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Ch. 9 - CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND THE ESCAPE FROM RELIGION

#35: Jan. - Mar. 2007 (Non-Fiction)
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ant

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Re: Ch. 9 - CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND THE ESCAPE FROM RELIGION

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Chris OConnor wrote:Ant, what specifically in chapter 9 did you disagree with?

Just the overall point Dawkins is essentially repeating in chapter 9 - religion is responsible for horrific deeds across the board.

Just as religion is responsible for monstrous deeds, it also has been responsible for loving deeds throughout history. Dawkins never really acknowledges the flip side of the coin.
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Re: Ch. 9 - CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND THE ESCAPE FROM RELIGION

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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
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DWill

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Re: Ch. 9 - CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND THE ESCAPE FROM RELIGION

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I'd say it takes fanatical devotion to something, some ideology that demands that we give up our independent and instinctual sense of what is the right way to treat other people.
We become in thrall to a power over us which is really nothing more than authority run amok. The examples of this that we see most often involve religion, but of course ideologies are sometimes not based on the supernatural.

The great majority of both religious people and ideologues remain in the sub-fanatical range. They do use their beliefs to make life less stressful for them, and their beliefs might help them accomplish much that is good. I agree with ant on that.
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Re: Ch. 9 - CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND THE ESCAPE FROM RELIGION

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Chris OConnor wrote:With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
I understand that, Chris :)


There is no denying the fact that atrocities have been committed due to political ideologies.
And there is no denying the fact that acts of compassion and giving have been motivated by religion as well.
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Re: Ch. 9 - CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND THE ESCAPE FROM RELIGION

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I know I’m waaaay late in this discussion. I don’t even know if all of the members who participated are still members but I’m reading the book now (I only read it in spurts) and I came across something in Chapter 9 that I think explains well religion’s capacity for abuse on children (and adults).
Dawkins talks about a woman who wrote him about what happened to her when she was a little girl:

“… I received a letter from an American woman in her forties who had been brought up Roman Catholic. At the age of seven, she told me, two unpleasant things had happened to her. She was sexually abused by her parish priest in his car. And, around the same time, a little schoolfriend of hers, who had tragically died, when to hell because she was a Protestant. Or so my correspondent had been led to believe by the then official doctrine of her parents’ church. Her view as a mature adult was that, of these two examples of Roman Catholic child abuse, the one physical and the other mental, the second was by far the worst. She wrote:

Being fondled by the priest simply left the impression (from the mind of a 7 year old) as ‘yucky’ while the memory of my friend going to hell was one of cold, immeasurable fear. I never lost sleep because of the priest – but I spent many a night being terrified that the people I loved would go to Hell. It gave me nightmares.”

Saint Gasoline wrote above, "What matters is that the beliefs being taught to children are not going to harm them or harm others." I think Dawkins pinpoints well, in this instance alone, the harm inflicted by the beliefs taught to the little girl.
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