Re: God Isn’t Real but the Devil Is: Childhood’s End and Five Years of Hell

Article

This was a good piece to read. Abuse is nothing to ignore. Anyone who suspects abuse should address it to the proper people and/or authorities. Of course, use your best judgement. The only thing I can criticize about an article such as this is that it is used as a way of arguing against the existence of God. What happened to this young girl and now woman was terrible and the one responsible needs to answer for his crimes. However this:

I now know that God did not “let” this happen to me because God does not exist. No God would allow something like that to happen to a child.

... is a leap in logic. Tragedies do not disprove the existence of God. It may disprove certain ideas of God, but could not in itself disprove his existence.

Laurence Gonzaga
6.16.15

Re: Religious Indoctrination Is Child Abuse [VIDEO]

Link to Post at Atheist Analysis

There's really not much to respond to here. It's basically an anti-religion quote from someone famous and a short video with no arguments or explanation. This is why I have no problem linking to both the post and the video here. If it had any persuasive power I might have been tempted to not reference it. I would be interested in a presentation on what psychological abuse is and clinically accepted examples of it, then examples of how religious indoctrination qualifies for psychological abuse, and some peer reviewed journal studies on religious indoctrination and negative effects that are correlated with it. I can't imagine ever having a true experiment that proves this link, if any, since you would have to say you are randomly assigning a subset of the population to the experimental group with "psychological abuse" treatment. That would be unethical methinks. Try again atheists.

Update: 1/21/15

They uploaded a new version. I had to watch the first version above to see what the difference is. It's basically the same video with less sinister music. The power of AV media, huh? My criticism above still stands. A video without any real substance.