Spanking because little Johnny nailed his sister in the head with a wiffle ball bat is one thing.
Beating a child for not remembering a bible verse, or goofing off in bible study class is something completely different.
Initially when I saw the story air live on TV I was initialy very angry that one of the 22 year old ministers was a smile on his face when the charges were being read…
When the 911 call was played I became even more irate because you can clearly hear the mother creaming when she sees her son’s back. Then the pictures of his back are revealed…From the nape of his neck to his waist he has terrible beating marks, they can not even be described as black and blues…they are brown and are all over his back.
What these two fundy ministers were thinking is almost beyond my comprehension.
Maybe a Christian doper can come along and enlighten us as to what these two ministers may have been thinking?
Both you and gobear seem to be asserting that there is a relationship between being a fundamentalist and being a violent authoritarian. While you may be correct, I’d be a lot more comfortable if you had something to back it up beyond just the fact that they agree with corporal punishment so that they must agree with violent beatings.
I agree wholeheartedly that there are many examples of child abuse by fundamentalists, from the idiot preacher in Milwaukee who killed the kid while supposedly curing him of seizures to the sub-human “Christians” here in Chicago who beat their 12 year old girl to death. However, there are many examples of child abuse period. In my experience, the issue of whether the person who beat the child was religious or not doesn’t really come up. For every case of “I beat the child because he’s screwed up his bible verses”, there are hundreds of “I killed the kid cause it wouldn’t stop crying.”
I doubt that, unless it has suddenly become normative Christian behavior to beat children for improperly learning Bible verses. I’m afraid that I didn’t get the press release on that one.
I suggest if you want to know what these two idiots were thinking, you should ask them, perhaps.
Here in the United States, the most common religion people ascribe to themselves is Christianity. Therefore, I would argue that most studies done in this country will show that most child abusers were Christian.
lel I believe they are on their way to prison, so talking to them is out of the question. My question was slightly rhetorical, I understand there are Christian groups who are very loving and devoted to their beliefs. Christian groups that would never dare to raise a hand to a child. I know this. I would like to know, from those who maybe are in the know, about fundy groups that advocate, or at very least, do not see anything wrong with such behavior as described in the OP?
Saint Zero - I can see that how my wording is off. I’m trying to do several things at once here in my office and am writing a little punchily…sorry. I do not want those Christians among us to think that I believe they all beat their kids with a happy happy face on at the first chance they get. I certainly do no think this. I am simply wondering how some ministers think that they are doing Gods work by beating a child into submission?
All righty then. Note that nobody even said that all fundies beat their kids. What was asserted was a high correlation with fundieism with abuse, which is NOT to say “All fundies abuse their kids.” They don’t.
Note also that fundie is not synonymous with Christian (Well, fundies think it is, but we’ll ignore them for a sec). Fundies are a subset of the panoply of Christian denominations.
Also note that it has been explicitly stated that this behavior is not limited to fundie Christians–fundies of other faiths also have a high correlation to the tendency to abuse kids. It’s about the need to control.
Well, if you happen to find anyone here who is a member of a Christian group that happens to think that beating kids for improperly learning Bible verses is acceptable, do let me know. I don’t expect that there will be too many members of such groups around here.
You’ll probably find more Snake Handlers around here, Phlosphr.
Sorry - I didn’t mean to imply that all Christians are fundamentalist. But the line between “fundamentalist” and “normal, God-fearing Christian churchgoer” is a fuzzy one. While I’m not fundamentalist myself (raised Catholic, currently unaffiliated), I’ve known a number of folks who were and they ran the gamut from scary 'thumpers who want to set fire to gay liberal Commies to nice, normal guys who would be less likely to hurt another person than they would be to spit on the altar.
The first time I read Phlosphr’s post, it seemed like he was trying to imply that all fundamentalists supported child-beating, but rereading it I see that he was actually just pitting the ones who think their faith allows them to be sadists - sorry, Phlosphr, for misreading. I just wanted to make sure that we aren’t pitting all fundamentalists for something the majority of them would abhor.
Especially since there are so many nasty things that most of them do believe that should be pitted.
I should have posted that earlier. 