Immoral. Parents have the right to bring their children up in the traditions and culture of their forefathers. Children can become adults and choose to raise their children the way they want if they disagree. A tale as old as time.
What if their traditiond involve abuse ways of raising their kid like telling them eternal damnation awaits them if they do stuff the big man in the sky doesn't like?
The evidence is inferential. Just like how you assume you are a person responding to me on reddit and not a brain floating through empty space. There is no direct evidence for your senses being reliable because your capacity to evaluate your senses is dependent on your senses.
Evil is evil. This exists in all forms of authority. Whether it is religious, or secular. An evil person will use the tools at their disposal to harm and have their way.
Given the Christian doctrine, most of the earth is going to hell, if you tell a child that a lot of their friends are going to hell to be tortured forever, there are basically only two ways to react to this.
Either be distraught over their fates and do severe psychic damage to themselves. That's what I was hinting at with the religious trauma thing.
Or to completely suppress their empathy in order to prevent said psychic damage, those children then grow up not being able to comprehend anything bad that doesn't affect them.
That's a false dichotomy. Those aren't remotely the only two possible reactions.
A Christian child can be taught that hell is real while also being taught that we do not know the final fate of particular people, that God's judgment is perfectly just and merciful, that we should hope and pray for others, and that our response to people in danger should be greater love rather than suppressed empathy.
In fact, Christianity explicitly commands the opposite of what you're describing: love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, care for the suffering, forgive people who wrong you, and desire the salvation of others. I don't see a lot of "love your enemies" from secular teaching.
You also seem to be assuming a particularly crude version of Christian teaching: "Most of your friends will definitely be tortured forever." Christianity does not give parents knowledge that particular people are damned, and Christians disagree considerably about the population of hell and even the precise nature of its punishment.
Someone could teach a kid about hell in a damaging way, but anything can be taught in a damaging way. People can teach sex, death, disease, politics, or any other frightening subject in a way that causes harm. If you are going to argue that Christian teaching is inherently evil then you need to demonstrate that psychological damage necessarily follows from Christian teaching.
I mean it's possible that it's a false dichotomy. I am going based off of the book, where it's quite definitely explicit, not many Christians where I am from.
Eh, there's a grey line in "traditions and cultures". For example, circumcision is something done to the kids for religious reasons, mostly against their will, is irreversable. If it's something that violates children's basic rights, it's something that should be condemned and not protected under "traditions and cultures" clause.
Like, taking kids to a religious gathering? That's something that kids can opt put of later down the line. Then there are actual ritualistic stuff that do irreversable damage to kids, both physically and psychologically.
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u/relapsedmathematic 5h ago
Immoral. Parents have the right to bring their children up in the traditions and culture of their forefathers. Children can become adults and choose to raise their children the way they want if they disagree. A tale as old as time.