How much religious brainwash is too much?

Question

Wouldn't any amount of brainwash be too much? THe story below is an extreme case, what about the not so extreme (IE, going to church, praying, etc)...its all the same really.

The number of children dying in the name of Jesus just keeps going up. As documented in multiple different cases here on DC, there is simply no reliable way for a believer to differentiate rationality from irrationality within the mindset of religion.

Yet it keeps happening over and over. The most recent case is the worst of the lot, for it appears this child wasn't even ill. He was starved to death at the age of 1 because he refused to say "Amen" after meals.

After denying Javon Thompson food and water for two days because he wouldn't say "Amen" after meals, the one-year-old's caretakers waited for a divine sign that their message had been heard: a resurrection.

For more than a week, police say in charging documents describing the scene, the child's lifeless body lay in the back room of an apartment. Queen Antoinette, the 40-year-old leader of a group that called itself 1 Mind Ministries, brought in her followers and told them to pray. God, she said, would raise Javon from the dead.

Instead, Javon's body began to decompose.

The boy's mother, 21-year-old Ria Ramkissoon, and four other people authorities say are members of the group face first-degree murder charges in his death. But Ramkissoon's mother and attorney say that she was brainwashed by a cult and acted only at the group leader's will

You can read the whole awful story for yourself.

The questions I continue to have for believers:

1. What test should "rational Christians" use to differentiate texts in the Bible that should be taken figuratively from texts in the Bible that should be taken literally?

2. How are believers to use their faith? Should they expect supernatural intervention from God on their behalf during their lives, or is this also figurative?

3. At what point can we differentiate rational religion from child abuse and murder? For example, was Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac good, or was it torture? If a modern parent did this to a child, would we allow that child to stay with that parent?

Answer 1

Okay that is really sad.  But there are mentally ill people everywhere.

Too bad we can't neuter these people when we find out what they are like!! Why can't we???

Answer 2

You make a good point:  it's the "they weren't true believers" nonsense

Just how is anyone supposed to know, in this jumble of superstition, just what a 'true believer' is and does?  After all, it's all right there in the book.  

If you say that, obviously, people should know that god won't literally raise people from the dead, how do you know that, and which other bits should not be taken literally?

My answer would be to get rid of the whole nasty confused mess altogether

Answer 3

So many religions, that is the problem.  Do away with religion, and get with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, get into the Word of God, the Holy Bible. When the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God is living through you, these things do not happen. Do not even try to compare our Creator with this mess of cults and other religions.

Answer 4

Religion is a disease of the weak minded. Just think for yourself.

Answer 5

ok first of all,those people are crazy and not to be mistaken for sane rational Christians,

I get so tired of you people saying that we are brainwashed,I know how to think for myself and I don't blindly follow any man on earth.

God would not allow me to hurt a child or anyone(not that I would want to)

there are cults out there where the people follow the commands of the leader(a man) and not the laws of God and that is not what we are supposed to do.

I do not belong to a cult,I belong to the family of God.

there are some people who are more susceptible to brainwashing but you are wrong when you put those people in the same category as a true Christian.

Answer 6

You're playing with fire.

1. We Christians are already unwilling participants in such a test. It should be at the individual Christians discretion to discern as he carefully chooses.

2. This is already outlined in the Bible. There is no worldly system that can accurately measure the degree of supernatural intervention from God in a person's life.

3. In humanist psychology it is typical to diagnose and medicate a patient without absolute cause of an illness. At most, there is hypothesis. And a hypothesis is only as strong for science, as faith is for a Christian. Providing too much for a child becomes a form of pampering. The child becomes expentant of things a parent cannot deliver. This is more a symptom of society than of childhood. Poverty is induced more by the system that the society itself. Yet, society feels its own desire to cling to the system for its necessary methods, though imperfect, of keeping order.

Answer 7

Vet dos zein a brainwash, vet dos zein tzu fil.