I increasingly feel like religious indoctrination in childhood creates a kind of mental illness or disability by disrupting the development of critical thinking skills.
This is not accidental. Many religious scholars have talked about the need to "instruct" children when they're very young - by the age of three or four.
I experienced this first hand and it was stunting, if not traumatic. I came to peace with myself for being atheist only in my 20s.
I have trauma from this, but from the other end. So many stunted people trying to force insanity on me as if it were logic. For the longest time I thought I was crazy or broken for not being able to make some connection they were. Turns out, there's no connections. Just gut feeling.
My wife only got it a little firsthand because her family is evangelical, but her mother is one of the kindest, most accepting, most tolerant people I've ever met. Despite that, and despite being an atheist since she was a teenager, she still has dreams about going to hell in her mid-40s.
Because it's normalized gaslighting.
If a kid isn't encouraged to think critically and is told to ignore their own perception of the world, they learn to seek truth externally from themselves.
Teaching children religion is child abuse. It happened to me and it was abuse. My parents didn't realize it and I forgive them because they were abused by it too but we need to start calling it what it is.
I increasingly feel like religious indoctrination in childhood creates a kind of mental illness or disability by disrupting the development of critical thinking skills.
This is not accidental. Many religious scholars have talked about the need to "instruct" children when they're very young - by the age of three or four.
I experienced this first hand and it was stunting, if not traumatic. I came to peace with myself for being atheist only in my 20s.
I have trauma from this, but from the other end. So many stunted people trying to force insanity on me as if it were logic. For the longest time I thought I was crazy or broken for not being able to make some connection they were. Turns out, there's no connections. Just gut feeling.
My wife only got it a little firsthand because her family is evangelical, but her mother is one of the kindest, most accepting, most tolerant people I've ever met. Despite that, and despite being an atheist since she was a teenager, she still has dreams about going to hell in her mid-40s.
Because it's normalized gaslighting. If a kid isn't encouraged to think critically and is told to ignore their own perception of the world, they learn to seek truth externally from themselves.
Teaching children religion is child abuse. It happened to me and it was abuse. My parents didn't realize it and I forgive them because they were abused by it too but we need to start calling it what it is.