BAPTISM
- A PROMISE
TO CONDITION YOUR CHILD
BAPTISM - A PROMISE TO CONDITION THE CHILD
As baptism is supposed to confer membership of the Catholic Church and the Catholic faith on the baby, it involves a promise made for the child by proxy to turn the child into a believer. The baptism is meant to oblige the child to honour the Roman Catholic Church and its doctrines. Adam and Eve caused all the children to be born after them to have original sin meaning they are born outside God's family and faith and need baptism to be brought in. The Adam and Even story has them breaking a law of God not to eat from a tree. The message is clear: Adam and Eve didn't do anything harmful. If you break a law of God that is sin. Goodness is not really about being harmless or helping others. It is about obedience. That is a vile message to give a child. And it is a message that is demonstrated by baptism.
If children become Catholics at baptism, then when they get older, others have a right to expect them to believe exactly what the Church tells them to believe and to be able to state the case for such faith - evidence etc.
The Catholic child is not raised to honour say Islam or Mormonism or Evangelical Christianity but raised to honour Catholicism. Parents may say that a child being raised to honour Catholicism does not imply the child is being raised to dishonour or disrespect other religions. The child is being raised to just not honour them or dishonour them. But if say Islam is the true faith then it follows that the child is being raised to dishonour it. Truth deserves honour. To approach it with the attitude that you will not honour or dishonour it is to dishonour it.
Conditioning is never well-intentioned. It is a refusal to accept say a child as he or she is. She or he must be a Catholic or regarded as Catholic in some sense to be accepted. We all know and see the power of conditioning - we know how easy it is to do to a child. There is no excuse for we have experienced it ourselves. If a child was truly accepted, the child would be nurtured to condition herself or himself rather than it being done by the Church and teachers and parents. Parents need to be guides not brainwashers.
If indoctrinating or influencing a child to embrace a particular religion is not taking advantage of the child, then why would Catholic parents object if they send children to Protestant schools that said they would give the children an education to develop their Catholic faith and they end up educated in another faith? If it is not taking advantage, why should it matter what faith the teachers propound to the children? You may answer that it is cruel to teach children a faith that does not match that of their parents. Let us keep that view out of it. Anyway the view implies that mixed marriages are unhealthy for children. A child reared in Islam has every chance of being as well-behaved as a child raised Catholic or Mormon or Calvinist or Buddhist for example.
Parents would not approve if children were conditioned to follow a cult like Militant Islam or Jim Jones People's Temple. They think of those who get caught up in those cults as gullible or stupid. No. They were and are as smart as anybody else. Conditioning works on the emotions to trick the victim into thinking he or she believes and it influences them to cleverly invent reasons to see these beliefs as plausible. If Catholics should condition then other religions should do it too so that should show you how dangerous and anti-truth conditioning is.
Some people think that the conditioning is no big deal when very intelligent theologians seem to believe in the Catholic faith. But they don't realise that the reason clever people can believe nonsense is because they are experts at coming up with reasons and excuses that seem to justify the belief. But they are clearly deciding what they want to believe and tricking themselves that they believe. When you work too hard to make a belief sound reasonable you show a need to convince yourself that it is correct. You can use 99% truth and correct reasoning but the 1% tiny errors and distortions that are hard to spot could be the Achille's heel of your whole argument. The best liars make tiny lies go a long way. When scientists are very very wrong, they use a lot of truth and correct logic in the process so that the errors are hard to find.
Truth will win out and expose the lying doctrines and errors that we have been conditioned to support one day. Conditioning endangers and hurts. Imagine the disappointment a child could have when realising that Jesus was a fraud if he lived?
It is natural that if a child is baptised that the parents should buy her or him a Bible. In it she or he should read that God ordered the genocide of the Canaanites. Jesus spoke a lot of repetitious and unhelpful tripe and never condemned all that God sanctioned mass murder. That silence says a lot about him. Also he went as far as to declare the revelations from God that demanded such evil to be truly God's impeccable word. Approval. Christians attempt to justify this by saying the Canaanites were completely evil and there was no other option but genocide. There was no room for loving these sinners and hating their sins for there was nothing worth saving or worth loving about them. Is that the kind of thing you want your child inspired by? Baptism would require that he or she should have access to this evil poison. If you should hate then you should hate those who have personally hurt you. But the Bible incites to hatred purely on religious grounds.
Christianity is guilty of moral relativism. That is it thinks it was right for God to urge his people to murder and rape and pillage before Christ and that kind of behaviour is wrong now. I am not saying moral relativism is wrong or right. I am saying that it is what the Christians have got. It happens because the Bible cannot agree with itself. It has one moral principle contradicting the other. This is dangerous. Many fanatical or insane Christians have actually gone out and murdered people because the Bible God commanded the death penalty for these people.
We cannot hope to have a personal relationship with God or Jesus Christ unless we know them. And we cannot know them unless we know ourselves. Catholicism claims that it works to give children such a special relationship as a gift. This is a lie for children do not know themselves and yet God and Jesus are pushed on them.
Prayer is self-centred. Children are taught to pray for their parents. Like all human beings, they will care for their parents and not give a toss about some other child's parents in some strange land. This not caring shows a willingness to see others hurt. If you don't care for others then whatever evil befalls them is okay with you. That is a bad human trait. But prayer makes it a worse trait. How? Suppose you are a praying child. You are asking God not to care that you don't care. You wouldn't be praying and offering prayer unless you thought God approved of it. So you increase your evil by indicating that God approves. Also, you are trying to get God to run the universe in such a way that your parents get special treatment. It is actually attempting to hurt others supernaturally. A belief that you had only so much magic power and that you were using it to cast a spell to help your parents only simply because you can't do it for all parents would be better.
Is the prayer both self-centred and unselfish? If it is then how can we call any act selfish? When a child does not share his sweets he hurts his relationships with others and so wasn't thinking of himself. But he is still selfish. So in that case we can safely say that the prayer is selfish and in a vicious way.
Jesus said seek and you will find. Millions have prayed for years to be able to see that Christianity is true and their prayers were never answered. That is proof that the faith is false. To say that those people were not true seekers is just insulting and a cop-out. It is like saying you have a cancer curing medicine and if it saves no lives it is because the cancer patients didn't really want to be cured. To give Jesus to your children as a friend when he makes false promises is just demeaning to the child and also cruel.
Christianity encourages children to look forward to Heaven where they will get rewards for the good they have done on earth. Suppose a child does well in an examination. The child may feel the rewards that come after diligence and hard work and success. Giving the child a reward such as a party will dull the satisfaction she or he will have felt. It takes away the most important rewards. So we conclude that Heaven is not a good thing to be teaching children. Also, it increases the likelihood that the child will prefer the reward for doing right to doing right. Worse, rewards make children less likely to do things that do not carry a reward.
You can do great good and be ready to swear that you do it selflessly and without any selfishness. And you can still be wrong. You cannot see all your motives or priorities. Indeed you often mask them from yourself. You could still be chiefly selfish. The atheist who does not believe in God or heavenly rewards has a better chance of being selfless than a believer. This is because religious faith adds to the temptation to be selfish and to have ulterior motives. We care about goodness. We do. But if we feel we are doing good out of selfishness, we will tend to hide that from ourselves. Religion adds to the pressure to do that.
Doctrines such as that bad people or sinners go to suffer forever in Hell are perversely satisfying especially to children. Parents who know what they are doing will not expose their children to a religion that teaches such doctrine. And baptism requires them to so it should be abandoned. Atheist children who harbour a vindictive pleasure at the misfortune of their enemies will not be as malign as those who believe in Hell. You would be very evil if you would enjoy the thought of somebody suffering forever. Christianity will deny it encourages such thinking but it knows that children will be children so it does encourage it.
Only a few Christians do what may be described as heroic good works. The rest find that their faith helps them to cope with the harsh realities of life but they are not very willing to change these realities! Generally speaking religious faith is a vice. For example, if you believe God is all powerful and ultimately responsible for all that happens then his will will be done. Whether you help cancer patients by giving donations or not doesn't matter. God is working and there is every reason to be optimistic even if all cancer patients never get another minute of help.
Psychologists have shown that we have the tendency to see the world as fair though the evidence is that it is not. We tend to treat people who win big prizes for example as if they deserved it. We tend to blame people for their own misfortune. The concept of a God who is in control and who is fair makes this vicious tendency worse. Catholic Church, we are bad enough as we are without you coming along to make us worse!
Every hypocrite goes about pretending and claiming to be a well-meaning person. A religious person who teaches a faith that isn't true is not a well-meaning person no matter how much of a do-gooder they are. You are only well-meaning if you do the wrong thing while genuinely meaning to help others and don't have the chance to know any better. Religionists can and should know better.
The Catholic Church teaches that we have no free will to live a sinless life. We only have free will to decide what sins we are to commit. This is not an encouraging message. A child with the use of reason - which means he develops free will then - that wouldn't sin would have to do it to avoid contradicting the faith and is in fact conditioned to sin. The Church reckons children become capable of sin around seven years old.
The Roman Catholic Church teaches that it is infallible and irrevocable doctrine that faith is infused by God’s miracle power at baptism. You can't then be a Catholic and deny it. But when the Church is unable to prove this and statistics certainly show that Catholics today show a weaker inclination than say Mormons or Muslims to believe in their religion without picking and choosing the doctrine is just an excuse for claiming the right to indoctrinate children. But there would only be such a right if proof existed.
The child that is baptised is not allowed to doubt any information about faith and morals coming from the Church at all. The Church teaches that the teaching authority of the priests and bishops who are one in heart and communion with Rome must be heeded and obeyed by all who are baptised. What is so special about these men that we should do that? This is manipulation. At least pagans are better off for the Church says they can doubt all they want before they are ready for the gift of faith. Infant baptism is vicious and an assault on human rights when it is claimed that it turns a person into a believer and member of the Church, the body of believers. Making the child a Catholic at baptism makes the child feel that adults have the right to make decisions for it. They do but not to that extent!
Conditioning is dangerous. It makes young Catholics hate Protestants. It makes young gay people hate themselves. It makes some young Muslims become suicide bombers or approve of such activity. People like to fit in so they absorb the prejudices of others. The young are not sure about how to live in the world so they take the easiest and most convenient route. They start to depend on the example and opinions and influence of their segment of society and environment and take on some of that identity.
The prejudices may be against groups and races and seen to be bad or against certain views which is just as dangerous. Conditioning works like hypnosis. It takes away our freedom and restricts us.
It is said that children have an inclination to believe in God so human nature then is inherently religious. Even if that is true, why not teach children spirituality without forcing any particular religion on them? A child would be happy not to go to Church which indicates that we should not describe children as religious but maybe as spiritual. Children have a tendency towards animism. If they fall over a brick they blame the brick because they think that things have consciousness and are bad or good. So it is more correct to say that their nature is inherently superstitious not religious. If they become religious later on then are they not swapping childlike superstition for religious superstition? If the religion is true, they may still be motivated by superstitious desires to follow it. It is better to be conditioned by science and secularism than religion for at least you are going to have a high regard for criticising your beliefs and you will be humbler than the believer in religion. You will revere evidence while religious people manipulate evidence and twist it to suit their faith. As Valerie Tarico noted, the brain is like a lawyer. It wants to be seen as believing what is right or true. It does not really care about being right (page 217, The Dark Side, Valerie Tarico, Dea Press, Seattle, 2006). That is a warning that the promotion of religion or anything else that decides what to believe and then looks for evidence to justify it is dangerous. Evidence should create belief. Science can't explain everything that does not change the fact that we should use the critical scientific method and only apportion belief to evidence.
There are so many things we are conditioned to believe or assume and religion is just one of them. There can be no doubt that the lack of interest in most religious people to find the truth - if they did work hard to find the truth there would not be so many different squabbling religions - is a sign of being conditioned. Brides get upset if they think their husbands to be see them in their wedding dress before the ceremony. This is another example of conditioning.
A woman is raped. The rapist drowns himself. Should we then hypnotise the woman to think the rape never happened? It will help her get on with her life if we do. But all agree we should not do it. If so, then religious delusion and religious conditioning and religious hypnosis are wrong. Religion doesn't mind deluding and conditioning people so it makes a travesty of right and wrong.
Religion should encourage people to find the faith or non-faith that works for them. Catholics should be encouraged to become Protestants by Catholics if they so wish as long as they are acting seriously and with deliberation. This doesn’t happen which shows there is a lot of prejudice and perhaps hatred simmering under the surface.
Baptism is against the kind of religious freedom we have commented on. It is pro-conditioning. It marries a child to the Church and the Church’s idea of God (God is not necessarily the Church’s idea of him so it is really the Church that is being served not God when God is served) and is making a commitment to the Church for the child and resolves to condition the child to make that commitment later on his or her own.
Conditioning is dangerous and degrading and individuality must be explored and nurtured. It is bad not because of the bad results that it can have – St Padre Pio would have been an Islamic suicide bomber had he been in the time and place for that when he was a boy. Religious conditioning is saying to the child, “We don’t want you as you are. We want you to be like us or our Church.” It is child-abuse.
Conditioning cannot be avoided completely so it is important to teach a child only what is true and proven. The religious fantasies that religions makes doctrines of are dangerous. If you teach a child that God will send her to Hell for being bad, the child will see God as bad and the universe he runs as a threat. It will fill the child with anger for she will feel she cannot be free when she has to do good to avoid hell. To tell her that God is good is to present her with a bad example for she will see God as somebody bad who you have to pretend is good.
Catholic schools require that pupils must be baptised. For a lot of Catholics, their main concern is to have the baby baptised as a prerequisite for having the child enrolled in a Catholic school later on. Instead of having the guts and the courage to insist that this rule is discriminatory the parents go along with it. If Catholic education is a good thing, it should be provided to children that may become Catholics and who have Catholic parents and not just to the baptised. The rule is a disgraceful attempt by Catholic bishops and priests to interfere in families and in what is none of their business. They resort to such tactics to force parents to make their babies members of the Church.
We force facts on children at school and since religion is just speculation we should not be forcing it on them. To teach a child religion is manipulating the child. It is taking advantage of the impressionable nature of the child.
Roman Catholicism refers to itself as the Catholic Church, that is the Church that is open to all people on earth and which anybody - however simple and uneducated - can see must be the true Church. Baptism is the way into the Church. By baptising your child, you are dedicating the child to these beliefs. They result in the child becoming suspicious of other religions. If it is so easy to see that the Catholic Church is the true Church then clearly Protestants and Muslims etc living among Catholics are deliberately blinding themselves. They are evil antichrists. Parents clearly do not have the right to indoctrinate their children into a religion like that. The child should not be baptised. Ecumenism is only a cynical pretence at solidarity and friendship between Roman Catholicism and other faiths. It counts for nothing but is a good proof that most if not all religion is about self-deception. No responsible parent wants that for their child.
Roman Catholicism says that parents have the right to decide to bring their child up as a Catholic and have the child baptised as an infant with a view to that.
Is this true?
It’s a trick of the clergy. It is not true that parents have a right to have their child baptised.
Even if parents have the right to decide they want their child baptised, it does not follow that anybody has the right to baptise the child. There is no reason to think that a priest has the right to baptise the child even with the parent's consent or at their request. The clergy are abusing babies by baptising them. They can't prove they are doing right.
The clergy certainly does not believe that Catholic parents, lapsed or practicing, have the right to raise their child as a Jew or a Satanist or a Witch or to have the baby initiated into one of those faiths. So just what label the clergy puts on you, that is if they decide you are Catholic, that supposedly gives you a right and or obligation to enter the baby into the Church and into its authority. The Church looks for special rights in this. It does not give you the right to enrol or enter your child in another faith. Talk of rights here is really about the Catholic Church getting special treatment.
It seems that parents only have the right to raise their children as Catholics whether they are Catholics themselves or not. The Church refuses to baptise babies that will not be raised as Catholics. The Catholic Church will not baptise a baby brought by Presbyterian parents who intend to raise the child as a Presbyterian. The reason is that baptism in a Catholic Church confers membership in the Catholic Church on the baby and it is a betrayal of this to raise the child in a different faith. The Church dismisses the view that baptism heals the baby and therefore is good even if the parents don't want to raise the baby as Catholic. It is like forbidding a child to be vaccinated on the grounds that the parents will give an antidote for the vaccine when the child grows older! The Church is more concerned about getting the child to agree with Catholicism than helping the child. Baptism treats the children as things.
Lapsed or doubtful Catholics who fear the power of their religion and would work against it for their own ends are said to have the right to have their baby baptised. The Church says they have the obligation to ensure the child is baptised. So when you think having the baby baptised is possibly a bad idea for the Church might not be the true religion at all, the Church still urges you to have the child baptised and to believe you have this right. If that is the case, then surely Jews or some other faith that differs from Catholicism, has no right to initiate any child into a religion other than Catholicism. When Catholic rebels have no right to deny Catholic baptism to their babies, how could the sincerely wrong believer in Judaism etc have the right?
The Church says that error (that is what it calls any idea or opinion that disagrees with the Church) has no rights but people do. That you must oppose the errors but not hurt the people that make the errors or look down on them is her doctrine. It follows then that only people who believe in the right religion can have a right to have their children brought up in the religion.
Children need instruction in right and wrong. Stories about God flooding the world and his son rising from the dead are not going to do that. The focus should be on training the child. Religion cares more for orthodoxy than for morals. For example, Hitler was never excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church for what he did. If he had dared question the Godhead of Christ he would have been.
Rights are based on needs. A child needs to know that stealing is bad. A child does not need to "know" that Mary is the Mother of God. Most children in the world don’t know and most of those that do know don’t care who she is and are fine. Therefore there is no intrinsic right to indoctrinate or unduly influence a child. Encouraging the child to think for itself about religion and telling it about religion is fine. That lays down a boundary that should never be crossed. Telling the child for example about the Our Father prayer is okay but making the child learn it and say it is wrong.
In Ireland, the vast majority of tax payers are Catholics. The Church says that these taxes pay for the schools so the parents have a right to insist that the schools teach the Catholic religion as fact. But the fact remains that some other arrangement could be put in place for the indoctrination of children. It doesn't have to be state schools. This is obvious and secularists have shouted it out loudly and clearly. The priesthood is simply trying to manipulate. It is its own plot to brainwash and indoctrinate children that it is really concerned about and not the rights of parents. It does not follow from Catholics paying taxes that schools funded thereby must indoctrinate Catholicism. It does not follow that hospitals should only be run by the Church, priests and nuns and religious orders, when the hospitals are funded by Catholics. It does not follow that only Catholic nurses should be employed in hospitals that are funded in a Catholic state. It does not follow that pharmacists must take an oath not to supply contraception when they are employed by a health service that is funded by Catholics.
A child is a child. There is no such thing as a Catholic child, a Buddhist child or a Protestant child. Humanists and atheists do not label their children as humanist children or atheist children. Don’t abuse children by labelling them. Children accept everybody – don’t try to make them see other children as different or as members of an opposing faith. Even when faiths are not in open opposition, it is undeniable that when the Protestant minister instructs his flock he is hoping to keep them from the Catholic Church which would like to see them in its fold!
Children are human beings. Religionists are human beings before they are religionists. Any attempt to label a child, any attempt to call a child a genuine member of the Church, is simply a lie.
| DOGMATIC UPBRINGING | NON-DOGMATIC UPBRINGING |
| Claims that it is a duty to teach religion to children in such a way that the children are required and expected to believe the religion. With this, a religion is taught as true. It is not taught in a neutral and comparative way. Children will only be confused and think one religion is as good as another if it is. | Teaching a
religion as true and teaching about other religions in a neutral way
could result in as much confusion if not more. Children will be
confused if they are taught there is only one true religion and when
they hear about several religions. The Church will have to assert
that if confusion is to be avoided the child must be taught nothing
about other religions at all and demand that only Catholicism must be
taught. If the children consider one religion as good as another they will tend to take on board teachings such as respect one another and do not steal and so on. Such ideas are common to all religions. They will not be confused in the matters that really count. My problem with some religions is that though they teach good things, they throw in ideas that destroy them. The good ends up warped. Children will not be confused if they are taught to respect others and themselves. In fact Catholics telling children rubbish such as Mary having a baby without sex will be confusing for they know that sex is needed for babies. Can you imagine many kids caring how Mary had a baby? Or how Jesus can turn into a wafer? Or how a priest can take away sin in baptism? Kids see and hear magic when they hear such things. Then they are confused by being told that magic is nonsense and a sin. The Church does not care if children are confused. It pretends to worry about children being confused if they are taught religion in a neutral way only because it wants to have a hold over them. It is not confusing the children that bothers them but that the children might find a religion that suits them better and fulfils them better than Roman Catholicism. Is it not worse to frighten a child by saying that he will go to Hell if he fails to believe or obey the Church than to confuse the child? |
| Claims religious indoctrination is acceptable for children are indoctrinated anyway - for example, in geography at school | Claims that religious indoctrination is wrong for it cannot be
verified as geography can. Claims that accidental indoctrination is one
thing but deliberate is another and is unacceptable. Claims that
religious belief depends on indoctrination more than any other kind of
instruction given to the child. Claims that it depends on wilful and
deliberate indoctrination. We know there is such a thing as subtle abuse. If religious indoctrination, even in a mild form, doesn't qualify then what does? |
| Secularists want crucifixes removed from classrooms and want schools to have only the option of teaching religion in a neutral way or not teaching it at all and teaching ethics instead. They do not care about creating a non-offensive environment for children from different faiths but about promoting atheism. | Removing crucifixes from classrooms and making religious teaching optional and only tolerating it if it is neutral and avoids indoctrination is not promoting atheism. It leaves the children free to make up their own minds. It is about being neutral and fair to all faiths. 9A Catholic school that has no crucifix is not promoting atheism. It may be trying to promote an environment where all feel welcome. The welcoming itself could be a tool for Catholic evangelism. If Muslims get a great impression of Catholics they might think about Catholic teaching and become interested in becoming Catholic. |
| It is child abuse not to indoctrinate your child against the errors of non-Christians. We must prepare the child for a merciful judgment and saying nothing means the child could grow up to die estranged from God and sentenced to everlasting torment | Anybody can invent a religion that makes similar threats. Naturally the Christian has to teach that indoctrinating children is saving them from the everlasting torment of Hell. This definitely implies that raising a child as undecided or as an unbeliever is child abuse of the most horrific kind. Christianity slanders and rouses hatred against those who don't share its twisted views on raising children. Their doctrine of eternal torment in Hell certainly implies that the Law should not tolerate any indoctrination except their brand of religion. |
| Lots of people claim that their religious upbringing never did them any harm and was good for them | But many disparage their religious indoctrination. Also it depends
on the religion. A Buddhist indoctrinating a child will not do the same
harm as a Fundamentalist Christian or Muslim indoctrinating a child
will. It also depends on what the child is being told. A heretical
Christian who teaches the child that God is our friend and sends nobody
to Hell and that there is no Hell for God is so forgiving will do no
harm to the child. But then the harm is being evaded because the
Christian is really being her or his own religion and not a true
Christian. Real Christians harm. Indoctrination is bad. To say it is not as the dogmatists do, is simply to claim that the end justifies the means. The manipulation of children is wrong no matter how good the results are. The victims should be disturbed by it. |
| If children are not taught to believe what we believe, they will believe any rubbish. We abhor superstition. | It is true that many people get alienated from their religion and soon start looking to mediums and tarot cards to find meaning in life. They are merely exchanging one superstition for another. To a Protestant, Catholic miracles are superstition. To Catholics Islamic miracles are superstition. Miracles are not really any different from magic. Christians say that Jesus rising from the dead by God's power is a miracle. If a witch did it, they would be saying it was magic. They are being arbitrary. They are being superstitious. |
| The child must be baptised and made a member of the Church without his or her consent | Consent is all important. The child will not feel, "I am better than Zainab next door for she was never baptised to put God's spirit in her" if he or she is not baptised. Religion collects people into a community that separates from other communities in the name of dogma - in this sense it is worse than racism. The person who separates from members of his own race will find it easy to start discriminating against and distancing from people of other races! |
| Baptism turns the sinful child into a holy person. Being baptised is a great protection against the desire to do evil. | The child doesn't have to pretend baptism made a difference. Catholicism should be sued for making claims about the supernatural power of baptism to make a person very good and holy and yet if you compare baptised and unbaptised people you see little difference. This is deliberate spiritual deception. The Church could be sued for the return of the baptismal fee or quackery. |
| The child needs God | The child does not - it does not have the fears than an adult has of suffering and death. A child can have fantasy friends if lonely. Nobody has the right to invent needs for other people. That is child abuse. |
| The child will be baptised and psychologically pressured into holy communion if necessary | The child is not initiated into any religion but encouraged to make her or his own decision later in life. Atheists should not force atheism on their children or indoctrinate them against religion |
| The child is told that the Roman Catholic religion is the only right one, the only reliable one | The child is taught about different religions and none. The child is encouraged to pick what he or she likes out of them provided it is helpful to her or him becoming a decent person. All pros and cons will be brought before the child. It should not be about making the child an atheist or anything. It should be about informing the child and supporting the child. |
| The child will be urged to thank God at meals and pray in accordance with the rules of the Church | There will be no pressure either way |
| The best child, at least potentially, is a Catholic child | The best child is a child who is willing to learn and improve and to decide because he or she thinks about people before he or she thinks about God or religious rules or religious organisations |
| The child is taught that the rules of the Church and the commandments of God tell us how to behave | The child is taught to understand why he or she must behave in a good way. If the child understands, the child will see guidance as loving and not as authoritarian and something to be rebelled against. If the child does wrong, he or she will feel that he or she can be a better person using his or her inner resources. Experiencing the confidence that comes from learning for yourself instead of being dictated to, the child gets a boost in the motivation to do better. A child that finds wisdom instead of other people trying to manipulate the child to have their ideas of wisdom has the self-confidence to overcome the failure. |
| The child may be tormented by thoughts of loved ones going to Hell to suffer forever at death. Religion is quite happy to teach the doctrine of Hell even to toddlers - Jesus said that everybody must be taught. His role and message are all about this Hell for he said he came to stop some people going to Hell. To not know it is to fail to understand him. | It would be impossible to put a child through that torment! |
| If a child grows up to reject the faith, we don't try to compel her or him to return. Therefore our indoctrinating children isn't wrong. We may baptise a child but the child can reject that baptism when he or she gets older. | Yes but what about now? You still take and seek an unfair
advantage. The child can suffer grave trauma later in life as he or she
tries to extricate himself or herself from the faith especially if that
faith claims to be essential to genuine goodness and if it says people
go to Hell if they leave it. Are you saying it is okay to do wrong to a
child now for later he or she can get over it? If you are really concerned about treating the child fairly, if you really believe the child should decide when old enough, then it must be wrong to impose a religion on that child to give that child the bother of perhaps renouncing the religion later on! You claim that baptism confers an obligation on the child to believe and obey the faith that baptises it. You are making out that if a child rejects the baptism or church membership that the child is letting you down and breaking loyalty and has no sense of duty to the faith. You are urging the child to live up to the baptism on pain of sin and everlasting torment in Hell. In other words, you are acting like a spiritual bully. You are a bigot. |
| You can commit a sin that deserves unending torment in Hell and this torment will start at death | You can't be that bad. Religion slanders you. It accuses you
without proof. Sue it! You need absolute proof before you can accuse
anybody of being capable of wallowing in hate and sin and evil in Hell
for all eternity.
If you are undecided about whether or not there is such a fate, then you can't choose it. It is safer not to be a Christian! If you believe that murder is sometimes right, that belief will make it worse for you in court not less when you are on trial for murder. But that is because the law is dealing with a difficult situation and can't encourage people to believe murder is right. The Law would agree that if you commit murder really and sincerely believing that it is right it still has to regard you as a criminal and subject to a life sentence. It agrees you haven't chosen jail but you still have to endure it. You are treated as if you have chosen it. If you don't believe in an eternal Hell you cannot choose it. God doesn't need to put you in Hell as if he were a Criminal Court trying to make the best of a bad situation in an imperfect and flawed world. All he needs to do is keep you away from his saints in Heaven. So if you sin grievously and die, you are not trying to abandon God forever unless you believe you are! If there is a Hell, then the message of Jesus Christ is putting people in it! |
| Loving God comes first and love your neighbour as yourself is secondary - this is what Jesus taught | In other words, religion and belief in God are more important than you! The child must see himself or herself as a special person and honour himself or herself accordingly and because he or she sees himself or herself as a gift he or she is keen to help others. Start with proper self-love not the love of God. The child will believe that if he or she does wrong, nobody should say the worst thing in it was how he or she offended God! That attitude promotes a lack of sensitivity to human suffering. |
| The fool says in his heart, "There is no God", none of them have done good none at all must be believed for God said it in scripture | Atheists are or may not be fools and many of them are upright people. The Bible is inciting to hatred and the Church should be sued for saying such things. |
| False religion does harm to children by indoctrinating, the true religion does not. The true religion informs but does not indoctrinate. Error is always bad even when it does good. It can make you opposed to the disciples of truth even though you don't mean to be. It always harms truth and often leads to hurt and trouble. | Any religion can say: False religion does harm to children by indoctrinating, the true
religion does not. They mean that when a child is told its
teaching is true that is informing but if any other religion does the
same thing its not informing but indoctrinating. They see
indoctrinating as teaching false doctrine. It is not. People
can be indoctrinated in TRUE doctrine too. All forms of religious indoctrinating of the child are manipulative. The indoctrination is abusive in that sense. To tell a child that he must love God as much as Jesus said, that he has original sin, that people go to Hell at death if they don't believe or obey God, that God may hurt and kill people and that he must be very upset by any sin he sees is strong child abuse. |
| Even those who disbelieve in God and who say we must live as if
there was only the natural and there was no supernatural are expressing
their faith. They are making an act of faith and yet they condemn
us for making acts of faith too. To say children should not be
baptised and should not be raised in a particular religion is to say
they should be raised in the faith of secularism. Our faith has at
least much right to indoctrinate children as theirs if not more.
The secularists don't like babies being baptised because they want to
force initiation into the secular faith on them. However, we should not hold that it takes as much faith to believe in no religion as in a religion. Religion commands faith. We command faith in our holy religion because we know that it is right and every right thinking person would embrace it. |
This pretence that secularism is faith like religion is a popular trick.
Religious faith seeks to pretend that non-religious attitudes are like a
secular religion.
To trust yourself and your own judgement takes less faith than trusting
that God has spoken to you. After all you have to trust yourself
to judge if you should judge God trustworthy! Trust yourself like
the secularists trust themselves - keep things simple. Secular faith in
reason and in what the senses say and in how we think cannot be compared
to religious faith. Its different. Secular faith is based on
what reasonable people agree with and not on what a God or Church or
Bible says. Religious people only accept reasonable beliefs when
those beliefs are taught by their God or Church or Bible - they accept
them because of authority and not because they are reasonable. Religion is harder to believe in than secularism. To encourage religion in a child is to oppress the child with a difficult faith.
|
CATHOLIC EDUCATION ABUSES THE CHILD
We all put blind faith in something. The Church says that if we use blind faith it should be her that we do this with her dogmas and interpretations of God that we use it with. The safer side is the secular side because that is the side that gives people the rights they should have. Religion invents rights and so causes disagreement and conflict. Secularism simplifies things. It just worries about the laws of this world and the needs of this world.
Catholicism is an education in bigotry. It is bad for children. Following the teaching of St Paul an apostle authorised by Jesus to teach his gospel for him, the Church says that in Adam all men have sinned and are sentenced to death. Any person that dies, dies because of Adam's sin. Romans 5 in the Bible says that one man Adam brought sin into the world and death came with sin and all men die for all men have sinned. This accuses unbaptised babies of deserving the death penalty. This is extreme doctrine. It shows the full horror of the implications of baptism. It is heresy to lament the murder of an unbaptised baby on the basis that the baby didn't deserve it. If it is wrong to murder the baby, the reason is not because of the baby's innocence for it is a sinner. The death penalty is cancelled in baptism. But even then the fact remains that the baby deserves not to live but to die. When a law refuses to punish you, that does not mean you no longer deserve the punishment. Babies haven't sinned but Paul says that death reigns even over those who haven't broken a commandment like Adam. He does not mean death reigns over the innocent but he means that Adam sinned on behalf of such so they are justly punished by God for his sin.
Christianity lays the guilt of causing the death of Jesus Christ for their sins on children. It also says that all sin is very seriously bad and sins like sexual desire outside of marriage, tolerating abortion, doubting the faith, disrespecting the clergy are deserving of everlasting torment in Hell so to commit them will result in you getting just that if you die.
No matter how Catholic children turn out, one thing is for sure, a Catholic education is an education in bigotry. Rather than making suggestions about different forms of spirituality that might work for them the Church seeks to control spirituality.
We might indoctrinate our young children in geography or whatever. We have to do that. It's a necessary evil. Is it not a necessary evil to indoctrinate a child in religion? If it is, then it must be the case that it is a necessary evil to indoctrinate only in the true religion. Unless you are very sure your religion is true, and few claim to be even half sure, you are abusing your child by teaching her or him religion.
There is strictly speaking no such thing as indoctrinating a child in secularism. For the secularist, living as if no religion can be known to be true is more important than stating things such as that there is no God. The child can see that he or she can't jump over a cliff and expect a god to rescue her or him. There is no indoctrination in telling a child that different religions and different people have different views about what God is and if he exists at all and for her or him to make up their own mind. Religious instruction manipulates children. Secularism does not.