connection that he will admit to any realm other than physical energy, space and the body he drives. To such an individual, the notion of spirituality of any kind can be abusive because it is threatening -- it could destabilize his whole worldview, open up more confusions than he could keep up with in his nightmares, and force him to reevaluate all his ethical choices against a standard much higher (if that is the right word) than any he had ever tried to use. This can be, temporarily at least, very crushing and invalidative.

By contrast, the OTHER way religion can be abuse is for the individual who DOES have a glimmer of his own spiritual nature, a sense of self that is more than material, a connection with his own creative powers and imagination, a touch of telepathy or other more-than-physical ability. To such a person, being given a model of the universe peopled with power icons and supranormal identities with which he cannot easily connect, or which he has to subscribe to in order to create and then connect with, is destructive, and can induce insanity in various degrees.

The middle ground is to find those paths of education which center around self-responsibility and the sovereign right of an individual to explore the universe and his powers in it on the basis of his own say-so.

There a huge flood of other kinds of cognitive abuse available in the world for young people from bad education to perverse cultural conventions and brutal peers. Defusing all that is something every child needs as he transitions into adulthood, but doing it with gimcrack beliefs not anchored in his own sense of self will not serve. Some of these things can be worse than arbitrary religious indoctrination, but that is neither here nor there.

A