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Comments by Ingmar


1. Religion's Real Child Abuse

Comment #109641 by Ingmar on January 9, 2008 at 11:01 am

Dawkins states his opinion that that religious upbringing is child abuse and supports it with evidence from a few individual victims. However, a hand full of supporting examples has no statistical significance. As he promotes the use of science to validate hypothesises, I would welcome a scientific study affirming Dawkins's hypothesis.

So I did a web search and found that a very closely related study has in fact been carried out in 2002 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the report is here:
http://www.youthandreligion.org/publications/docs/RiskReport1.pdf

It has even been put in direct relation to Dawkins hypothesis here:
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/religion_as_child_abuse.html

To summarize, child abuse negatively affects mental health, provides additional risks for psychopathology, and increases suicidal behaviours, eating disorders, depression, delinquency and criminal behaviours, and alcohol abuse. To affirm Dawkins's hypothesis these negative effects should be occurring at increased rates in adolescents that had a religious upbringing. However, the study shows that every single one of those negative effects is instead reduced by religious "indoctrination" and increased for those that never attend church and/or do not regard religion as important. Thus, scientific inquiry shows that Dawkins's generalization from a few examples is false; instead the general trend is that child abuse and religious upbringing have opposite outcomes on behaviour. If any religion related upbringing can be regarded as child abuse, then it is non-religious upbringing.