The religious don’t regard telling children about hellfire and damnation is indoctrinating them before they have attained the age of reason, which it clearly is, they see it as a good thing. Making children fear hellfire is meant to save their souls and set them on the only path to righteousness. Nobody would deliberately teach their children a tissue of lies knowing them to be lies. The reason to
instil fear into a child when they are too young to see that the story is farcical is never that the person doing the teaching believes that the story is farcical, the motives are always pure but no matter, the effect is the same. Try telling an adult that God, who loves them, got angry with people doing bad things so he flooded the entire Earth and drowned almost all animals and people. Straight away they are going to spot that this is rather a petulant thing to have done. It would be mass murder on the biggest possible scale and it would result in the deaths of millions of innocent animals and children. This could not be seen as a nice story, not evidence that God was the kind of person you would want to be a member of your golf club let alone the being you wished to spend all eternity adoring. They don’t make the rather obvious connections between mass killing and being a bad-tempered and indiscriminate sh*t that any adult would when told the story for the first time. But then we tell children all sorts of preposterous things and they lap them up. There are two very good reasons for this: firstly children don’t have enough experience of life to see how crazy some of the things we tell them are and secondly a capacity to accept what figures in authority tell us is part of our make-up. Credulity is essential in children. If we all began as blank slates from I think therefore I am we would almost certainly be dead before we had learned a tiny fraction of what we need to know. Questioning everything we are told is not a good strategy for little children. Children have to be wide-eyed and credulous so they can absorb all the lessons we need to pack into them. Many of the things we have to teach children are very far from obvious and self evident. They learn about hunger, greed, ageing, death, learning, pain, healing and love. They have to cope with truth, lies, stories, myths, let’s pretend, cartoons, films, teasing, pets and wild animals. When we really think about the task a child has to master it is amazing that they cope so well. The reason that they do cope so well is that they have learning protocols built-in. There is no way that a formless intellect could cope with the demands of infancy as well as we manage it. Exactly how complex these built-in protocols are I believe is beyond our current levels of knowledge to fathom and it is an inherently difficult task to identify universal assumptions and spot the difference between things which are simply logical from those which betray the designing hand of evolution
