More brainwashed children

About a month ago, I blogged about a video of a child preacher, yelling and screaming from the pulpit. It was an eye opening display of a child's perception of the church experience, showing how the child is not seeing the soft, 'love thy neighbor', baby Jesus and little sheepies version of the church, but sees a person yelling and screaming fanatically at the front of a big room.

It's pretty obvious that the children aren't getting the message, that their attendance at church is inappropriate and that they ought to be protected from being exposed from this kind of material.

It's similar to when we went to the Bethlehem Experience, where they were showing the goriest scenes from 'Passion of the Christ' as all the children were walking past, leaving a number of children in our group crying, upset by the experience.

It seems like, in these cases, some people are willing to subject their children to traumatic experiences, justified by the fact that they are doing so as a way to indoctrinate children into the faith.

I say that if you are using methods like this to scare, shock and traumatise children into staying in your church, you are commiting child abuse and should be stopped.

There are standards of classification designed to protect people from offensive material. I would liek to see these standards enforced upon churches too.

Please speak out against abuse of children whenever you see it.




To add to the previous post on child preachers, here's a selection of kid preachers. It's pretty scary stuff!

A child's perception of church

In this video, a child (toddler) delivers a sermon in raving gibberish. What is most concerning about this is that the child is simply mimicking the behaviour modeled to him by the regular preachers. In his mind, church is about going to a big pretty room and being yelled at by a wildly gesticulating man pacing around the stage.

It's scary to think that children are being exposed to this type of service (I recognise that not all religious services are like this), where they can't yet understand the message being delivered and are just exposed to the tone of the delivery.

Church should be a child-free environment. If a child wishes to start learning about their parent's faith at an age where they are able to demonstrate an understanding of the concepts involved, I don't so much mind. But to expose very young children to the frightening sermons of the more 'enthusiastic' rligious denominations is wrong and comarable to child abuse.