Dawn Sherman, a 14 year old girl in Illinois, is suing her school due to a new law that requires a moment of silence prior to the start of class. The response is pretty much what you’d expect. Dawn has been found guilty of “forcing” her alleged beliefs on others and has somehow managed to deny them all the right to believe in God.
What caught my eye were the remarks about her being brainwashed by her dad. What led them to believe Dawn was being brainwashed?
She appears to be an atheist – just like her father – and is pretty insistence about her rights being respected – just like her father. I have no doubt that Dawn was and is being influenced by her father. She’s only lived with him for her entire life and he’s obviously not the shrinking “nice” kind of atheist, but brainwashed?
You’ve gotta be kidding me. Influencing someone to believe a particular thing through mere speech and example is not brainwashing. Now if Ron or his wife threatened to, let’s say, take her gifts away if she wasn’t an atheist, then we’d have something.
Of course, it’s not really about Dawn being brainwashed. It’s about atheist parents actually being unapologetically atheistic around their kids. We’re not supposed to let our kids know we don’t believe in invisible magic men in the sky “until they’re old enough”. Old enough for what?
As I more or less stated in an earlier post about Christian persecution in America, I’ve been accosted on the streets by god peddlers. My daughter is usually present. If she’s not “old enough” to be introduced to disbelief, isn’t she also not “old enough” to be introduced to belief?
If waiting until it’s appropriate is actually important, shouldn’t every believer in the country shut their fucking traps about their special friend every time they realize a young child is present? Of course not. Many even see the presence of a young child as a reason to start the god peddling.
I’ve been hit up for God more times since our daughter was born than in all the years prior to her birth. My own mother would specifically target new parents. She’d give them diapers and other baby items in a basket, complete with the “raise your kid in church or be prepared to post bail” pamphlets.
The fact of the matter is when we atheist parents behave atheistically around our children and, even better, do so in a manner that isn’t apologetic, our kids kind of figure out that it’s okay to not believe in an invisible magic man.
They might even conclude that it’s normal to think and express such thoughts. We can’t have that, can we? They might get a wild hair up their ass and their tell their friends that the parents are lying to them about Santa Claus and God.
0 Responses to She’s being brainwashed, but I made mine up all by myself
Billy January 11, 2008
Great post. I have seen this article a couple of times, but not with this depth of analysis. If I may put in my two cents worth:
I would posit that it is the theists who do the brainwashing. Everything from ‘if you tell a lie, it makes jesus cry’ to ‘if you touch your genitals, you will burn in hell for eternity.’ There are hundreds, nay, thousands, of these little tidbits designed to force children into a particular mindset through threats and, in some cases, punishments.
I have a perfect example of brainwashing from when I was in high school. My best friend was the son of a horse farmer / technician for NOAH. The family was very conservative religiously, very liberal politically and socially (I guess this was still okay during the 1980s). Or so I thought. His little sister became a fan of Michael Jackson (the Thriller version, not the whatever the heck it is today version).
Her parents freaked. Her church freaked. I happened by one Monday morning to pick up my friend for calculus (it was at 8:00am, an hour before school actually started). I walked into the kitchen (this was normal (this is the family I learned the, “If you’ve been here three times, you’re no longer company, you’re family) and I even had a key to the house). The kitchen was full of adults sitting in a circle with the poor 13-year-old girl in the center. One man (the minister, I guess (I never visited his church, so I can’t be sure)) was standing in front of her screaming for the devil to get out. Next to her was a pile of all of her books, records, cassette tapes, underwear, bras, shirts and skirts. She was wearing just a pair of loose white panties and a t-shirt and was covered in sweat.
My friend caught me and we left. I asked, “What the heck (not my exact words) was that all about?” He explained that the church had intervened to save her from the eternal sin of free-thought. They (the preacher and the church members) had gone through every single book, approving only about one in ten. They had done the same with her records and tapes. They had forced her to try on every set of clothing she had, as well as every set of undergarments to determine which ones were acceptable (the ones on the floor next to her were the devil wear) and had photographed the ones considered unacceptable while she was wearing them (shudder). They had started at noon the previous day and gone in shifts. Almost 20 hours of verbal abuse and humiliation.
I asked my friend how he could stand by while this happened? His response? “If I questioned what they were doing to her, I would have been next. Can you imagine what they would do with Dungeons & Dragons, Cthulhu books, Playboy, Devo and Pink Floyd? Do you think I’m f—ing nuts?”
In retrospect, no. But you’re parents and the members of the church sure are.
What was done to this girl was, without doubt, brainwashing.
In my house, my wife and I are open about our atheism. My children do (during the summer while staying with my parents) attend church (Unitarian) but my sone descibes himself as 90% atheist, 10% agnostic. My daughter is fully agnostic. We did not force these attitudes on them. We did not brainwash them. We were open to questions. We gave honest answers. We did not keep them awake for 20 hours abusing them.
Who brainwashes?
Sorry for the long post. Occupational Hazard.
KC January 13, 2008
My siblings and I went through similar things with our mother. Music, books, games and even people were deemed “of the devil”. It never got as bad as what happened with your friend’s sister, but that’s probably because our dad was an atheist and refused, on threat of impending death (he’d come to the door with his shotgun), to let any of the “brothers” in the house. He’d barely let ‘em come on the grounds.
None of it really took with us three older ones, but our younger sister, now 30, is still recovering from what our mother and that church did. She told me just a few months ago that she used to hate me so much when we kids because I didn’t seem bothered by the stunts that gang of thugs pulled. She, however, used to lie awake at night reviewing the day’s events to see if she’d done/thought something that was going to get her sent to Hell.
They got to her so bad that she actually told our dad he was going to hell – with a smile on her face. I think she was about six at the time. That haunts her to this day.
Of course, various believers say there’s no “evidence” that religious groups mentally abuse kids, as if telling kids they’re going to tortured for eternity if they step over an imaginary line isn’t abuse! It makes me want to start throwing things.