Childhood Religious Indoctrination is Psychological Abuse

My opponent has accepted the debate and its terms. He accepts the 3 definitions for child psychological/emotional abuse laid out in my opening statements. He has focused on the third definition(s) laid out by the American Academy of Paediatrics and attempted to show that childhood religious indoctrination is applicable to said definitions. The definitions he as used to describe childhood religious indoctrination as a form of child psychological abuse are as follows. "----- Terrorizing (committing life-threatening acts; making a child feel unsafe; setting unrealistic expectations with threat of loss, harm, or danger if they are not met; and threatening or perpetrating violence against a child or child's loved ones or objects)." "----- Exploiting or corrupting that encourages a child to develop inappropriate behaviors (modeling, permitting, or encouraging antisocial or developmentally inappropriate behavior; encouraging or coercing abandonment of developmentally appropriate autonomy; restricting or interfering with cognitive development)." "----- Isolating (confining, placing unreasonable limitations on freedom of movement or social interactions). " "----- Unreliable or inconsistent parenting (contradictory and ambivalent demands)." "---- Neglecting mental health, medical, and educational needs (ignoring, preventing, or failing to provide treatments or services for emotional, behavioral, physical, or educational needs or problems)." In response to this, I would like my opponent to provide proven links between the selected forms of child psychological abuse and indoctrination practices. As it currently stands, my opponent's claim that childhood religious indoctrination constitutes the selected forms of abuse is unsubstantiated. "I would also like to briefly address my opponent's opening arguments. The notion that the church would disclose information regarding psychological abuse is an unwarranted inference; in fact, a much more logical inference would be that they would in fact HIDE such information to prevent its coupling with the sexual abuse scandals." I would ask my opponent to properly comprehend my statement about the Roman Catholic Church and child sexual abuse. Here is my original statement: "Even in the event of a withholding of information (as was the case in the Roman Catholic Church for decades), wouldn't authorities also reveal decades of psychological abuse relating to childhood religious education as well?" Would my opponent please note that I specifically mentioned authorities who eventually revealed the period of sexual abuse within the church by some clergy. I did not ask why the church wouldn't have revealed the information itself. My actual question was that, upon the discovery of sexual abuse within that organization, why would these authorities (those who revealed the sexual abuse) not have also revealed details of psychological abuse as well? "Second, primary socialization cannot be an excuse for religious indoctrination, as "mainstream society" contains many different religions, all with competing viewpoints on particular topics. Furthermore, since no one religion is prevalent among a majority (or perhaps even a plurality) of the populace, "normal social mores" can only be those mores that are common to all religions, making this assessment fairly useless, as indoctrination by its nature would require beliefs that are outside the "norm." May I state that my opponent does not seem to properly understand the concept of "primary socialization" or that religious organizations are in and of themselves cultural entities with their own set of social mores which are socialized via indoctrination. Firstly I believe a more in depth definition and explanation of socialization needs to be provided: http://anthro.palomar.edu... Secondly a religious community is in and of itself a culture and is therefore subject to the same rules of socialization both primary and secondary as in any other cultural entities (states, ethnic groups etc). Societal norms are specific to each cultural entity i.e. to each religious organization. There needn't therefore be any homogeneity within societal norms between religious organization as each functions as a unique and separate cultural entity. In regards to my opponent's response to my final note: This was not an attack on Dawkin's argument, but the seemingly blind acceptance of it by those I have witnessed promulgating it, all of whom have cited Dawkin's writings on the subject as the basis for their argument. This does not mean, nor have I made it out to mean, that there are not other cases to me made in support of the argument or even that Dawkin's is wrong. It is common for people to "jump on the bandwagon" of an argument or cause which they have done no prior research on. This was what I was referring to.