Debate: Is forcing your child to be a certain religion, a form of child abuse?
Side: Yes

Please state what "abuse" has been placed onto the child? Do define this beyond my expectation.I already did: emotional and cognitive retardation.What is the harm in teaching them this? I also doubt the child will become close minded. I tend to find both Atheists and Theists hold a belief preservation bias towards their own enigmas. I'd like to see you provide some evidence for your claim and then show me how this applies to all children who are taught a religion."Indoctrination: to teach (someone) to fully accept the ideas, opinions, and beliefs of a particular group and to not consider other ideas, opinions, and beliefs." (Merriam-Webster)Religion demands full acceptance of its tenets as a matter of faith, without and even in some cases against evidence and reason; this is closed-mindedness, clear and simple. To be clear, I recognize that atheists can be equally dogmatic and indoctrinating. The crucial difference to my mind is that theism innately requires these attributes, whereas atheism does not.Oh, okay. An emotional crutch you say? So is it not okay for a child to pray to receive and A on his test and also put in effort to score that high? Is it improper for a child to pray to see a lost one in heaven once more? Is it improper to have a child pray to see their lost father again after he has given his life for his country? No. In fact I would say that these are very sweet things to pray and believe in. Unless you wish to tell your child that your father was a simple being and is no longer in existence and you will never see him again since his consciousness has drifted away and has ceased to exist. I would define that as mental abuse.The primary difference between you and I is that you value the subjective and I value the objective. Religion substitutes subjective assumption for proximity to objective truth; I personally prefer the pursuit of reason to delusion. And I do think it is ill-advised to teach children to pray to ignore reality rather than to confront it head-on, but I guess that comes down to my preference for not burying my head in the sand. Religion is a comfortable alternative to admitting we do not know everything and that what we do know is not how we would like it to be; the problem is that religion trades comfort for emotional maturity. Rather than avoid reality we should learn (and teach our children) to live with reality as it is. The conflict and distress over reality is not innate, but a consequence of our forming the very attachments to an idealized world that religion teaches people to make (e.g. our lives have meaning, there is an afterlife, etc.). Religion creates the expectation for that which we cannot prove exists, and in some cases for which we can say probably does not exist; it sets us (and the child) up for disappointment.I love the way you say "unlikely" since you must be aware that your statement may be false. If a child is raised on a true Christian doctrine he will walk as a confident man who will work hard in life and hope to receive eternal life. If I am incorrect do prove your statement to be correct. Show me a statistic that supports your claim.I do not think anyone can claim absolute certainty about anything, and this is why I used the word unlikely in my argument. I cannot point to statistics because that data has not presently been collected to support either of our claims. Fortunately, statistics are not the only means for substantiating an argument; I have presented you with a logical progression of ideas that demonstrates why one might conclude my initial claims to be more probable than any other alternative. I challenge you to actually address that rationale and demonstrate where and why my reasoning itself is fallible. I see. So basically "in some cases" is the crutch of your argument since its applicability is not general but case specific. I can give an "in some cases" bit on Atheistic homes. I can create scenarios that seems abusive. & etc.It is not the crutch of my argument, but an extension upon it. There is a reason I said "the harm can be even greater" (in reference to the harms already established as inherent to religion generally). I have readily acknowledged that atheists can be equally fallible, because my argument all along has not been that no atheists are abusive but that there is greater capacity for non-abusive comportment within the atheistic perspective than in the theistic perspective on account of the latter's innate indoctrinal attribute.