Religious Child Abuse

[Phaedrus]

We're always reading stories of children dying due to the ignorant beliefs of the parents.

Here is a recent story I just came across:

Seven year old boy killed while being punished for failing to memorize bible verses.

Christian love: A 7-year-old boy in Wisconsin was tortured and killed while being punished for failing to memorize 13 Bible verses.

Ethan Hauschultz, a 7-year-old boy living in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, was killed after being hit, kicked, poked, and repeatedly shoved to the ground while being forced to carry around a 44-pound log in the snow as punishment for failing to memorize Bible verses.

Religion is a positive force, my ass.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

"He's in a better place now."

[Gwaithmir]

My father was a bible-thumping Lutheran who firmly believed in the biblical injunctions about keeping children in line by beating them with rods and, "...by the blueness of their wounds shall they be cleansed." He subjected my brother and I to severe beatings with belts and sticks, usually for the most trivial of offenses. Sometimes the bruises and other marks were still visible two weeks after the chastisements. I'm surprised he never sent us to the hospital or killed one of us. He died in 2003 and I didn't shed so much as a single tear for him at his funeral.

[skyking]

My father was a bible-thumping Lutheran who firmly believed in the biblical injunctions about keeping children in line by beating them with rods and, "...by the blueness of their wounds shall they be cleansed." He subjected my brother and I to severe beatings with belts and sticks, usually for the most trivial of offenses. Sometimes the bruises and other marks were still visible two weeks after the chastisements. I'm surprised he never sent us to the hospital or killed one of us. He died in 2003 and I didn't shed so much as a single tear for him at his funeral.

 

[mordant]

My father was a bible-thumping Lutheran who firmly believed in the biblical injunctions about keeping children in line by beating them with rods and, "...by the blueness of their wounds shall they be cleansed." He subjected my brother and I to severe beatings with belts and sticks, usually for the most trivial of offenses. Sometimes the bruises and other marks were still visible two weeks after the chastisements. I'm surprised he never sent us to the hospital or killed one of us. He died in 2003 and I didn't shed so much as a single tear for him at his funeral.

My father was a bible-thumping evangelical who also subscribed in principle to "spare the rod and spoil the child" and yet for some reason never laid a hand on us. I lived with the mere threat of his wrath, not any sort of reality of it. So what you experienced does not necessarily follow inherently. I think your father was a sick, insecure, narcissistic, sociopathic fuck and religion of a certain kind just gave him a way to excuse it. Indeed, I'll bet he was drawn to the most enabling brand, if he wasn't already raised in it and had the inherent dysfunction reproduced in him as a child.

My father just wanted his family to be okay and joined up because a church got ahold of his oldest son and corrected his behavior problems. Instead of a less dysfunctional social group getting credit for the change, god did.

Then there's my wife, whose parents abused her without religion being a factor at all. They weren't church people.

My pointing this out of course is in no way intended to minimize the harms you and your brother endured or the pain you experienced. Only to point out that there's a variety of teaching emphases, personalities and dysfunction that go into the stew that religion mixes, that allows us to come out with very different memories and feelings about our respective childhoods. And some people manage to fuck their children over without the aid of religion.

I prefer to think of religion as an accelerant for dumpster fires, and at its worst, a producer of new ones. I am truly sorry for what you went through. In an ideal world, religion wouldn't be there enabling and excusing people like your father and others like him. But I tend to hate fathers like that more than their religions, because they allowed ideology to override their empathy and their parental responsibilities.

[Phaedrus]

My father was a bible-thumping Lutheran who firmly believed in the biblical injunctions about keeping children in line by beating them with rods and, "...by the blueness of their wounds shall they be cleansed." He subjected my brother and I to severe beatings with belts and sticks, usually for the most trivial of offenses. Sometimes the bruises and other marks were still visible two weeks after the chastisements. I'm surprised he never sent us to the hospital or killed one of us. He died in 2003 and I didn't shed so much as a single tear for him at his funeral.

I wouldn't have even attended the funeral. Certainly not attending my father's.

[Minimalist]

"He's in a better place now."

Yeah... any where those bible-thumping shitwits aren't is a better place.