Christians Terrify Children with Visions of Hell

The United States is made up of 84% religious folk. Almost all of them are Christian. Now the jury is still out on whether or not Catholics are Christians, so you would have to ask the Catholics about that. Don’t ask your run of the mill Christian because they will tell you they, the Catholics, are not. As a matter of fact they will probably tell you that they are Papists, and Mackerel Snappers, and other not so nice things. The Catholics on the other hand will probably tell you that they are the only true faith and all others are interlopers and have no chance in hell of going to Catholic heaven; the only real heaven.

That being said one thing many of these Jesus Jumpers have in common is their penchant for abusing children with horror stories of hell and eternal damnation. This is a form of verbal abuse not dissimilar to the traditionally accepted form of negative expression called child abuse.

I grew up in a Catholic family. I went to Catholic school for the first 12 years of my young life. I remember the nuns telling us if we didn’t pray every day we would get stomach cancer and die. I remember them telling us if we entertained “indecent” thoughts we would be taken by the devil in our sleep. The very idea of masturbation was never mentioned because the horror that would follow would be too terrible to even mention. That and the fact we were about 8 years old.

I remember waking up at night covered in sweat, after having dreamed that the devil was coming to get me and I didn’t know why, only that the nuns had said he would, for even the slightest transgression.

A friend mailed me this little cartoon the other day and it seemed to fit the occasion quite well. It is yet another expression of the horror that is perpetrated on the young and innocent by the religious zealots: