There is a law against harrassing people with threats of physical harm already. That is what preaching eternal torment does. But its not enforced. There are other laws which religions break as well, and we don't do anything about it there either, like with polygamy. Religions have a kind of immunity, where some kinds of crimes, as long as they are done in the name of religion, are ok. Its bs.
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Should teaching eternal hell be a crime?
- Thread starter 839311
- Start date
There is a law against harrassing people with threats of physical harm already. That is what preaching eternal torment does. But its not enforced. There are other laws which religions break as well, and we don't do anything about it there either, like with polygamy. Religions have a kind of immunity, where some kinds of crimes, as long as they are done in the name of religion, are ok. Its bs.
When we start removing kids from their homes because they're being taught about the Boogeyman, then you can cry "special treatment".
This issue isn't one of preferential treatment for religion.
no-body
Well-Known Member
My thinking is, telling your child alone "believe this or you go to hell" is kind of vague and they probably won't really understand it. If you raise the child right in other ways they will probably rebel against this idea when they can think on their own. If the parent or church uses it as a psychological source of grief, they will most likely do other non-religious and/or non-cultural related things that will screw up their children and you should go after them for that.
I find disturbing the amount of people who would trust the government to mandate religious upbringing.
Regardless of the sarcasm, the point stands, you should be prepared for the philosophy you espouse in this thread, that government should intervene in familial religious upbringing to bring about the least amount of harm, to be used in a manner in which you do not see fit.
You would not like it at all if the Christian majority of this country tried to tell you that you could not teach non-Christian religious ideas to your hypothetical children because of the possible harm you would be doing them.
That has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand... and no, according to the Bible, which includes the NT, adulterers should not be killed. "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" and all...
This is of course, without even going into the laughable premise, that teaching an eternal hell necessarily psychologically scars children. Sure some can be, but that is not the teaching itself, but the manner in which it is presented.
I for instance, never feared going to hell as a child, it was viewed with sadness as the final place of punishment for the unrepentant, of which I knew I was not one of.
Which would require a constitutional amendment altering the First Amendment to remove the clause barring infringement on the freedom of religion.
To teach children about eternal Hell is about God threatening them, not the messenger. By your reasoning that this is a 'threat',
it would be illegal to teach anyone about a religion with bad repercussions. There go many flavors of Xtianity, Islam & who knows
what others. So you're proposing massive government regulation of religion. Would the benefits outweigh the ensuing repression,
rebellion & Constitutional overthrow? You should also consider that giving government such great power to do this thing for you,
could be used to also do unanticipated things to you. Do you trust government that much?
Laws against polygamy are enforced.
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Children have very powerful imaginations. It isn't hard for a child to imagine a burning pit with people in it being tortured. I think it is exactly when I was a child that my ideas of hell were most vivid. As for understanding it, I agree with you there. Its hard enough for adults to understand that the idea of an all-powerful and perfectly good god is completely incompatible with the idea that the same god would want to torment people for all eternity. Children are practically defenseless when it comes to ideas being presented to them by people they trust.
I'm not advocating 839311's idea to outlaw teaching kids about Hell, but when we're talking about preferential treatment of religion in general, you have to remember that there are two parts to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment: the bit about "free exercise" is tempered by the first bit ("Congress shall pass no law, etc."). Any law that grants a religion a special exemption from the law in the name of some form of "free exercise" is still violating the First Amendment by being a law respecting an establishment of religion.
I realize that there's a conflict here on some issues. I don't think the answer is to say that religion gets to do whatever it wants in every case, because that situation would violate the First Amendment as well.
Personally, I think the intent of the Establishment Clause is to prevent Congress from singling out specific religions for special negative treatment, not to exempt them from the normal laws of the land.
A
angellous_evangellous
Guest
Yeah, but kids don't have the higher reasoning skills to imagine a hell as terrible as adults can.
The kids have powerful imaginations, but what they imagine can be loosely related (or not at all) to what the preacher says.
I heard about hell all the time as a kid, but the imagery never caught me until halfway through college. I can also tell you that I've worked as a minister with teenagers and adults who have been taught about hell all their lives and can't recall a blessed thing about it.
They should be fined, for starters, if they teach eternal hell. Same with rascists teaching their children to hate people if their skin color is different. I don't tolerate these kinds of crimes. I don't think teaching rascism is a crime, but it damn well should be. And it is in my eyes. There need to be checks in place within our society that try to control such evil, to atleast try to contain it, and especially to try to prevent future generations from being infected with it as well.
No, and I don't like how some Christians want to make teaching evolution in schools illegal either.
I don't buy that for a second. Sadness, yeah. But I am certain that it also made you afraid at one point or another.
No it wouldn't. It sounds to me that you are saying that teaching muslims to hate Americans is alright? Teaching them that strapping 20 sticks of dynamite to themselves and blowing themselves up in a crowded square is acceptable? That polygamy should be ok, as long as you are a mormon? That consuming peyote is perfectly alright, as long as you are a member of a particular Native American tribe? That terrorizing children with the threat of eternal torment is not breaking the law, even though the law protects people against threats of physical harm? Or do you happily draw the line of immunity around your faith only, because you should be allowed to break the law but members of other faiths shouldn't? What are you saying?
I don't know whether higher reasoning affects the scale of terror much. I think that when kids are very young, that they are susceptible to being frightened in a much more intense way. I think that people become more controlled, and less emotionally volatile as they become older. I agree with you that higher reasoning allows adults to imagine more terrible hells, but that these hells don't personally seem as terrifying as they seem to kids.
I can't accept that someone who has been taught about hell all their lives has never had the imagery of someone painfully burning in a pit of fire. I don't buy that.
My grandmother told me that when she was a little girl, her mother told her that if she didn't eat her crusts, they'd dance around her pillow while she slept.
Some parents tell their children that if they don't look both ways before you cross the street, they'll be hit by a bus.
My grade 7 shop teacher's main method of enforcing safety procedures was to regale us of gory (and in retrospect, exaggerated) stories of what happened when long hair wasn't tied back or the chuck key was left in the drill press.
Mainly from TV, when I was little, I was worried that there was a monster under my bed who would try to grab my ankles if I stepped out of bed in the middle of the night.
I'd say that teaching kids about Hell is on par with these sorts of ideas. Why do you single out the religious belief for special treatment?
We call them God fearing Christians.
As long as we have the second amendment, I'm not too worried about anyone taking the first amendment. I'm glad my children are raised.
uu_sage
Active Member
My fiance and I are both Christian Universalists. We will teach our kids about universal salvation, the gospel of God's success. In our mind Arminianism and Calvinism are theologies that undermines God's love, God's grace, God's power, mercy, forgiveness and denies the ability of God to make all God's children happy and whole. Arminianism says that God should be able to save all souls but can't (making the creation more powerful than God) and Calvinism says that God is able to save all souls but is not willing to (turning God into an indifferent hateful monster). Armianism has 90 percent of the world reconciled while Calvinism reconciles only 50 percent. Both these systems make God's salvation and reconciliation of the world a failure by being a complete failure or a near success. Both the traditional schools of thought create a hell on Earth. God's love and grace cannot fail. Only a 100 percent of creation reconciled is good for God. God is able and will reconciliation all creation, Christian or not, in due time according to God's purposes. We will allow our orthodox sisters and brothers hold on to the Calvinist or Arminian views but we will not preach those systems in my family.
First, I want to be clear that I don't single out kids when I say that preaching hell should not be taught. Im saying that preaching eternal torment to anyone should be made illegal, whether they are kids or teenagers or adults.
I certainly disagree with some of those examples being on par with the threat of eternal torment, although the dancing crust might qualify.
If you were to say to an adult that if he doesn't look both ways before crossing the street he will be hit by a bus, he would laugh at your joke, or he would laugh at you if you said that seriously, followed probably by concern for you. If you told an adult that uneaten crusts will dance around his pillow he would laugh. On the other hand, people very often do take the threat of eternal torment seriously. And the threat is made seriously. Context is an important factor too. Kids listening to a shop teacher know that he isn't threatening them, but warning them about dangers in the shop.
The situation could be different for kids. Are the crusts happy crusts? Or are they demon crusts with sharp teeth? We have to be careful about what we say to kids. Kids can be frightened by many things. Is it right to teach that crusts with sharp teeth dance around your childs pillow? No. Because kids very well might believe that these crusts will cause them harm. And if you are threatening kids with physical harm caused by evil beings then yeah you are committing a crime. Its actually quite sick that parents would purposefully threaten their children in such a way. I can't imagine frightening a child every night by saying that the bogeyman will come get her if she doesn't eat her vegetables. That's completely revolting.
Watching tv is a different issue because nobody is actually threatening you. Unless you are watching a pastor telling you that you are going to hell if you don't convert to his particular denomination.
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I really enjoyed reading your belief that I will be saved from death by a god. Its comforting. In the current religious atmosphere its especially refreshing to hear that God will save everyone. If ony I had been exposed to this kind of thinking at the start of my own Christian journey.
The exact opposite is true of religions that preach eternal torment. I feel like I am being threatened by them. I feel like they are targeting my fears with their primitive, insane belief. I hope that I don't ever hear anyone tell me that I am going to hell again, although I know that I will. It makes my blood boil to listen to someone threatening me like that. Its extremely offensive.
Why? Why "eternal torment" specifically?
If the problem is with instilling fear in a child, then why limit yourself?
Yet you aren't calling for it to be illegal for parents to threaten their kids with the Boogeyman.
So? If it's a matter of protecting the well-being of the child, then the child's state of mind is all that matters. Does it really matter where the idea came from? Once we establish that a child's environment has resulted in this horrible belief in the mind of the child, shouldn't the child be removed from that environment?
They don't strike me as horribly scarred by their experience.....a bit loopy, but not scarred.
I wonder....if some children are scarred by being taught that there is no afterlife, that this miserable life is all we get,
that there is no meaning or purpose...then should parents teaching such atheism be punished too? This is all sounding
very authoritarian.
I don't know how to do it, but some rascal might create a poll.....
Should teaching children that it's a godless universe with no afterlife be illegal?
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waitasec
Veteran Member
teaching the concept of hell to a child is just a sign of low self esteem expressed through mental abuse. who in their right mind would subject a child to such a thing...? i'll tell you who, a person who is obsessed with control and power over an innocent mind... it is a despicable and an abhorrent act indeed
unworthy of mercy
:fight:
I'm not limiting myself, as you saw with your crust example.
Actually thats exactly what I did in my last post.
Why eternal torment specifically? I guess because I find it particularly offensive. I personally believe that the concept of eternal torment is the most evil thing imaginable. I think scope also has something to do with it. Not too many people feel threatened by the bogeyman causing them harm. But everyone on earth is at some time or another threatened with eternal torment, while many are threatened with this on a constant basis. Its terror on a global scale. Very disturbing. It needs to be opposed.
I disagree with you there. I think the parents should keep custody, but they should be fined and certainly reprimanded by society. I don't think its practical either, or beneficial, and would certainly cause a revolution. An appropriate punishment would be a fine, or maybe mandatory counselling sessions explaining why harrassing others with physical harm is illegal, and hopefully reducing this kind of behaviour.