And around and around it goes....

The point must be made that much religious indoctrination is not physical abuse, and perhaps not really emotional abuse as such -- a benevolent education into Christianity is no scarier than listening to environmentalists declaim, I suppose -- but the issue that is being avoided is whether indoctrination with false or authoritarian data is intellectual abuse. I believe that it can be. The alphabet is a tool, for managing the interface with the social world. So 's potty training and multiplication tables. So even though they may not be fully understood, they are data that the growing child finds referents for and can learn to think clearly with. This is not the case with views of Godhood and the often qwuirky and nonsensical moral structures handed about to children in religious communities of one or another sort -- not just Christian, as anyone who has read Infidel can tell you. But in this culture, they have the majority of the pattern.

Any way, we have no common parlance for this sort of intellectual abuse, and therefore the assertion can easily be rejected. But that makes it none the less true, founded and valid (except under the law).


A