Religion and children, and Dawkins and Brown
I re-read the chapter of The God Delusion which contains page 326, this morning, in order to find out (having forgotten since I first read it) what the context is in which Dawkins quotes that passage by Nicholas Humphrey. In reading it I became more angry with Brown than ever, for the simple reason that he completely leaves out the context which is one of angry compassion for the mental suffering religion can cause to children and their parents. The chapter starts with the 19th century case of a six-year-old Jewish boy in Bologna who was forcibly removed from his weeping parents by officers of the Catholic Inquisition, to be raised by the church. His parents never saw him again except on occasional brief supervised visits. Why was he removed? Because his nursemaid (age 14 at the time) had ‘baptized’ him.
Dawkins then goes on to compare sexual abuse with mental abuse, and to make the interesting and (I think) important point that sexual abuse in some cases is trivial compared to the mental torture of the fear of hell. He quotes a heart-rending letter from a woman who was told at age 7 that her Protestant friend who had died was in hell – this thought was agony for the child.
That is what leads up to Humphrey’s lecture. It’s impossible (in my view) to read it unmoved – yet Brown presents the basic idea as if it were nothing but the fantasy of a sadistic atheist meddler. It’s an utter distortion and grossly unfair – to Dawkins but even more to children who are tortured with fears of hell and eternal punishment.
This is all the more deranged because it’s not as if there are no reasonable criticisms that could be made. One could for instance argue that Dawkins fails to balance this worry with the ways religion can console children and parents; one could claim that the problem is not religion as such but religion that threatens and punishes instead of promising and consoling (or religion that threatens and punishes as a condition of promising and consoling). One could object to many specifics of tone, choice of examples, and so on – yet Brown didn’t do any of that; instead he chose to flail away at a straw man instead of engaging with the actual book. Whatever for? And why do so many other critics do the same thing? Is it just easier, to invent a bogey-atheist and then keep recycling the same complaints about it? Are they just lazy? Or are they a mix of lazy and malevolent?
I don’t know. I’m just asking.
(I posted a slightly different and shorter version of this on Brown’s piece a couple of hours ago.)
Well said, Ophelia. Brown is a miserable beggar, you know. He does this sort of thing all the time. Go back and look over some of his op-ed things and there’s a nasty edge to a lot of them.
If the story is the same, David Kertzer writes about it in his book The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. The thing that was most horrifying, for me, of the whole story is that the boy was brought up by the pope, and eventually became a priest.
And interesting sidelight to this story is that Protestant sailors, on shore in catholic Spain, were, as baptised Christians, subject to catholic canon law, and could be tried for heresy by the Inquisition. (That’s just a memory, but I think I have it right.)
I’d like to know of a religion that offers only consolation. Consolation is the obverse of threat in most religions. But I can testify to the horror of eternal torture. Perhaps the most horrible part of the threat, in my experience, was the fact that you never knew whether you had committed the unforgiveable sin (against the Holy Spirit), and were damned, no matter what you did. Damnation was very real in those far off days of the late forties and early fifties. Very real, with real flames and real suffering, repeated forever. The sermon in Portrait of the Artist is very near the real thing, and still had power to stir up fear, years after I had stopped believing in the real hell that Jesus spoke of so often.
I’m not sure that the fear ever leaves one for good, which makes the Koran a horrifying read. I have always said that, as a child, I had been abused (in more ways than one). Religion was the worst abuser of them all. My children grew up without any. We may have lived in a Rectory, but we never said ‘grace’, and we never read Bible stories. The last book my wife Elizabeth read to our daughter was “All Quiet on the Western Front”!
Dawkins’s point is a good one, and one that atheists should raise more often.
Too many atheists harp on the argument that religion is a comforting fairytale. The problem with this argument is that it’s possible to defend comforting fairytales as psychologically necessary, especially for children. (It’s also possible to criticize them, but it’s not slam-dunk either way).
However, there is no way to defend a painful, torturous lie, a lie that gets wives to stay with their abusive husbands and men to stone rape victims and strong women to force themselves to be meek and subservient and gay people to live lives of closeted misery. That is abuse.
Though I think it’s very much an overstatement to say sexual abuse is “trivial” compared to the mental torture of religion. I have worked with many survivors of sexual abuse; it’s never “trivial” compared to anything. I think it’s more accurate to just say that religion can leave horrific mental scars, without attempting to rank that pain against other types of abuse.
“Though I think it’s very much an overstatement to say sexual abuse is “trivial” compared to the mental torture of religion.”
The operative words, of course, here, being ‘in some cases’.
‘Mental torture of religion’, from childhood, can leave indelible, dangerous and psychological imprints that can affect its recipients for the entirety of their lives. Their psyches can just be as damaged as those who were sexually abused and sometimes even more so – depending on the nature of the children.
When a commission to inquire into institutional child abuse was set up in Ireland in 2002 – it was only going to deal with those who were sexually abused in institutions – but it was vehemently brought home to all those concerned that children suffered very harshly under the banner of all things relating to the religious regime of the institutions.
In my estimation – those who were sexually abused suffered tremendously – but there were also those who suffered as much from the effects of all the hell fire and damnation teaching that was pumped into them on a daily basis.
‘Trivial’ is the wrong word and it’s not Dawkins’s word; I couldn’t remember what he said so I grabbed that word. But it’s not true that it’s never trivial (at least not if one also uses a word other than ‘abuse’ which is non-trivial by definition). Dawkins said he had a teacher himself who carried affection a little too far and that it was mildly embarrassing but nothing more. I think it’s fair to say that one mild grope is not necessarily traumatic.
My answer: self-absorbed & dim-witted.
Sure religion can “seem” to console as anything coming from warm environments of family and so on can console. Quite like Dawkins could console, if offered lovingly to children scared shitless – by hell, responsibilities to God & …
Not because it’s a good story but just because it’s delivered authentically.
Found my copy of TGD. I think I am bound to support Jenavir when she says that sexual abuse is never trivial compared with anything, and I think Dawkins does play down the psychological fallout from sexual abuse, however apparently trivial. In fact, Dawkins is, if anything, overfair to the Roman Catholic Church in regard to its many sexual offences against the children in its care. It’s too easy to dismiss the psychological trauma of children who have been the victims of such unsolicited attention, and I suspect, to make his point, that Dawkins has done this. In fact, I think this weakens his case.
He is probably right, on the other hand, to say that there is a measure of paranoia over the mere possibility of sexual abuse, and that this has reduced children’s freedom to roam, which, as Dawkins says, ‘was one of the delights of childhood in earlier times.’ (316)
What Dawkins wants to do is to say that religious indoctrination may be as seriously damaging as sexual abuse. And here I agree with him, though much of the evidence he presents is anecdotal. Here’s where the the whole question of limitations on parents’ freedom to indoctrinate their children comes in. But, unlike Brown’s caricature of Dawkins’ argument, Dawkins is quite aware of the difficulty of policing the limits of parents’ rights to induct children into their beliefs and way of life. (Perhaps it is the dimension of ‘way of life’ that is the problem. Dawkins tends to see religious beliefs as in some sense merely propositional, when the reality is that they incorporate so much more than that.)
Here’s where the bogey-atheist comes in, because Dawkins is really quite sensitive to the problems involved, but makes a good case, it seems to me, for the claim that there should be publicly recognised limits placed on the right of parents to indoctrinate their children in their religious beliefs and practices.
Religious indoctrination, he holds, in my view correctly, can do serious psychological harm, and the appeal to religious and ethnic diversity can play into minimising the dangers involved. But I don’t think the bogey-atheist is a result of either laziness or malevolence. I think it’s a consequence of a deeply embedded preference towards religious culture (and not only belief), its importance, and the respect to which it is due.
The failure to recognise the harm that religions can do to children is deeply based on our traditions of religious toleration. Indeed, even raising the question looks like the intolerance of one belief system (atheism) towards another (religion). People like Brown see atheism as one player in the public space to which religions also belong equally, so it should occasion no surprise if the other players look on the atheist position, which presumes to judge other belief systems, as an unwelcome, and fairly intolerant intruder.
Yes but one could defend religious culture via reasonable criticisms of what Dawkins says as opposed to via demented criticisms of what he did not say. That’s the part that I don’t get – unless it’s pure laziness or laziness plus malice. (Too much trouble to open the book, or that plus it’s more satisfying to exaggerate and misrepresent anyway.)
The thing about freedom to roam really grabbed me, in a visceral way. My childhood was all about the freedom to roam and it was crucial to…everything: my mental world, sense of self, character, etc.
“the other players look on the atheist position, which presumes to judge other belief systems, as an unwelcome, and fairly intolerant intruder.”
Yes but it’s all one way – as if religion is not a fairly intolerant intruder.
Yes, freedom to roam grabbed me too, for that was characteristic of childhood once.
Regarding the rest, I’m trying to put myself in the place of the religious believer. Other religions, even if intolerant, at least share some of the features of religious believing and way of life of other religions. Atheism is very different, even if people like Dennett want to soften the blow a bit by having carol parties and Christmas trees. Atheism denies the very sense (the meaningfulness) of religious believing, rightly, in my view.
Religious tolerance was founded on the acceptance of religious ways of believing and living. Atheism dismisses the whole project of religion. Therefore, to the religious person, like most Christians whose contemporary tradition of tolerance is rooted in religious tolerance, the atheist stands out as absolutely intolerant. I think this is why the idea of new atheism made sense to a lot of people who were accustomed to unbelievers not believing, but not to unbelievers directly challenging religion to make sense in ways that unbelievers could understand.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that the idea of the new atheism has developed precisely at a time when Islam is putting the old idea of religious sovereignty back on the agenda. When I was still in the church I wondered why, suddenly (and it seemed very sudden, almost a perceptible seismic shift), literalism was coming back in fashion. It had been marginalised for some time. But it grew out of parts of the world that had not gone through the Enlightenment and the privatisation of religion that had been part of it. In fact, it grew up in parts of the world where Third World Christianity interfaced with other religions which had not experienced the Enlightenment. And then the interface became very evident very quickly in cultures that had experienced Enlightenment.
It is in this very new context (Huntington’s clash of civilisation context, if you will) that atheism ceases to be just another player in the conversation, but, in a very real sense, the only one. This is very threatening to religion, because they have always made similar claims to completeness and sufficiency, and they know they can no longer do this in even quasi-rational terms. So they’re stuck, and that explains the vehemence and lack of clarity in their responses. They know that there is no reasoned response to Dawkins. They still think, with Kuhn, that this is only one paradigm amongst many. I think we are witnessing an enormous – because global – cultural shift, and I still think it might shift in the wrong way.
Apologies for being many-worded.
‘Too many atheists harp on the argument that religion is a comforting fairytale.’
It’s ironic that this neoconservative, Straussian argument – that religion is a noble lie to keep the masses in line – has been adopted by so many of atheism’s leftwing critics
No apologies needed, that’s interesting.
And it seems right, too. I’ve been thinking about the same things (not surprisingly) – and sharpening my awareness of the shift from being atheist but not bothering to make noise about it, and making noise about it.
I would date the beginning of the shift a little earlier though – well before 9/11. I think Carl Sagan’s book The Demon-haunted World was one of the opening rounds, or perhaps the opening round. I know it shifted me from the ‘ignore all that’ type of atheist to a slightly more explicit kind – and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one. Steve Gould’s horrible Rock of Ages book was another goad, this time from the other direction. I think there was some shifting and heaving going on in the mid-90s – and then 9/11 and Sam Harris ripped the lid off the volcano.
Hey, write an article or a blog post or something about that, Max.
Yes, for me it began with The Demon-Haunted World. I still have my first edition of 1995. I took a Latin tag from the book – Ubi dubium, ibi libertas – and put it on my bookplate, shortly after. I remember I read the ‘crap detecting’ chapters with special interest. This was the time that the shift in the church was taking place too, and the Anglican Communion began to split apart, and I began to feel shunted off onto a siding. It was really the best place to be.
There was a time (I confess it) when I thought Dawkins a trifle shrill.
Having encountered Brown, I no longer think so.
Eric, I agree: Dawkins is over-fair to the Church on that issue. The freedom to roam was compromised, but that was not because the threat of sexual abuse was exaggerated. That was because the threat of STRANGERS abusing kids (kidnapping them while they roam) was exaggerating. Meanwhile, the friendly neighborhood priest was never suspected. And so he got away with molesting lots of kids.
A rational fear of sexual abuse would not compromise freedom to roam, as it would take into account the fact that the main danger comes from friends/relatives/priests/coaches.
OB, you said:
I think it’s fair to say that one mild grope is not necessarily traumatic.
This is true. I was thinking more of actions that are either more severe or more persistent. And I think most cases of sexual abuse that are reported, and that we hear about, fall into the more severe or more persistent category. Most reported sexual abuse cases aren’t mild gropes. If Dawkins suggests they are (I don’t remember if he does), he’s trivializing the issue. (Also, mild gropes can be traumatizing depending on the situation).
I do think sexual abuse is more likely to traumatize people than horrific religious teachings, in part because many people are able to simply ignore what their pastors say (though certainly not all people). But Dawkins makes a valuable point nonetheless. We shelter our children from horror movies and violent video games, we shudder at exposing them to songs with lyrics that glorify violence, and yet we teach them that God fries people for eternity and this is just and right?
Where’s the logic?
Snap, Eric: I still have my first edition too (though it can’t be valuable as such, I’m sure the first print run was in the hundreds of thousands). Sagan did a couple of memorable radio interviews when it came out (Science Friday and Fresh Air) that also did their bit to make me more stroppy on the whole subject.
It wasn’t long after that Dawkins was in town on a book tour for Climbing Mount Improbable; I heard him interviewed on the local NPR station, including someone phoning in to urge him to get an asbestos suit. I went to his reading at the University book store the next day and told him that we’re not all like that around here; that added a few more ounces to the stroppiness quotient.
Dawkins can be a little shrill at times. There are places where I would say, if I were his editor – ‘this paragraph could be more elegantly restrained.’ That’s why I say Brown could have made substantive and reasonable criticisms (along with the fact that that’s always possible in any case). But he’s nowhere near as shrill as the atheist-bashers say he is – or as shrill as most of them are, for that matter.
“yet we teach them that God fries people for eternity”
Quite. I did a good old rant a few years ago about the fact that Patrick Henry College includes that belief in a ‘statement of beliefs’ that students are required to sign. I find that disgusting.
Ah, yes, not a collector of first editions for their value. Besides, I always take the dust covers off, which makes them valueless in any case. Can’t stand dust covers.
You should have attended my school. We were surrounded by it, saturated with it, almost burned in it, hell was so real. And it went on for twelve full years of boarding school. Prayers at bedtime, chapel services, scripture classes every morning for an hour. You have no idea how this burns into your very soul (using that word in a quite non-religious way).
Well I have some idea, because I think it’s an absolute horror and an outrage and a crime. I’ve told the story about my friend – well it’s Claire, in fact, who comments here sometimes – who used to cry herself to sleep as a child because she was afraid for her non-theist father. Multiply that by who knows how many millions. And then wonder about all the people who are confident they’re not going to hell and who don’t fear for the people who are…and despair.
I’ve said somewhere, and repeat, that I think it’s the worst thing humans have come up with.
Ophelia
Here you go
http://maxdunbar.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/andrew-brown-man-about-town/
“I do think sexual abuse is more likely to traumatize people than horrific religious teachings, in part because many people are able to simply ignore what their pastors say (though certainly not all people).”
Many people who were indoctrinated (by religion) from birth (well, almost, or age of reason to be more exact) are more
likely ‘not’ to ignore the clergy – as they are by it so brainwashed.
There are also people who grew up with me who have severe symptomologies of Complex PTSD (which is a disorder akin to that suffered by those who as children were sexually abused. Religious teachings and all that went with it had a big part to play in their disorders.
Children were told by the religious that the ground would open up and swallow them – if they told lies. They had to abide to the very last by the teachings in the penny cathechism.
They were also told that their tongues would turn all black if they told lies. It was of course all God’s doing – to those who would not obey his commandments.
They were told they would burn in the flames of hell.
They were told they were worse than the soldiers who crucified Jesus, their saviour.
I could go on for forever and a day pointing out kit that was said to wee children that created nightmarish fear in their very beings.
I can definitely say that in extreme cases there are people who suffered from as much trauma as a result of religious teachings – as those who were sexually abused.
Additionally, there are adults who continually point out through thre medium of the blogosphere the silliness of the attire of the religious – but, does anyone ever stop to think what children might think/thought of their ridiculous antediluvian gear.
I personally know someone who went from a female religious industrial school (at the ripe old age of ten years) to a male Christain brother-run industrial school and the child could not differentiate at all between the sexes – as both wore eerie black long robes down to their feet.
That too from my standpoint is just another type (there are oddles more, besides) of trauma that children have had in the past to contend with indeed.
“The thing about freedom to roam really grabbed me, in a visceral way. My childhood was all about the freedom to roam and it was crucial to…everything: my mental world, sense of self, character, etc.”
Thank your lucky stars OB, that your childhood roaming did not consist of walking, two times daily, two by two, up and down a cloister in the pursuit of attending mass/benediction (all said in Latin) Also, walking up and down (with bended head) an avenue with rosary beads in hands, frantically praying to Mary to cleanse your impure soul.
The confessional box and the ‘bless me Father’ fear that was put into children, by the religious, every week of their born lives, from the ages of communion (at 7 years) onwards and for the rest of their lives, was doubtless to say, absolutely insidious.
Which goes to show, Marie-Therese, that Brown hasn’t an idea in the world what he’s talking about. (i) He doesn’t characterise Dawkins’ point correctly; but (ii) religious indoctrination can be a form of very serious child abuse that perhaps ought to be considered by the authorities. When they thought that parents were teaching their children Satanism, family and children’s services (variously named in different countries) acted quickly enough. Why do they not think teaching other religions can have just as serious repercussions on the mental health of children?
“religious indoctrination can be a form of very serious child abuse that perhaps ought to be considered by the authorities.”
Yes, yes, yes, Eric, it IS indeed serious chid abuse of the highest ilk. Religious teachings/living overrided everything else in their lives. Relgion was life incarnate. There was no room for natural and normal nurturing.
Religious was the only daily staple diet.
Children were not only imprisoned by the courts, because their parent/s did not conform to proper religious teachings – they were also daily imprisoned in their heads by the drumming of religious teachings of their respective orders. They breathed, slept, ihhaled, ate, worked, slaved, sang, wept and yelled every single day of their lives – religious teachings. It was sheer hell. There was no room for children to blossom and grow into healthy human beings. Their lives were taken up with religious teachings.
They habitually underwent subtle exorisms so to speak – to keep them, I suppose, on the straight and narrow.
I believe that those parents who send their children off to the rotten pastors of the world to be exorcised should by the authorities, be held accountable – as they are allowing their children to be severely abused by the so-called religious freaks.
They were imprisoned in their heads.
Argh. That sums it up.
Marie-Therese,
I wish I could be present at a conversation between yourself and Brown et al.
‘Imprisoned in my head.’ That about sums it up. It can be a very hard sentence.
How odd to have this conversation without any reference to the actual science of childhood development. Anecdotes and opinions are being thrown around as though no one had ever rigorously studied the impact of various types of abuse on personality and mental health.
Dawkins’ own self-reported sexual abuse at the hands of his tutor occurred when he was well past the age of greatest vulnerability to such acts. (Would anybody be writing it off as merely “embarrassing” if it were his pre-school teacher who had groped him rather than his boarding school teacher?) Moreover, it appeared to be an isolated incident, and most importantly it did not involve a parent or primary caregiver. This makes it a very poor representative of the kind of child abuse most people are rightly concerned about. It’s more like a McGuffin. To say that this shows that sexual abuse can be “trivial” would be a bit like saying that serving in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War shows that wartime service need not be traumatic. It’s just disingenuous.
Let’s compare apples to apples, and let’s start by pointing to some evidence, not just intuition, that the doctrine of eternal damnation leads to the same sort of deep and lasting trauma that results from physical and sexual abuse of children. Who wants to go first?
Who wants to go first?
Well, you apparently.
There are degrees of physical and sexual and psychological abuse. Who suggested that pointing out one was to deny the other?
Uh – yes, anecdotes and opinions are being thrown around, because this is the blog section of the website, not an issue of The Journal of Infant Cognition. More to the point, the post is not about sexual abuse and its impact, it’s about the way Andrew Brown left out the context of what Dawkins said (in addition to simply misrepresenting it). The relative impact of sexual abuse and mental abuse is of interest but it is not central, and we’ve been discussing it in a casual way rather than doing research on it. That would be odd only if I’d been claiming to offer an authoritative statement on the subject; I think it’s pretty obvious that I wasn’t.
Ophelia,
I didn’t say that I expected a carefully argued, footnoted and referenced white paper. Just some reference to actual fact would do the trick. Humphrey and Dawkins argue that the doctrine of hell, among other religious teachings, is something so horrible we should take measures to protect children from it (which unmistakable implies that we should prevent parents from raising their children religiously, as I have argued with you on CiF). Based on what, exactly, other than intuition and the occasional bit of fan mail? Is there some actual research they can point to that serious harm is being done? I haven’t seen a jot of anything quantifiable.
Both men make explicit comparison to physical or sexual child abuse. Humphrey to knocking out a child’s teeth. Dawkins actually argues that it is worse to be taught Catholic dogma by a priest than to be molested by one. Evidence? Reference to just a single study would do the trick. The stakes are high, here, and call for a critical standard of inquiry.
Perhaps this wasn’t the central argument of your post, but you did write that Dawkins’ argument that sexual abuse, in some cases, paled in comparison to religious doctrine was an “important” one. Since you are a serious writer and thinker, this suggests to me that you’ve actually acquainted yourself with the topic. The fact that you are now shying off with the defense that you were just being “casual” suggests that you’re more interested in scoring points against the wicked relativists than fostering an increased understanding of how different upbringings affect children.
Since you brought it up, I’ll now respond to your central point that Andrew Brown took Nick Humphrey’s comments out of context. Your appeal is an emotional one; you write that it’s impossible to read NH’s lecture and remain “unmoved.” That’s a bit Machiavellian, no? All kinds of crap is justified in the name of “think of the children,” usually by Puritanical, repressed Republicans. And so we have movements to ban this or that book or movie or video game, or sex education course, etc. The fact that we reject these appeals as spurious does not mean that we have no empathy for children; it means that we differ with the Republicans on what constitutes the greater good; (in this case freedom of speech, mostly.)
It also means we reject the argument that the cultural influences in question are as harmful as they are claimed to be, just as I reject, or am at least deeply skeptical of, the argument that religious doctrine causes the kind of deep and lasting trauma that children need protection from. So we are back to evidence, which neither you, nor Humphrey or Dawkins have yet provided, that this horrible harm is taking place. A letter recounting the pain of believing one’s playmate is suffering eternal torment may be heartrending, but it must be balanced against countless anecdotes of people who assert that being raised to believe in hell was no big deal, in the long run. Now, maybe there’s more there than meets the eye. But without some compelling evidence that these parents are doing calculable harm, you’ve got little more than a witch hunt on your hands.
Well, Chris, I’m not a social scientist, and I won’t even hazard a guess at the results that might be derived from a study of children raised with the fear of hell fire, or other forms of religious indoctrination. I suspect there will be some evidence, nevertheless, since some of the evidence from medieval religion points in that direction. The witchcraze thing was closely related to the idea of the devil and hell, if you’re really interested in witch hunts. And many the absolutely mad movements recounted in Norman Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium were directly related to the fear of hell.
I speak from my own experience of being terrorised as a child in a Christian boarding school.Is this anecdotal? You bet! Did I suffer serious trauma during my life because of that? I don’t know, but I have always believed so. Not enough to base policy on, of course, if it means removing children from families. But there is enough evidence – an example recently linked by Ophelia, of a man who considers himself the son of god and thinks that gives him the right to sexually abuse little girls, or situations in which people relied on prayer instead of medicine and permitted their children to die – that some children are indeed at risk because of religious beliefs. That is perhaps a good enough reason to do some of the kinds of research you find wanting in a blog discussion.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘calculable harm’. What would the evidence look like? Children’s authorities intervene in cases where children are at risk. Always dangerous. Sometimes, despite what I would consider calculable harm, children are returned to parents who do in fact go on to harm them.
This is precisely why Dawkins’ points in The God Delusion go nowhere near as far as Andrew Brown suggests. But I think there are grounds for reasonable concern, if some of the children that I have seen in my years as a priest are anything to go by. (Anecdotal, again, I’m afraid, but sufficiently calculable that I have myself raised issues of concern with parents.)
Chris Schoen,
No, Humphrey doesn’t say anything about hell. You’ve argued with me on CiF? I don’t remember anyone with that name. It’s not at all unmistakable what Humphrey implies should be done about parents limiting their children’s horizons and so on, and it’s even less unmistakable what Dawkins implies by quoting Humphrey, especially since he says the strong statement needs qualification. You’re right that I don’t offhand know of any studies about the fear of hell (and I’ve been thinking that if there aren’t any, someone should commission one or several) – but I also don’t think I need to for the purposes of what I’ve claimed here and on Andrew Brown’s posts.
Dawkins doesn’t argue that it’s always necessarily worse to be taught dogma than to be groped, and I didn’t say he did.
No I did not write “that sexual abuse, in some cases, paled in comparison to religious doctrine” – that’s just what Andrew Brown did: make a sloppy and misleading approximation of what someone said. I’m not interested in “scoring points” (and I don’t know what “wicked relativists” have to do with anything, I haven’t mentioned relativists), I’m fascinated by the fact that Andrew Brown first misrepresented what Dawkins said and now refuses to admit it much less apologize.
Since I brought it up? But I didn’t bring it up to you, I don’t know you. All that about the children and emotion is bullshit – the bit about reading it unmoved was an aside, it’s not the argument. The argument is simply to point to what is on page 326 and what Brown said was there; it’s brutally simple.
Speaking of anecdotes – what countless anecdotes of people who assert that being raised to believe in hell was no big deal? Why are those anecdotes worth mentioning when other anecdotes aren’t?
Witch hunt – now who’s being emotive? Neither Humphrey nor Dawkins said how children should be protected from either threats of hell or an atmosphere of dogma, and it is not at all clear what either of them had in mind (except it is clear that Dawkins said Humphrey’s claims needed qualification). It could be simply education they had in mind.
Eric MacDonald,
I have not read Cohn, but I will check him out. I would agree with you that the witch craze was “related to the devil and hell,” but I think that relationship is complex, and does not lead in itself to a theory of mental terrorism by religious doctrine.
But there is enough evidence – an example recently linked by Ophelia, of a man who considers himself the son of god and thinks that gives him the right to sexually abuse little girls, or situations in which people relied on prayer instead of medicine and permitted their children to die – that some children are indeed at risk because of religious beliefs.
With respect, the first example is only evidence that a certain man’s derangement has a religious flavor. There’s no way to determine in this case that one element is prior to the other (which is why actual research, not anecdotes, is what is needed.)
Your second example, of denying medical attention for religious reasons is a clearer example of religiously inspired harm, that I would not casually quarrel with. But I want to redirect the conversation to Humphrey’s main point, which is that the transmission of religious ideas is inherently harmful This is a separate matter than whether certain religious practices are harmful. Absent any compelling evidence that the former leads to the latter, I think we should be careful not to confuse the two.
You ask what I mean by “calculable harm.” I merely mean a scientific standard resembling the one we use to criminalize abuse of children, for example. We know that child abuse ruins lives and perpetuates cycles of violence and mental illness across generations, because we have assiduously studied child development over the last 75 years. We can quantify, within a certain variable range, the precise types of harm that are caused by sexual, physical and emotional abuse and we can predict with some reliability the types of mental illness and personality disorder these children will suffer in later life.
When similar scientific knowledge becomes available for the effects of religious upbringing, then we can talk about what to do about it more concretely.
Ophelia,
Your argument appears to have some very slippery esoteric properties. In the post that we are commenting on, you wrote that Brown “le[ft] out the context of angry empathy” in Humphrey’s lecture. When I engaged you on this context by calling it “emotional” you claimed that this was just an “aside” and not the main part of your argument. I feel a little like Menelaus wrestling with Morpheus. But that’s OK, I can use the exercise.
Dawkins doesn’t argue that it’s always necessarily worse to be taught dogma than to be groped, and I didn’t say he did.
Nor did I say that’s what he said. You added the words “always” and necessarily. Here are his actual words:
“Odious as the physical abuse of children by priests undoubtedly is, I suspect that it may do them less lasting damage than the mental abuse of having been brought up Catholic in the first place.”
Granted, Dawkins is a careful writer, and made sure to say “I suspect” and “may do less damage.” But his claim is nevertheless entirely unsubstantiated. What are the measurable criteria of this damage, and where are the studies that have measured them?
I note that Dawkins himself got quite testy at Libby Purves over the recent fairy tales flap for presenting her “intuition” about the importance of fairy tales without reference to scientific evidence. But what does Dawkins offer on the comparison of Catholic upbringing and priestly molestation, but intuition of his own?
Neither Humphrey nor Dawkins said how children should be protected from either threats of hell or an atmosphere of dogma, and it is not at all clear what either of them had in mind (except it is clear that Dawkins said Humphrey’s claims needed qualification). It could be simply education they had in mind.
As I’ve argued at Brown’s blog, this is a waffle. If the education is not compulsory, then it’s a vapid and impotent response, which religious parents can easily ignore. If it *is* compulsory, we have criminalized the parents who evade it.
If religious doctrine really is just as bad as knocking out childrens’ teeth, we need to put our money where our mouths are and make it just as illegal. If it isn’t as bad–or if we just don’t know because it hasn’t been studied, it’s highly irresponsible to draw this comparison.
Chris Schoen – You’re just a serial sloppy reader, which is not okay, because I don’t need the exercise, I have a lot of other things to do. If you want to argue here, quote accurately. Approximation is not acceptable. It’s not that difficult to scroll up the page and check, after all.
“When I engaged you on this context by calling it “emotional” you claimed that this was just an “aside” and not the main part of your argument”
No – that is sloppy. I said:
“the bit about reading it unmoved was an aside, it’s not the argument.”
It was that one sentence that was an aside.
I haven’t seen your argument on Brown’s post – but I disagree about the waffle. I’ve just written a comment there myself expanding on that thought, and I think I’ll do a post about it here. Meanwhile, briefly – my view is that it’s just a (tragic, if you will) problem, with no obvious solution. I’m not in the least convinced that Dawkins doesn’t see it the same way. You seem to be convinced that he thinks there is a solution, however coercive – but you present no evidence for that view.
I can definitely say that in extreme cases there are people who suffered from as much trauma as a result of religious teachings – as those who were sexually abused.
Of course there are extreme cases where this happens, yes. This in large part because those extreme religious teachings/practices allow for and excuse either physical or sexual abuse. See, for instance, the Catholic Church and its relationship to pedophiles and domestic abuse, or conservative Islamic leaders and their relationship to forced marriage. Or James Dobson and his recommendation that even babies be spanked, in order to break their wills and make them servile and obedient (NOT making this up or exaggerating, check it out).
In the sort of brainwashing environment you describe, Marie-Therese, there isn’t simply the teaching of malicious ideas. There are also malevolent actions (hitting, covering up molestation, the “Magdalene Sisters” brutalities, etc.), which can and should be identified and punished as such by secular authorities. Again, for an example, look at the recent FDLS scandal.
Are there extreme cases where the mere ideas taught by the religion, without the abusive actions enabled by those ideas, as bad as sexual abuse? I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the answer was yes. Those ideas are certainly horrific. But I’m talking about likelihoods. I think it’s fair to say that it’s far less likely to cause trauma if you’re told your Jewish best friend is going to hell (as painful as that is) than if you’re molested.
Ohhhhh – I really have to disagree with you there, Jenavir. I think belief that your best friend is in hell (not going to hell, in hell) – if you take it seriously enough – can be far more traumatic than being molested. If you take this stuff seriously you think that merely physical things that happen to you are temporary and will be made right in heaven – but your friend is lost and in torment, forever.
It may be that in many or most cases, denial comes into play, and people just deliberately forget about their friends in hell, so that physical and sexual molestation really are more traumatic. But I think it’s a mistake just to assume that.
Here is just one example of a religious teaching that children in institutions and elsewhere had to withstand on a regular basis.
Children’s whole lives were completely immersed in a belief system that was foisted upon them – they were not in this respect unlike little male Muslim children who have to learn the Koran.
The stations of the cross:
1. Jesus is condemned to death
2. Jesus receives the cross
3. Jesus falls the first time
4. Jesus meets His Mother
5. Simon of Cyrene carries the cross
6. Veronica wipes Jesus’ face with her veil
7. Jesus falls the second time
8. Jesus meets the daughters of Jerusalem
9. Jesus falls the third time
10. Jesus is stripped of His garments
11. Crucifixion: Jesus is nailed to the cross
12. Jesus dies on the cross
13. Jesus’ body is removed from the cross (Deposition or Lamentation)
14. Jesus is laid in the tomb and covered in incense.
Not only did little children have to recite the ‘stations of the cross’ they had to contemplate on an almost naked statue depicting a three dimensional figure of the suffering Lord Jesus with pierced wire going through his bloodied forehead and bloodstained lashed body.
Children cried when they were told by the religious that they did this to Jesus.
Fancy telling children that they were responsible for killing and whipping Jesus!
This is child abuse of the highest order.
Children were absolutely traumatised.
OB: I think assuming that denial exists in most of the time is the only option, actually. Because people who’ve been sexually abused seek therapy, experience PTSD sometimes, commit suicide because of it (in extreme cases), have severe relationship problems, have severe drug problems, etc. That’s all very well-documented.
But most conservative Christians don’t experience this kind of trauma. Or at least we don’t have evidence that they do. If they did, we’d have to believe that wide swathes of the American South are walking around in perpetual states of trauma-related conditions. This does not comport with my experiences or with common sense. Nor does the historical record suggest that medieval people were walking around in that state (how could a whole society of people in that state function, anyway?). So inevitably I think the human tendency to create a “buffer” between what we’re taught and what we really truly deep-down believe comes into play.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there are individual cases where there’s no denial, and in that cases envisioning someone burning in hell might result in trauma. But by and large? I don’t see it. I don’t think people are really as sensitive as all that.
Though I suppose you could say that many people in the American South or medieval Europe wouldn’t have close Jewish or other non-Christian friends…but still, they’d know people who sinned without repenting, who were gay, who were different types of Christian, etc.
When you get down to it, envisioning your best friend in hell is an imagined horror, a horror you don’t actually witness or experience. As opposed to molestation, which is immediate and felt. Even if you take an idea seriously, it’s still very hard to make an imagined horror real to you unless your faith that it will happen is absolute and your imagination is very powerful (and perhaps not even then).
And I just don’t buy that people in general have that level of both certainty and imagination: if they did, they wouldn’t disobey their religions as frequently as they do (and did in the past as well).
Not to spam or anything, but I think part of the confusion here might be in the definition of “trauma.” Envisioning a loved one in hell would cause extreme grief and distress, but clinically, I’m not sure it would cause trauma. It could, of course (theoretically there’s not much that couldn’t). But it’s unlikely to in my opinion because it’s not a traumatic event that can be re-experienced through flashbacks, and I can’t think of how it would be associated with any triggers or cause panic attacks. I don’t know that it would lead to insomnia or nightmares self-destructive behaviors (dissociation, drug use) either. Not every horrifying idea is traumatic. Generally speaking there is a physical component to psychological trauma. Not necessarily a physical injury, but it’s something seen, heard, there’s usually (though not always) a threat to the body.
Jenavir – sure, okay; I’m not invested in calling it trauma. And I think you’re probably right that there’s a lot of denial, quasi-belief, as-if belief, etc.
But on the other hand – I think it’s also true that for some children the idea that Daddy or best friend is going to or in hell is just as horrible as it would be if hell were like the nearest Safeway: that real and that easy to get into. And I think that generally gets papered over as if it were no big deal.
I’m also not a bit sure that it’s common sense that large swaths of the South are not full of traumatized people. Not sure that’s common sense about anywhere, really. (Although I may be using ‘traumatized’ sloppily again. Scarred, anyway; damaged; cracked here and there. Mind you, that could be because I watch ‘Wife Swap’ now and then and get frightening glimpses of how insane some parents are.)
Yeah, I get “scarred,” frightened, harmed, in pain, etc. All of that makes perfect sense to me. I’m picky about the use of “trauma” partly because it’s related to my profession and intellectual interests, and also because I’ve seen people overuse the term in irresponsible ways.
About the South: well, if you mean scarred and damaged, then I guess we can’t really know. I do think it’s too easy to assume that people with beliefs repugnant to us are suffering for it, though. Sometimes it’s true, but sometimes it’s not. Quite a few religious folks think we atheists must be suffering all the time because we have no belief in a loving God!
No, quite right, ‘trauma’ isn’t a word to throw around in a silly way. [reminds self not to do that]
Oh sure – I know lots of believers are blissful. (But for some, a lot of the bliss is mixed up with thinking the wicked will fry – cf. the ‘rapture’ novels. But that’s a somewhat different issue.)
Some children are more vulnerable to trauma than others, for reasons scientists don’t fully understand.
It has been shown that the impact of a traumatic event is likely to be greatest in the child or adolescent who previously has been the victim of child abuse or some other form of trauma. And the child who lacks family support is more at risk for a poor recovery.