I am a child/grandchild of one of those fundamental Christians. Before I had children I would have said that children need more discipline. A child isn't there for a parent to take fluctuation out on. I have spanked my son and felt awful about it and have given a lot of thought to whether I am crossing a line. I have been remember more of the abuse in my childhood (after suppressing it for over 35 years). I feel my children need to mind me for the sake of their safety but just to work out my anger heck NO. There are other ways besides yelling and physically hurting a child to get them to do what you say.

My family emphasized religion too. They sent me to parochial school for twelve years while otherwise neglecting me. Sometimes religion is used more as a rationalization for bad behavior and as a false self-righteousness than as a doorway to a truly spiritual quest.

I think back and remember their religious piety and strictness in contrast to the shameful things they did in their lives and all I can think of is the word hypocrisy. Obeying meaningless religious rules and doing a lot of praying is no substitute for true morality.

The men who go to church and act self-righteous, then go home and beat up their wives because they changed their hairstyle without permission are not religious, they're just plain ordinary lowlifes and thugs.

I remember as a boy of twelve going to a Church of Christ service and hearing the preacher speak about the 'blue-eyed devil.' He was a financially well-off black-supremacist preacher speaking about the white race and all of its supposed evils. I was a poor, malnourished, abused white child with blond hair and blue eyes, forced to attend all-black churches by my severely schizophrenic mother. My mother agreed with the black preacher and told me often that white people were all evil and should be eliminated from the face of the earth. It was an extremely sickening situation to be in.

I have had any notion that religion is good burned out of me by this experience and others. Religion is not inherently good. It's whatever people make it into. For example, Catholic Church priests anally raping young boys is bad and those priests should be imprisoned, while the Salvation Army Church feeding the homeless is a good deed and those people should be rewarded or recognized in some way for what they do.

Religion in the home can be a means to teach children basic rules such as do unto others as you would have them do unto you (The Golden Rule). But religion is not the only means of rearing children. I'm not going to go so far as endorsing Atheism, because to be honest, I don't like Atheists just as I don't like Catholic priests, though for different reasons that I won't go into detail about here. But I am going to say that to me, religion is a lot of superstitious nonsense mixed with a few rules for living well; the combination of the two is enough to fool people into believing it to be true in its entirety. For those who are religious and have found a church to attend that's on the side of good, I wish you only the best. For me, religion has been something else entirely.

For me personally, just my own opinion...if a religion teaches a mixture of things that sound reasonable and things that are obviously nonsense...I say toss the whole mess out. The religion is true or it isn't, it can't be both true and untrue at the same time.

Most of the established churches relegate women to inferior positions, based on strongly held doctrine that men are more spiritual and rational. Anyone who's experienced much of life can see that's a lie, you don't need a doctorate in comparative religion. The fundamental nature of human beings has to be at the core of any religious belief system. If a religion can't even say what we are, why should we believe their teaching about the spiritual realm? So I say out they go...I won't respect any institution that's based on lies.