From the first page of this thread:
The religious people I actually know seem OK – but I know most of them would vote to deny me the right to Marry another guy.
Well, I would vote against a law saying you could "marry" another guy, or that I could. Marriage, as it is established by the State, is unconstitutional, an establishment of the religious view of a special interest. Changing the law to slip in gays is just adding another special interest to the mix, and a hostile one at that.
Since you seem to be very anti-religious, you should ask yourself whether using the force of the State to coerce people to add something antithetical to a religious position is sensible!
If brainwashing and misinforming children isn’t a form or abuse - what is? I’d certainly rate it worse than taking naked photos of them.
Any parent/adult authority figure who is not a bad person should sometimes seriously contemplate the idea that the beliefs they hold may not be absolutely right.
In which case they should at least have the common sense and humility to let future generations decide for themselves based on the real factual evidence available.
And who is to determine what is or is not "brainwashing"? To me, to exercise the force necessary to coerce parents into following someone else's agenda for their kids is child abuse more surely than most any religious indoctrination!
Further, who is to determine what the "real factual evidence" is? Atheists would generally limit that to things that can be measured in a laboratory, but that throws out quite a bit of science along with religion; pilgrims to Fatima would insist that the visions there are "factual evidence".
But anyway, the whole argument is silly. One of the major aspects of being a parent is passing along their values to their [children].
This is a most absurd thread.
It is impossible for parents not to impart beliefs and values to children - children are not raised in a skinner box, they are raised in life, and values and beliefs get transmitted.
Parents will indeed pass values to their children; it cannot be helped. It can be done purposefully, as parents ought, or willy-nilly, without thought -- but it will be done. Here lies one of the fallacies of the teaching profession: that there is such a thing as "values-neutral" education. If nothing else, the mere concept of things being "values-neutral" contains a value, and the belief that this is a good thing holds a deeper one.
Everything teaches -- that's a truth that most people dislike, but it's there. A person with white hair running a stop sign has just taught any children watching that it's okay to ignore safety and the law; a person who takes the largest piece of pizza for himself has just taught that selfishness is acceptable; a person who litters has just taught that the world can be treated as trash.
And there is no way to transmit these things as other than absolutes. Children see to the core of their parents' lessons quite well, and generally accept them wholeheartedly; the trouble is that parents rarely realize what it is that they are teaching.
But beyond that - who decides, who is the one who determines what abuse is when it comes to values?
That is a dangerous area and no one has that right and authority, and frankly after reading some of the comments that have been presented here, it can only be restated that freedom of conscious and not the imposition of others should determine what values and beliefs are transmitted by parents to children.
Bingo.
If we call something "child abuse", in these times that means we are asserting that people with guns have the 'right' to take children from parents and indoctrinate them according the the agenda of the people who pay the gunmen. That itself is a lesson that imparts a value: the lesson is that people with guns get their way, and the value is that having more force available is a thing to be desired. It matters not the least bit whether the gunmen are from the "government"; that anyone at all should be able to come between parent and child by means of force conveys the message. Even deeper in that message is that children are property, to be taken by those with greater force at their disposal.
Children are uniquely vulnerable – which is why they are usually protected from exposure to sex, violence and drugs etc as these influences can have bad effects which last all of their adult lives.
....
I think people should be able to hold any belief they want – provided this does not harm others. But harm includes using any form of coercion to force these ideas on others.
For those interested in Gay issues this religiously inspired harm ranges from relatively mild political lobbying to limit Gay civil rights all the way to several countries which still have the death penalty for homosexuality.
And here is the crux of the matter: just how does Dawkins, or anyone else, suggest we "protect" children from having ideas forced in them by coercion? If we propose government intervention, well, as George Washington so astutely pointed out, government is force, nothing else, and so government intervention is a matter of coercion (witness the assault forces sent to force Elian Gonzalez into a course someone else chose for him),
As for "religiously inspired harm", I'll return to the issue of gay "marriage": to me, trying to bash our way in to joining a program of religious discrimination is "religiously inspired harm", because it merely affirms that the religiously inspired harm of establishing a sectarian definition is acceptable.
Ultimately, this question boils down to who "owns" the children, and thus ultimately who owns us all. If religious indoctrination is "child abuse" in a legal sense, then we have thrown out freedom by establishing that both children and parents are the property of the State. And that, more than anything done in the name of religion, is most certainly child abuse.
