AhhhHereItGoes
You said, about what adults believe or talk about concerning religion, that you don't mind what they say:
but fear mongering a child would make me uneasy.
Well said
I have a strong faith. I don't force it on anyone. If someone asks about it I'll discuss it. I read the Bible. It's a hell of a difficult book to understand at times. I look up talks on the internet etc. to try and understand it and I enjoy learning about it very much. I try not to talk about it because people are all at a different place in their thinking, I find. But we have to be honest, be we Catholic, Evangelical, Baptist, or other religions which are not Christian or Atheist, we do not actually know! We can only have our own ideas and believe and hold what we believe by Faith. That is why, for me, we must respect each other and not be rude to each other however nutty the other person seems to us! I do think people who are offensive should be curtailed though. For example saying a baby will go to hell. I believe that is completely untrue. If I believed it were true though, I think I should not say it because it is offensive.
There was a Teacher in one school I taught in who refused to have any witches so banned Meg Mog and Owl and when we "did" Australia she would not sing the bit in Waltzing Mathilda where "his ghost may be heard"
As I said, I was asked to research Harry Potter, I was told at first "to look for Satan!" I tried not to laugh, then realised they were teasing me, but that it was a serious piece of research in view of the distress some young people were experiencing. These were enough in number to make us feel we needed to look specifically at this issue and they were from all across the British Isles, did not know each other, had very different backgrounds, both male and female and an age range of 8 - 17. I will say no more as I can't. But the results of my research showed what I said before.
My conclusion? Let children read Harry Potter! They are brilliant stories! They are also wonderful in helping children develop the kind of reading skills that are valuable: reading quickly, reading ahead, thinking ahead and wanting to find out what will happen. I wouldn't be surprised if the Harry Potter Books didn't raise the nations average reading ages when they were hot off the press! It is true that some children had a very strange depression and fascination for certain aspects of the books around the spells and people's names. These, compared with the massive number of readers seem most insignificant in number. Why it happened to those children one can only surmise. I said earlier, there may have been a few children in the 1950s with symptoms of similar mental problems after gorging on one Famous Five Book after another or one Enid Blyton Adventure book after another, all of which were scary but not about witches, however, the people interviewed about these books said things like they used to "read in terror under the covers with a torch". So any very well written fiction book that is frightening and has cliff-hangers might make a small proportion of children become a bit over-anxious to the level of benefitting from some therapeutic intervention. But only a very very few. Hardly any really! So enjoy the books!!!
It is true that different Christian Churches teach very different things. The Roman Catholic Church for several hundred years has steered away from the Bible and created its own rules. That was the crux of the Protestant Reformation. Yet the Protestants don't follow what the Bible says either, not concerning which day is the Sabbath. They stuck with Sunday, the day the Roman Church had changed the day of worship to, altering it from the Seventh Day which God asks us to share with him as the day of rest, in the Bible. The Roman Catholics made the day of rest the first day which is Sun - day. The influence of Mithraism on the early Christian Church is very strong in Christianity today. Mithras was the god of the sun.
We could all discuss issues and nit pick but I think arguing is a waste of time. We need to work together to fight against real sin. Real sin is cruelty to children. It may be that we have found a real example of a child undergoing cruelty, in this very thread. It is this which we should all come together about, no matter what our beliefs and religious feelings. If the practice of child cruelty is happening because of the teachings of a particular group of churches, intentionally or not, now that this has been raised it must be looked into. There may be no problem. Or there may be some members of the congregation who are believing they need to discipline their child severely and are doing this too harshly so the child is mentally scarred and his behaviour, even at a young age is now aggressive and violent to other children.
I would appeal to all of you as Mums and people who care about children and know that it is love that makes them grow, please do not let this happen and walk by and do nothing.