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I know that 99.9% of Christians would never consider this anything but horrifying and repugnant, but that someone can interput the same Bible that we are reading right now makes me (again) question how anyone can believe that a god that cared about us would allow this to happen to an innocent child.
The sad fact is there are sick people that do sick things, no gods or devils needed.
PZ Myers got it right when he said;
Christianity says obey. Christianity says submit. Christianity worships authority. Women and children are to submit to the will of the father of the family, just as he is to submit to the grand phantasmal patriarch. Christianity is about never questioning; about not thinking critically; about worshipping; about accepting holy writ. It is about knitting elaborate straitjackets for the mind, cheerfully putting them on yourself, and then making sure your children are burdened with the same restraints, all in the name of perpetuating a hateful and limited ideology.
Yes, the Pearls are extremists who cinch the straitjacket more tightly and more brutally than most, and I do not regard most Christians as even endorsing the evil they promote (although, with over 650,000 copies of their book sold, the Pearls’ ideas are apparently a rather popular subset of Christianity) — but still, this isn’t an aberration, a wild notion grafted onto a benevolent faith. It’s part of faith itself, that people are raised to value belief in and obedience to the holy strong man.
Your children are not your followers or your servants or slavish little echoes of yourself. They are your responsibility, and your job is to raise them to be free and independent and, most of all, to be themselves. We are not sinners in the hands of a <insert random adjective here> god, and this whole idea that there is a hierarchical chain of authority is demeaning and destructive. We are fractious and creative and unique and wild and interesting, and when you force children into this restrictive mold of subservience, you diminish their humanity.
And sometimes you snuff it right out.
