Recently, a pamphlet was dropped at my house from a local Christian church. "God wants you to be 100% certain when you die you will go to heaven," it said. Of course, the pamphlet leaves out the fact that the Bible also says that no such certainty is available to us, for we are all condemned to, as the great St. Paul assures us in Philippians 2:12-13, "work out our salvation in fear in trembling." Despite this glaring omission, the pamphlet goes on to assure the reader that there are several things a person must "know from the Bible to be 100% sure" you will go to Heaven and not hell. The first and most important of these is that "you are a sinner and you don't deserve to go to heaven, "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23)."
This reminded me of a classic nineteenth century fairy tale about an ugly duckling. It is the story of a duckling who, when hatched along with his brothers and sisters, is ridiculed and ostracized because the other ducklings all perceive him to be ugly. Believing the criticisms heaped upon him by his own siblings, the duckling, branded by the other ducklings with the Scarlet letter of its own ugliness, wanders alone through the fall and winter, suffering all the while from fear, loneliness, and sadness.
In the spring, however, the ugly duckling flies away from the marsh and meets up with a group of swans. When it does, the ugly duckling, much to its surprise, realizes that it is not a duckling at all. Instead, he discovers what was being labeled by the other ducklings as "ugly" was simply the fact that he did not look like all of the other ducklings. And he didn't because, as it turned out, the "ugly duckling" was actually a beautiful swan. Only then does the duckling realize that the story it had been led to believe about itself by its brothers and sisters, a story that it had been telling itself its whole life and dutifully believed to be infallibly true, was in fact a lie. And only after discovering that what the duckling had believed about itself its whole life was, in fact, a lie, did the duckling learn it could fly.
This fairy tale offers an ominous warning that over a billion parents around the world simply ignore, even though most of them probably know this story, or at least the morale of it. That warning is that we are limited by who we think we are, based on the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Yet this fact still does not dissuade so many parents from teaching their children to believe they are ugly ducklings as well, even though it should. And this is because, whenever a Christian parent decides to raise their child to be a Christian, and usually to join a larger social network of others who have done the same thing, they are condemning their own child to repeat the story of the ugly duckling. And they do this with the "belief" that only by doing so might both they, and that child, ever have a chance in hell of becoming an angel in heaven.
If you ever suggested to a Christian mother or father that they are guilty of teaching their child to believe they are an ugly duckling, they would most likely be not only deeply offended by such a suggestion, they would also argue that the exact opposite is true. No matter how much you tried to explain to those parents that what they are truly doing to their own children by teaching them to "believe" the Christian religion, they would rather feed themselves to lions rather than ever admit they were doing anything harmful to their child by teaching them to "believe" the things that Christianity requires you to believe. Indeed, Christian parents are quite convinced that by raising their child to be a Christian they are protecting their child from having their innocence robbed by the world. Only they ain't - they just think they are. In fact, it is the parent who is robbing the child's innocence, and they not only never even know it, they devote their lives to denying it as well.
So how do Christian parents rob their own children of their innocence, let alone teach their child to believe they are an ugly duckling, while at the same time those Christian parents simply deny they are doing any such things? Simple: they do this by teaching the child to believe that they are born with a soul stained with the ugliness of original sin, for which they do not deserve to go to heaven, but they do deserve to go to hell.
They dismiss any suggestion that teaching a child such things could ever be detrimental to that child’s psychological, emotional, or even spiritual well being, despite what that classical fairy tale has to say. They believe this mostly because they were taught the very same thing, and they do not believe it was in anyway detrimental to who they turned out to be. On the contrary! Of course, this is like an ugly duckling feeling perfectly fine with being an ugly duckling, because the duckling never discovers it was actually a swan. Likewise, the Christian who accepts they are who they could've or would've turned out to be but for the "beliefs" they were taught to tell themselves. If asked, how would the ugly duckling have answered the question of whether it liked being a duck, if it had never left the marsh it grew up in, and discovered it was a swan that could fly? And isn't that the whole point of Neo leaving the matrix, and then flying out of our screen at the end of the film?
And why do Christians see it as a virtue to tell themselves they are naturally born sinners anyway? Well, because doing so is the price of admission into that club of believers who not only believe they have a superior set of moral values to those of unbelievers, but who also think that the superior set of values they claim to possess (and are willing to even kill and die for, if need be) will one day earn them the ability to live forever, in paradise, like an angel or a god, or even a angelic swan. And nothing convinces the Christian parent that they are deserving of such an eternal reward more than the fact that they each have, in obedience to their religious beliefs, agreed to teach their child to "believe" they are born with a soul ugly with the stain of original sin; for this will ensure the child will depend on Christianity their whole life to save themselves from hell.
Unable to consider whether the parents beliefs about original sin are true or false, let alone whether the parents beliefs about the virtue of adopting such beliefs are good or bad for the child's emotional development, and desperate to be approved of by those parents on whom the child necessarily relies for everything, the child simply accepts that they are a natural born sinner. And for doing so, cake and celebrations tend to follow, when the child makes their first confession, then communes with the tortured body of Christ crucified, and finally confirms they are indeed proud to be guilty of causing the torture and death of their lord and savior, in order to save themselves from the fires of hell.
And parents have their child do all of this a good decade before those parts of that child's brain needed for critical thinking ever fully form, forcing the child to make the choice to adopt such "beliefs" while using a brain controlled mostly by fear of punishment (from parents and God) and hope for rewards (from parents and God). And then the Christian insists that the child has clearly used their "free will" to make such a choice, without the slightest bit of coercion whatsoever, and all by the time they turn 13 years old. Impressive.
As a result of accepting the "belief" that they are guilty of original sin, and also believing that they are accepting this guilt of their own free will (despite being coerced by parents and priests that hell awaits all those who refuse to accept such a belief), the child's mind begins to become crucified to the Christian religion. Thereafter, they enter into a church that doubles as a tomb for their own desires and will, and celebrate the separating of body and blood symbolizing the death of their own will, and all while looking at a larger than (their) life crucifix, every seven days. And by electing to kill their own will and replace it with that of their religion (which they are taught to believe is actually the will of God), the child is taught that they will get a much better life after they die. And since their parents say it must be true, the child has little to no choice but to obey their parents and "believe" as they do.
The miracle of this process of propagating inter-generational guilt for a religion is how it then requires the parent to always act like Pontius Pilate. It does this by leading each parent to forever wash their hands of any of the traumatic impact such a story may have on an impressionable child from that point on. And even though there is a growing body of research - that certainly serves as far more verifiable evidence that religion causes trauma than religion has for proving the existence of a soul, or hell, or that a child is born guilty of original sin, or even that their own brand of God is better than any other brand - parents simply reject any Everest of evidence you provide, and all out of a preference for their "beliefs," the social security and connections those beliefs help to foster, and the endorphin induced euphoria such beliefs can produce, especially as part of a crowd.
(For examples of the effects of religious trauma, see
https://medium.com/backyard-theology/why-religious-trauma-is-actually-trauma-2192e9c2daf2 , https://therapist.com/trauma/religious-trauma/, https://www.sophiasociety.org/blog/religious-trauma-is-real-trauma)
In addition to a commitment to denying that a religion that requires a child to admit to contributing to the bloody mutilation they are forced to observe in church every week, and the fear of hell and the end of the world that such "beliefs" instill, the parent is equally committed to insisting that any accomplishment the child achieves, and every virtue the child will ever exhibit, is less because the parents were good parents in general, and more because the parents were good enough to know they needed to teach their child to accept Christianity. Otherwise, the child is just as likely to turn out to be Jeffery Dahmer or Adolf Hitler (both of whom were practicing Christians at various points in their lives).
Naturally, it is the religious duty of every Christian on earth to deny any of this is true, because they cannot stand the thought that they are guilty of robbing their own children of the innocence and perfection they were truly born with. In truth, however, Christianity teaches parents to accuse their own children of being disobedient murderers (their disobedience stemming back to Adam and Eve, and the murder they contributed to is the killing of Christ via their "sins"). In effect, such an accusation amounts to a form of murder of the child's innocence, so that each parent performs the role of a spiritual Abraham sacrificing Isaac's innocent soul on the alter of religious obedience, to a Church telling both parents and children alike that they are all guilty as sin of the stain of original sin. And the only way to be forgiven for this sin is through unquestioned obedience to the claims being made about "God" from that same church; a God who, coincidentally enough, just happens to hate all the same people that the Roman Catholic Church does.
Ironically, it is because Christians claim to be born sinners in need of a savior that they actually "believe" they are spiritually or morally better than everyone else who thinks otherwise. Like denying that they rob children of their innocence by simply assuming they are all stained with original sin, which only the blood of Christ can wash out, so the Christian likewise denies that they think they are better than everyone else simply because they believe they are sinners who have been saved by the bloody execution of Jesus.
If they do not think they are "improved" by believing this, and will win an infinite better life after they die for doing so, then what is their incentive for so believing? (Good luck ever getting a straight answer to that.) And the only reason they think they need to be improved in the first place, since children certainly do not suffer from such an identity crisis to begin with, is because they had been so convinced that they were flawed and needed to be fixed that they no longer remember what it was like before they had to feel sorry for just being whatever, and whoever, they wanted to be.
It is no wonder Jesus said we can only enter the kingdom of heaven by becoming children again, for they never see themselves as flawed or sinful. And like that duckling, the fear Christians have of suffering from fear, loneliness, and sadness, if ever they leave their marsh and all of their fellow ducklings, ensures Christians will seek to remain within the safety provided by their spiritual social club by continuing to teach their children to believe their soul is born so ugly with sin that it could only be redeemed through the brutal torture and murder of an innocent man. And to that man, the child must believe they must dedicate their whole life as a form of an apology, just for having been born with a soul that is as ugly with sin as that swan who had confused itself for a duckling.
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