Noddy24 wrote:tinygiraffe--
I'm referring to her firm conviction that she didn't "deserve" a fundamentalist upbringing from her parents.
No one deserves a fundamentalist upbringing. I don't think you really understand what that means.
Children are very impressionable and their psyches are delicate. Teach them that there is anything infallible and absolute and 100% certain, and they will grow to need that. Base these beliefs on a foundation of sand (the erroneous "proofs" of fundamentalist doctrines), and you're setting up your child for disaster.
Child grows up, finds out the lies, and the foundation crumbles. The now-adult still needs absolute certainty and the guarantee of life after death in heaven, united with loves ones--but now has no such guarantee. How is the now-adult to deal with his/her own mortality, and the idea that separation from loved ones is surely to occur? There is no tool developed within the psyche to deal with this new pain.
The consequences of teaching a child fundamentalism go beyond the reality of mortality, however. A child raised as a fundamentalist is taught that everyone else is wrong, and is secluded and protected from people different from him or her. A fundamentalist child does not find out about the real world until he or she is an adult and suddenly forced into it. The adjustment is painful, and sometimes does not take place. The now-adult cannot adjust, and develops problems such as inability to hold a job, depression, drug addiction, or other coping methods to deal with a world they didn't grow up in and cannot adjust to.
Those children who branch out early from the boundaries of fundamentalism and interact with those who are different (do not attend church, or instead attend mass, or who may be different in other ways than religion) are surrounded by a thick cloud of pressure, criticism, prayers, judgemental attitudes, and so on by the church, and are therefore pressured to come "out from among them and be ye separate." If the behavior continues the entire family might be cast out from the church by a vote in the congregation, or the pastor may be feel justified to cast out the errant family himself.
Quote:
How dare those people do their best by her in their own way?
How dare they not be atheists?
Anyone should be smart enough to understand that the earth is not 6,000 years old, that Jesus is not coming again, that their little religious group cannot be the only correct ones in their doctrine while everyone else believes Satan-induced lies, and the list goes on.
I believe my parents (especially my father) indulged some need within himself (need for absolute certainty? need to be told what to believe? need to share my mother's religion? I don't know) by believing in fundamentalism, and he rationalized any deeply-internalized doubts with common stereotypical ideas that church is good for the family, people who believe in god are better off in their lives, the messages in church were decent family-values, etc.
