There are many forms of psychological abuse against our children, some idiosyncratic and some social.  The young girl driven to suicide by a thoughtless adult who first raised her hope for love through creating a fictitious suitor on a social networking site and then cruelly dashed that hope in a warped attempt to assist her own daughter to bully the victim is an example of just how serious psychological abuse can be.  Social abuse differs only in method not impact.  We rail at the image of children brainwashed to strap explosives on their tiny bodies, becoming human weapons for the political, religious, social or just plain perverse agendas of groups like the Taliban or the Lord’s Resistance Army.  Such psychological abuse of innocents undermines any possible validity their philosophies could warrant.  No justification exists for inculcating hate in the minds of young people.  Brainwashing anyone to make them believe what some other wishes is always wrong.  In the case of youth it is also always criminal. 

I doubt there is a single reader that has disagreed with me so far.  I want to go a step further though.  What about brainwashing by omission.  If we agree with the above arguments should it not be a natural step to say that intentionally withholding knowledge from children for the purpose of manipulating them into believing what some other desires them to believe or to think is also wrong and criminal.  That is a natural corollary of my arguments above.  Al Qaeda does not say to a young suicide bomber, ‘read this treatise by Osama bin Laden and this pamphlet by Thomas Paine and then go kill the infidel because bin Laden is right and Paine is wrong.‘  My suspicion is that Al Qaeda training facilities do not have well stocked and balanced libraries.  The abuse is not in presenting the children with a biased idea, all ideas are by nature biased, it is in presenting the idea as the only idea.  Omitting information from children in order to inculcate any social agenda is abuse.  And therefore anyone who would perpetrate such abuse should be sanctioned by our society accordingly.  Presenting children with all perspectives but saying that we as Canadians, or in this community or this family believe that one or the other perspective is the correct one is different.  That is not necessarily abuse.  A child’s country, community and most particularly family will likely be more persuasive than an obscure author.  The child may therefore be guided by such authoritative opinion but they still are aware that other perspectives do exist.  It might cross the line into abuse if we were to present the other perspectives with derision or ridicule.  This is not an exact science and a judgement call must be made at what point abuse occurs.  But the case I have in mind at the moment clearly crosses that line. 

Currently there is a bill before the Alberta Legislature that would allow parents to withdraw their children from class if the curriculum includes anything which goes against their religious beliefs.  The premier is even trying to defend this abomination by saying that it is only religious questions.  Translation:  Religious brainwashing good; any other brainwashing bad.  I’d bet you hot cross buns to pancakes (the Anglicans should get that one) if I were to demand the right to remove my child from class to avoid having them exposed to capitalist ideals,  the same god-bothering twits behind this bill (wonder what’s in their libraries?) would be pushing to remove her from my home to save her from this twisted old socialist.  Every evangelical from Lethbridge to Fort Macleod would be burning my effigy in their state of the art tele-pulpit.  So why the muted response to this legislation.  A polite whimper from the CBC (okay what do we expect, they’re Canadian) is all the coverage I have seen so far.  Of course the CBC missed a number of child abuse / religion stories until it was too late just ask Catholic choir boys and our Aboriginal people.  Capitalism encourages behaviours and causes practices that I am convinced harm innocent human beings and are anathema to the basic cooperative nature of humanity.  In simple terms capitalism to me is a crime against humanity which should be prosecuted as we prosecuted Naziism at Nuremburg.  So I would be remiss in my responsibilities as a parent to allow some pro-capitalist school system to expose my child to such obscenity.  Right?  If I firmly believe this, and I do, I should shelter my child from it.  Wrong.  I would be abusing my child.  Ignorance weakens a human being and my job as a parent is to strengthen my child to survive in a world of conflict and contradiction.  To disarm that child from the start is the ultimate abuse. 

For those who want to argue that the two things are not the same tell me why.  If you can’t defend your argument, you don’t have one.  Premier Ed Stelmach, if you pass this bill you are a child abuser.  You are a pariah in our society and should be sanctioned accordingly.  To the RCMP (let’s pretend they might listen to reason and are not just the goon squad for sordid politicians), if child abuse is an abhorrent crime within our society you must focus all of your resources into bringing Mr. Stelmach and every member of the legislature in support of this bill before the bar of justice and seek out those who use the money of god to manipulate and control society.  Save our children now and we won’t need a parade of religious leaders apologizing later.

Most of us were raised to be tolerant of people’s beliefs.  But is there no limit to tolerance?  In one of the books I reviewed on this site, American Fascists, Chris Hedges asks the question, ‘In a tolerant society do we tolerate intolerance?’  Most religious institutions are intolerant to a greater or lesser degree.  Perhaps we should be more clear.  I may be able to tolerate your intolerance if you keep it to yourself.  If it does not infringe on the lives of others then okay be as bigoted as you want to be.  Actually there is no way to stop someone from thinking intolerant thoughts anyway.  But we can, and should, stop the political menace of organized religion.  Believe in the Easter Bunny, believe in Santa Claus or believe in god but don’t translate that into the oppression of other people. 

Some people, I am sure are thinking that I am going overboard.  After all the church does a lot of good doesn’t it.  I don’t know.  Does it?  Ask the gay and lesbian community here whether they believe the church does them a lot of good.  Ask our aboriginal communities what they think of the church after the experience of residential schools.  Or ask the thousands of men and women who lost their innocence in a choir loft to a man of the cloth who told them it was what god wanted.  Maybe we should take off the blinders and lose the guilt trip and look at organized religion in the clear light of the facts. 

What has sent me off here is the recent announcement by the Pope, der Führer of the Roman Catholic Church, who has just enlightened the world that condoms do nothing to help the HIV/AIDS epidemic.  Christian Churches, particularly the mainstream Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches, have been making great inroads into Africa.  Africa also happens to be where HIV/AIDS is most prevalent for a number of reasons.  These churches reinforce and promote social attitudes that contribute to this prevalence.  Lack of proper medical treatment, including the drugs necessary to keep patients alive, and lack of anything more than symbolic assistance from the wealthy industrialized world is doing enough damage on a continent struggling to overcome the legacies of colonialism and cold war.  We don’t need a bunch of holy rollers encouraging the disempowerment of women in the name of a Jewish revolutionary that DIED 2000 years ago.  As for the silly story of him coming back to life you can read a better version of it in Egyptian mythology, written another 2000 years before he supposedly showed up.  The resurrection story was common among early civilizations.  So pick your favourite but don’t use it to commit mass murder. 

The suffering caused by these institutions is in no way allayed by any positive contribution they make.  They give virtually nothing to society.  Any small assistance those in need receive is accompanied at the very least by a healthy dose of degradation.  Actually that is what the christian church is all about.  Everything human is evil and must be overcome.  We, each of us, individually are worthless.  Only by suppressing our humanity can we hope for salvation.  Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses.  It is kind of like life insurance, you have to die to win.  The more you suffer and endure during your lifetime, the more your reward in heaven is the pitch line.  You know that bit about it being easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven.  But since there is no god there is no heaven and so I don’t think it is noble to suffer here while others enrich themselves.  Actually as I look at the suffering endured by so many people in this world, if there was a god I would personally kill the son of a bitch. 

“God being everything, the real world and man are nothing.  God being truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death.  God being master, man is the slave.  Incapable of finding justice, truth, and eternal life by his own effort, he can attain them only through a divine revelation.  ….. Slaves of God, men must also be slaves of Church and State, in so far as the State is consecrated by the Church.  ……

The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.” 

Michael Bakunin from God and the State

It is time to throw off the shackles and break the political power of religion once and for all.  If we do not, millions will continue to suffer while the religious elite continue to sanctimoniously enrich themselves.  Church leaders should be imprisoned alongside the other drug dealers.  The menacing fairy tale these pushers peddle has claimed more lives than heroine, crack cocaine and all other narcotics combined.

Wouldn’t it be nice if politicians actually talked to us like we were adults.  It is an insult to our intelligence that our leaders should deflect our concerns with scripted gobble-de-goop.  But what really boggles the mind is that we (in the royal sense of society as a whole) accept it, jump in our snugly jammies, nestle in our nice warm beds to dream the sweet dreams of the innocent.  Safe in the knowledge that Daddy president or prime minister will chase away all the monsters and bad men that want to hurt us.  This might be funny if it wasn’t so sad and we could just turn our faces and ignore the sadness if it wasn’t so dangerous.  This complacency is what horror is madeof.  It led to the deaths of more than 60 million people (total death toll of World War 2) in the middle of the last century. 

Politics has followed numbers into becoming a way to turn off the human mind.  It is well established that most modern people shut down as soon as someone starts rattling off statistics or columns of figures.  Most of us are functionally innumerate.  Politics now seems to have the same effect.  I am just not sure when this happened.  Politics really rose as a mass interest as we moved toward a more inclusive understanding of society.  The English Civil War, the American and French Revolutions, the First World War and the Socialist and Communist revolutions that followed propelled the kiss of politics to every lip.  The rights of man, democracy, Liberté Egalité Fraternité, dictatorship of the proletariat, the International Working Man’s Association, the Industrial Workers of the World, and in my own era Students for a Democratic Society, The July 26th Movement, the Southern Christian Leadership Committee and more were founts of information not just for radicals and political specialists but for all.  Politics was the stuff of dinner table conversations (and the cause of my ulcers but I bear them proudly as a battle injury in the war to create the good society).  Politics was not just important, it was exciting.  It offered the possibility of a better society not just a richer one.  The ideal taken from the Christian Bible of ‘What gaineth a man if he should inherit the whole world but lose his own soul’ meant something.  I am by no means a religious person although I do consider myself a spiritual man.  But what that verse stands for is not about religion it is about integrity.  The opposite sentiment is expressed as everyone has a price. 

Today’s world seems to function on the latter sentiment.  When did gluttony replace honour and expediency replace justice?  When did we stop caring about what is right and start closing our minds at the first tones of political thought?  We have surrendered our freedom not to foreign terrorists but to the seductress in our midst.  The syrupy placations of our own political succubi rape our soul and leave us unable to stand for our own beliefs.  Unable to challenge their actions lest the narcotic poison be withheld, we become our own murderers.