I was five years of age when I was brainwashed with My Book of Bible Stories by the Watchtower Society.

I recently dug up the book when cleaning my house.  I was horrified...it's nothing short of child terrorism.  I highly recommend picking up a copy simply to use as an example of immoral religious brainwashing.  Oh, and keep this book away from children.

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Matt,

What planet have you been living on?  This has been going on for centuries!

I note you have referenced information from FFrF...did you miss Barbara G Walker's article "Violence in Religion" where she points out that one of the early (catholic) church fathers, St. john Chrysostom advised terrifying children with stories of child-devouring demons, to keep them still "when they want food or play or anything else unreasonable".  So to this early christian, children wanting food or to be able to play was unreasonable and the children should be terrorized with frightening stories of demons that eat little chldren who make such unreasonable requests. 

When I was a kid Jesus was always the one having children brought to him and always carrying a pretty lamb.  Nice picture, usually smiling.  His dad, on the other hand, was the bad dad from hell.  All fire and brimestone, drowning everyone (including babies of both human and animal kind); raining fire down from 'heaven'. 

My problem, even as a kid, was trying to get how Jesus could be so good when his dad was a complete bastard and why anyone would want to try to appease the 'bad dad'.  Obviously, Jesus wasn't raised by his dad, but had a step-dad (Joseph) who taught him to be good.  Now that I thnk about it, that's a pretty funny story i made up as a kid.  It helped me, coming from a 'broken home' and a dad who was a sociopath (very bad dad).

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      Pyrokidd's back,  haven't heard from you in awhile ...  missed ya.

My mom has custody of my 4-year-old niece, and has had custody for a couple of years now.  I know my niece is in better hands than she would be with my sister, who has drug and mental health issues.  It still makes me cringe whenever I hear my niece talk about Jesus, though. My mom isn't very religious, but I'm afraid that whatever indoctrination my niece gets now, with my family's history of mental illness and the fundamentalist nature of this state, my niece won't have a chance to grow up thinking for herself.

Unfortunately early indoctrination, starting almost before the child develops long-term memory, seems to be the major vector for most of the theistic memes.

            It doesn't really matter how long it has been an acceptable practice, it is still not right to put children through any of this bs.

That's true. Only problem is how could that be done without taking away their freedom of religion? Even if we could outlaw that sort of thing it would be easy for the parents to indoctrinate the children.

Speaking of childhood indoctrination, the religious nuts aren't the only people out to wreck kids' minds.

Exhibit A

That's funny to me, I remember in second grade getting in trouble for referring to a black girl as black. Seemed like an obvious way to identify her, since she was the only one in the class at the time, but I was told that's the wrong way to think of a person, even if there's no harm intended.

By the way,

Thanks, I didn't even know my presence here was even that noticeable.......

I was indoctrinated from birth and slowly weened my way out of it on my own.  My girls I'm more than happy to allow their grandmother or various people to try to indoctrinate them.  I'm here to ask them to think.  I would rather them know their religious counterparts than be ignorant of them.  I'm arming them against those ideas. 

After that they can choose for themselves.   And I will love them no matter what they decide.