Raising Children Without the Concept of Sin [View all]

'My religious fundamentalist childhood was built around the fear of sin. My daughters don’t even know the word.

*Because unbelievers didn’t have the stick of eternal damnation hanging over their heads, they had no reason to act morally, and were therefore, I believed, capable of utter depravity.

But then, as a teenager, I started attending a public school and my black-and-white worldview started gaining color and nuance. I became good friends with a Jewish girl, surreptitiously listened to Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40,” and hid copies of Glamour magazine under my mattress as if they were pornography. I stopped fearing the secular world and grew intrigued by it. And paid the price: At 17, after being caught “fornicating” with my high school boyfriend, I was sent to a Christian reform school where children were beaten in the name of God. It was there that I learned that religion has nothing to do with goodness and there’s a strong link between zealotry and hypocrisy.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/well/family/raising-children-without-the-concept-of-sin.html?