Religion and Child Abuse | Moiz Khan

Religion and Child AbuseFiled Under: Religion

As Richard Dawkins points out in his “The God Delusion,” child abuse and religion have a long history together. Dawkins argues, the labeling of young children often takes the form of child abuse. Labeling a child by the religion of their parents is something quite disgusting indeed.

As a child, I spent countless hours in the local Mosque and in religious instruction classes. The classes were merely learning to read the Koran in Arabic. The instructors were men who had no admirable qualities about them. They were failures in life, or simply not able to achieve any material wealth, and thus could make a reasonable living for themselves by the donations of the mosque. They weren’t very intelligent, and their devout belief in Islam showed such. Though, they were nothing beyond a waste of time. That is a rather fortunate situation as at least in the case of the Catholic faith, quite a few of such instructors were also disgusting pedophiles.

Aside from such blatant abuse, religion often takes the form of mental abuse. I often come upon young teenagers who have been brainwashed to the point that they will never break out their religious faith. They wasted years of their life already on this religious nonsense. They will waste more time and money throughout their life, all for a worthless cause. Their support of religion and god often becomes opposition to evolution and science. Dawkins’ famous closing of the Blind Watchmaker sums this point up quite beautifully. “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.” People often ask, why bother with debating religious people, and that is what I often quote as a reply. If I did not debate the theists, and especially those who deny the fact of evolution, I would be allowing those people to die without ever truly living.

In a recent case of religion being the cause behind of child abuse, a Ohio teacher actually branded a child with an image of the cross. The teacher used a device to literally burn the cross on the child’s arm. That is not the end of the teachers offenses, as Mr. Freshwater was actually teaching creationism in a public school. Creationism is not only idiotic, but teaching it in a state funded school is unconstitutional. Such cases of clear child abuse are quite disturbing, and should be disturbing to every American who upholds the Constitution and the fundemental seperation of Church and State. If parents want their children to have such a third rate instruction, they should send them to a Church, not a modern institution of learning. And if people want to teach such nonsense, they should not do it on a salary that is paid by the state.