Exploiting children to push religion
June 12th, 2010
|
| Share |
Many in the skeptic and atheist communities claim that raising a child with religion is child abuse and should be illegal. I’m not generally of that opinion, because, for one thing, the jails are not large enough and secondly, even imperfect parents are not necessarily ground for child protective services to get involved, as state-based child rearing tends to be even worse.
Yet in some cases, the abuse and exploitation of children reaches a point where it makes me wonder how people get away with this. Of course, this is allowed primarily because it’s wrapped in religion. Still, this video is just sad.
This entry was posted on Saturday, June 12th, 2010 at 10:47 am and is filed under Culture, Misc, Politics, media, religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
View blog reactions
June 12th, 2010 at 3:52 pm
This is rather grim aright. However I have a feeling the kids themselves will likely become apostate as they mature. Like myself, many of those that studied religion deeply enough when they were young, and were relatively serious about it are the truest atheists as the got older. In fact in retrospect I do believe most of the Jesuits who taught me had lost their faith themselves and were just moving along by inertia. Thinking back, several of them dropped hints to that effect.
But in the end the sort of thing depicted in the video, while disturbing, is little more than public performance, which we tolerate children doing in other domains of the lively arts.
Quote Comment
June 12th, 2010 at 6:29 pm
DV82XL said:
Maybe, but pushing a child into being a spectacle can be pretty brutal on their development. Just look at all the child stars who turned into very messed up adults. Michael Jackson started out as a child star in a messed up family that was overly disciplined, religious and forced him into more spotlight than he ever wanted and look what happened to him. His whole adult life was one of plastic surgery, bizarre child-like freakishness and an early death after taking way too many prescription drugs.
Quote Comment
June 12th, 2010 at 11:25 pm
DV82XL, as well you can imagine, there is a reason that every single iranian immigrant, that I have had the fortune to meet here in Sweden, finds religion and authority distasteful. They also tend to be quite highly educated and hard working; the selection mechanism for that is that the highly educated and hard working find it much easier to emmigrate and make new life for themselves elsewhere.
Quote Comment
June 13th, 2010 at 8:56 pm
Q said:
Ah, Michael Jackson. You will forever be held up as prima facie evidence of every societal ill.
My opinion: Jacko would have been wacko regardless of fame. The stardom and pressure may have exacerbated his condition, but I suspect it was always there and was made all the more bizarre by having the resources to play out eccentricities that most mentally ill people don’t have the resources to act on.
That said, I too find child exploitation distasteful and potentially damaging, but nowhere more so than in child beauty pageants.
Quote Comment
June 13th, 2010 at 10:35 pm
Jacko was… strange…
Man, I wonder what was going on with some of his weird fantasies and beliefs.
he had this commissioned by a painter to hang in his home (by some reports over his bed but I don’t know if it’s true):
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rtOXMZlMTkg/Sdgka98K01I/AAAAAAAABz0/FDXo-wKrjio/s1600/lastsupper_michaeljackson.jpg
By the way, in case you don’t recognize the context, that is Leonardo Di Vinci’s Last Supper in the layout with Michael Jackson in a golden thrown as Jesus. He is surrounded by Einstein, Edison, John F. Kennedy, Aberham Lincoln, Walk Disney, Elvis Charley Chaplin and I’m not sure who the other guy is (James Dean, I think)
I’m not sure what the papers are. I believe that he’s holding the US Constitution or the Magna Carta or the Emancipation Proclamation or some other historic document that is pivotal to Western Society.
That is more than a case of a starlet child. That’s….. weeeeeiiiird
Quote Comment
June 13th, 2010 at 10:44 pm
drbuzz0 said:
On the other hand, having a large picture or carving of a man writhing in agony while he is being tortured to death nailed up on a wooden cross, over one’s bed is absolutely acceptable.
Quote Comment
June 13th, 2010 at 11:44 pm
James Dean? I’m thinking Prince (either that or Little Richard), although that would make him the only living apostle. If you group them by twos, you’ve got two presidents, two scientists, and two film-makers. Elvis is both a film star and musician, but if the pairing holds, I would expect him to be matched with another musician.
Not that it matters, dude was nuts.
Quote Comment
June 14th, 2010 at 1:52 am
You know, Stevie Wonder, Christopher Walken, and Shirley Temple (just to name a few former child stars) pretty much all turned out all right.
Jacko was just plain weird!
Quote Comment
June 14th, 2010 at 7:19 am
Mr. Blue said:
Yes some do OK in the long run but many don’t.
Gary Coleman, Dana Plato, Danny Bonaduce, Corey Haim, Tiffany, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan. Both sides of the argument can come up with lists.
And yes in many cases other parts of the family dynamic probably contributed to the situation, but just because being a child entertainer/preacher may not by itself cause problems it sure doesn’t help.
Quote Comment
June 14th, 2010 at 9:28 am
A little off topic, but I suppose if we’re going to have movies and television shows that are not exclusively about adult characters, we need to have some child actors. If we want to have entertainment or dramatizations that have young people as characters or extras, someone has to play them.
I don’t know that this necessarily will always translate to growing up to be a freak. I think part of it might be that the parents who push their children to be stars are not always focusing on being good parents. Another thing about child stars is that they generally don’t have good financial wisdom to realize that most stars don’t have continuous work and do go through some dry spells and therefore should invest most of their money in safe investments to insure they won’t be left poor when they go a few years without much work. This therefore falls to their parents or agents, who too often don’t step in.
Quote Comment
June 14th, 2010 at 9:24 pm
I think there is something to be said for a required school course for all children from an early age, is a world religions course that gives children some idea of beliefs outside the religion of their parents. Ideally this would include both an explanation of the beliefs that would meet the approval of those who hold them & criticisms of the beliefs by outsiders.
There are too many religions to cover them all, but a reasonably varied sampling should be feasible.
Quote Comment
June 14th, 2010 at 10:59 pm
I think you might underestimate the political furor that allowing criticism of religions or explanations of other religions would likely cause.
Quote Comment
June 15th, 2010 at 9:20 am
I realize that people would fear such a course would mean their children would leave their religion & this would make it politically impossible. But I can dream of the ideal.
Note that such a fear is an implicit admission that ones religion does not actually make sense. Someone who was confident that his beliefs are justified would regard such a course as an opportunity to get converts.
Quote Comment
June 16th, 2010 at 3:27 pm
The main problem behind dubbing it child abuse to raise a child within a religion is that we in the West cherish freedom of speech and freedom of ideas, and if we are to arbitrarily define what are acceptable thoughts, then we are crossing a line that frankly should not be crossed.
Think about it this way: a lot of religious people feel it is child abuse to raise a child *without* religion, so if we allow the government to dictate what ideas it is right for parents to foster in their children, there is a very good chance we’ll wind up with a law saying all children need to be raised Christian. And it will be a specific type of Christian, of course. I do not want to live in such a nation. Other nations have tried that. It was a failure, and carried a sharp humanitarian price. It is simply not worth it to prove some sort of point.
Far better is to make sure everyone has fair and equitable access to a decent education, and let the rest sort itself out. We can ban specific practices that some religions call for; marriage to a 12-year-old and polygamy are both illegal in our society, though certain religions endorse (or even encourage) both practices. As long as people are able to basically get along with one another, I don’t think it’s important what ideas they hold. You can’t kill off ideas anyway, and people raised in faiths are usually less ardent than the converts.
Will people hold ideas I disagree with? Yes! And I’m okay with that. You can raise your kid a Satanist if you like, as long as you aren’t hurting him or teaching him how to break the law or anything like that. What’s wrong is wrong, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s coming from a religion or a gang.
Actually, there’s another point against the “ban children from religion” concept. How do you distinguish a religion from just a kooky idea, or another structured social group? Does it have to be a recognized, organized religion before it could be prosecuted? Is it child abuse to raise your child as a SCAdian, and make them camp out in entirely period-accurate gear? After all, it will likely lead to them getting picked on in school, even if you get them to fighter’s practice on a regular basis. What about the die-hard sci-fi con-goers, who raise their kids speaking Klingon and pull them out of school to attend conventions? I think banning religion is more than a slippery slope. It’s the first step towards thought control, and ironically enough, the groups most enthusiastic about it are religions themselves.
Quote Comment
June 16th, 2010 at 9:26 pm
“Far better is to make sure everyone has fair and equitable access to a decent education, and let the rest sort itself out.”
Which is why I made my suggestions.
What is child abuse is not teaching them a set of ideas that I consider total BS, but preventing the children from learning about other ideas that conflict with your own ideas.
Quote Comment
June 17th, 2010 at 3:33 pm
Very well said; you are far more elegant in your language than I.
Quote Comment