<p>As Richard Dawkins said, labeling a child a Catholic Child or a Muslim child or a Jewish child is completely dangerous. Moreover, making a child girl wear a burqa or hijab, or a make a jewish girl or boy wear a yamika (or however you spell it) is child abuse at its finest. Yesterday at my neighbor’s birthday party I saw a little boy was wearing a yamika. Poor dude, he probably has no idea what’s going on. How dare they.</p>
<p>The only kind of thing I can think of with religion involving children is for them to go to church and just play with other children in the courtyard and not listen to any sermon. </p>
<p>Fortunately, I was raised without any imposed religion and I’m real thankful for that. Religion is poison. I just believe in God, and I’m not an enemy of religion, but I think it does more harm than good.</p>
<p>Not child abuse. In their minds they believe that they’re doing something good, like securing a place in heaven for their kids. </p>
<p>But that really does suck. But hey, maybe we’re the ignorant ones. Nobody KNOWS for sure if any one religion is true is there is nothing at all out there. Maybe one day the Jewish God will come out and send us to hell for being idiots and not believing him and calling his followers child abusers. You’re just as ignorant as them if you automatically rule it out without knowing. That would be a leap of faith, just as they do.</p>
<p>^Oh god, securing a place in heaven for their kids? Are you serious? </p>
<p>That is child abuse. And judging by your comment i think you’re jewish but that doesn’t really matter because the point is you’re skirting around the issue by saying the Jewish god might come out for us all. Then again, BeKindRewind, there IS no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his messenger. So you are wrong.</p>
<p>There are worse forms of child abuse, but I do agree that is is morally ambiguous to introduce a particular religion to your child and teach them that religion is the absolute truth. There is no need to brainwash children, people ought to be able to choose their beliefs as adults, and indoctrination as a child interferes with that freedom. All the same, we derive a number of our fundamental beliefs from our parents, religion being only one. We can’t expect people to stop impacting their children.</p>
<p>What’s ironic is that christianity, despite its lovely appearance, has had the most bloodshed out of all the three religions, yet, i haven’t seen anything that requires christians to wear upon entering a church. temples = yamikas; mosques = burqas/hijabs. i might be wrong because yamikas might be optional. but churhces don’t make you wear jack.</p>
<p>^this all of course is relating only to religious apparel which i think is unnecessary. the heart is what counts and not the scarf.</p>
<p>Raising a child in a religion is certainly not inherently abusive. Where religions fail and become dangerous is when they claim, “This is the one true path. Everyone else is wrong.” </p>
<p>But, religion in itself is full of deep scientific wisdoms yet to be discovered. Spirituality is simply filling in the blank. If one can use Islam or Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism or even atheism as a tool to discover the ultimate wisdom, then that is precisely what the individuals from whom those religions emerged came here to do. </p>
<p>I, personally, was raised Catholic and had a big falling out. I embarked on a spiritual journey to understand truth regardless of background. When I finally discovered that deeply scientific truth, I was able to see it in the teachings of Christ (not necessarily in his followers or in most of the Bible, but it was there in the texts that had avoided the edits of man). I realized Christ was simply a master of applied quantum physics.</p>
<p>I’ve found a number of people I know who were not raised in any religious tradition share the view of baller4lyfe. I also find these people the least likely to be open to any mystical interaction or guidance. For all the pain religion caused me, it also opened me at a young age to the possibility that we our science is far, far, far from having all the answers. My non-religious friends just don’t get it. They think it’s all mind games and mental opium.</p>
<p>There are some Christian churches here that do have dress codes. For instance, there’s a church near me called the Brethren Church. It requires all the women to wear bonnets and ankle-length dresses, with no jewelry. They’re also supposed to grow their hair long. While this church obviously is not well established nationally, it is rather sizable in my area. I also think that’s ridiculous. What does anyone get from wearing a yarmulke?</p>
<p>Actually, I think it’s good that parents involve their children in religion. If nothing else, it teaches them some moral values. Additionally, there are now atheist Sunday schools for atheists who still want their children to have moral values. That part of religion is good.</p>
<p>You’re right it does teach moral values but I got that without all the fluffing on the cake (raised with an excellent family, close ties, right from wrong, love for sports, etc). i even go to church and mosques now to meet new people, and am just as happy as them. and i do like religion-based stories, literature, and certain aspects of the religion.</p>
<p>I’m with applejack. If a child is raised with hardcore religious extremists, they may never learn to consider other possibilities. </p>
<p>But then again, without religion, most of humanity would risk becoming nihilistic. Thinking in terms of “if there isno reason to be good, then why bother” leads to degradation of the world. And that would be bad.</p>
<p>^ That may be the case, but then people are led to believe that the only reason one should be a good human being is in fear of not having an afterlife or being eternally damned.</p>
<p>Or MAYBE cutting off your children’s left ears and feeding them asparagus every Tuesday would save their souls. I mean, no one really knows, right?</p>
<p>I wouldn’t go so far as to call it abuse, I definitely think using religion to control children is damaging. I went to a Catholic elementary school, and we wee taught that it was a sin to forget your homework or get a test question wrong. I was afraid I would go to hell if I broke a school rule. No adult should use eternal damnation as a tool of discipline.</p>
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<p>***? Science is the exact opposite of religion. I’m not saying that religious teachings and scientific theories never coincide, but their methods are competely different. Religion demands that you accept things as absolute truth without proof, without evidence, on faith. Science demands that you verify your hypotheses again and again before they are even considered. You can’t consider “mystical revelation” to be scientific truth.</p>
<p>As for the yamikas, etc. idk, my mom made me wear these ugly pink shoes when I was little, and I never felt abused. To a child, a yamika is just a funny-looking hat.</p>
Same here (until I was about 10 or 11 years old)… but I was atheist at 8 (perhaps not for the usual “logical” reasons). They told me bad handwriting was a sin, too; I was dysgraphic and spent ages on my work to make it look good.</p>
<p>I think child abuse is telling your kid that he’s going to go to hell if he’s not a Christian/Muslim/Jew when he/she’s too young to really make their own decisions (eg less than 13 years).</p>
<p>LOL. this is hilarious. your little, pink shoes didn’t have a sinister undertone and wouldn’t transpire into a greater goal now, would it? that’s precisely what religious clothing leads to. first its the yamika, then a menorah-holder, than god knows what else. that is a first step to the religion. is there a first step to pink shoes? no, because it has no greater goal and you would definitely change your wardrobe to sandals. the point is that pink shoes or sandals do not have a lurking poison behind them. religious apparel does because it CAN (i didn’t say does) lead to greater goals which includes brainwashing, intolerance, manipulation by clerics, ad infinitum. i’m pretty sure that if you wear pink shoes as a child,there is no pink shoe queen out there forcing you to obey its command or else.</p>
<p>so your argument is deeply flawed, because to a child, a yamika is a prima facie funny looking hat, but as the child grows, so too does the influence of the yamika. that was a confabulated response that paid no heed to future deficits. what are the future deficits of pink shoes? oh bother, you get sick of it, so go ahead and switch to sandals, you’re not under oath or binded by anything. future deficits to a child who wore a yamika? expulsion from religion, family disappointment, ad infinitum.</p>
<p>^I apologize, I guess I don’t really know how Jewish children feel about yamikas. When I was a kid, I never really associated religious apparel with anything sinister. It seems to me that the bigger problem is the brainwashing that goes on in religious institutions, and clothing is just a superficial symbol of that.</p>
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<p>People also use the word “good” as an adverb all the time, that doesn’t mean it’s right. You can’t walk into a science lab and say “God told me the speed of light is 3*10^8 m/s^2!” and expect to get published, you need to have actual evidence.</p>