The following example illustrates how Christianity affects the way people reason, even into harming their own child out of a "belief" that they are actually helping that child. More simply, it illustrates how religion teaches mothers to be cruel out of a belief they are really being kind.
My sister is a Catholic. Being so, she dutifully taught her children they were born sinners, just as our own parents had done with us. Realizing that this "belief" was a charge made against me as an infant for which there was no direct evidence to support it, I once asked her why she thought it was a good thing to teach her children that they were born sinners. Why, I pressed her, did she think her children were better off believing they were born flawed and prone to sin rather than that they were born flawless and prone to being good? After all, don’t we behave according to the things we believe about ourselves, the way the ugly duckling thought it could not fly because it believed it was a duck rather than a swan?
In reply she said “Because look at the world.” This, I pointed out, did not only NOT answer my question, since it was in no way related to why she thought the world could only be improved by teaching her children their nature was to be no better than the world was overall, it also shifted the blame for all of the world’s problems onto the innocent infant.
Rather than consider the circular reasoning she was relying on, and all to avoid actually considering that teaching her children to believe they were sinners might not in any way be making them “better” people, she instead decided to rationalize her decision as being the right one, in obedience to her Catholicism (in order to deserve heaven and avoid hell). She did this by using all the world’s problems as her evidence that she was right and “good” to teach her children that they are born with the flaws of original sin (which lead to all of the problems in the world).
Being a teacher, I wondered if she thought the best way to calm down a rowdy classroom full of disobedient children was to teach them it was their nature to be rowdy and disobedient, or if teaching them to see themselves that way was more likely to lead them to think, since it was their “nature” to be rowdy and disobedient, it wasn’t really their fault when they were? With such a "belief" in their head, they were less at fault for being rowdy and disobedient, for being so was as natural to them as it was for a fish was to swim or a bird to fly. They could only to be praised whenever they managed to resist their true nature.
That resisting their “true nature” only teaches the child to pretend to be something they are not, teaching them to wear a "false face" as a virtue that covers up their true selves, never once occurred to my sister, because she had been taught to do the very same thing so long ago she now accepts it, not as a result of her lifelong Catholic conditioning, but her "true" nature.
Certainly none of the Native American tribes believed or taught their children they were born sinners, or that it was a virtue to pretend to be something different than their nature in order to be accepted by their tribe. And while they were not without their wars and problems, they were certainly nowhere near as bad off as those Christians in Europe who showed up and started slaughtering them all for the glory of Gold and their Christian god.
Having tried it for 2000 years and it having failed miserably to make things better, despite a church armed with supernatural sacraments that it claims come directly from God, perhaps it is time to try a different approach. After all, if Native American religion had replaced Christianity as the largest religion in the world today, how much better off would the world be for both our own species and every other?
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