Indoctrinating them with fear is completely different: Telling adolescent boys and girls that if they're gay, they will burn in hell for eternity. That if they give in to the completely normal and natural urge to masturbate, they're sinners. Every major religion relies on fear to control the minds of the young (and old for that matter). Some will brush it off, but others will find themselves confused and tormented by it.
And then there are the various forms of male and female genital mutilation performed against their wishes in the name of religion.
You're changing your argument; before the problem was imposing a worldview, now it's whether "fear" plays some role in that process (and the examples I gave don't rule out "fear," either). Yes, fear of punishment and especially of social isolation is a natural and normal part of maintaining social order, so inevitably it'll be involved to varying degrees in transmission of religious 'worldviews,' even if it's something as unremarkable as felt reluctance to reject traditions we see as binding us to our families. (True story: I have a British colleague who was "raised to be atheist" as she puts it, but isn't atheist today herself; she doesn't identify with any organized religion but likes attending local Quaker meetings occasionally, and her parents were quite hostile and scornful when they visited and discovered this, so she no longer discusses it with them. I can relate a bit, because my own mother was quite unhappy when as an adult I switched from Orthodoxy to Conservatism--not because of my intellectual disagreements with Orthodoxy, most of which she shared, but basically social identity stuff having to do with being Sephardi. But she got over it after a little while. Quite likely, someday one of my own children will make some sort of 'break' with us, could be religious or any number of things, that we'll find hard to swallow at first and won't be able to hide it entirely. That's normal.)
The specific examples you gave are cherry-picking, though; I would never tell my children they'd "burn in hell" for anything, nor did my parents ever tell us that (Jews don't believe in "Hell" anyway, and many of us, my parents and me included, are wholly agnostic about the afterlife, on which our religion has no coherent doctrine and to which little attention is paid in Sabbath schools and other forms of basic Jewish education; that's a distinctly Christian preoccupation. Also, my denomination recognizes and conducts same-sex marriages and certainly doesn't condemn being gay, nor would I, obviously). I was never taught that masturbation is "sinful," nor would I ever teach my children that (no denomination of Judaism officially teaches this, regardless of what the ridiculous Wiki entry on the topic--I swear, someone from Chabad must write half their Judaism stuff--has to say;
some sects and rabbis still side with the "onanism" interpretation mentioned in the Talmud, but that never had legal status even then, and by the medieval period many of the major commentators dismissed it). As for the circumcision debate, and there certainly is at least a small one in Reform and Reconstructionist circles, for me that's an issue for Jewish men--who usually have very strong opinions on the topic--to work out; I'm not personally categorically opposed to ritual body alteration, including of children (and there are dozens of forms that takes in the world, and as many 'whys', often cultural rather than religious), but, I don't feel qualified to weigh the possible functional compromises against the identity issues in this case.
One more thing, the reason I responded to your generalizations by contextualizing them within specific *debates* is because that's the approach to religion I was raised with (and one example of the experiential nuances of religion that Hitchens/Dawkins/et al.'s anthropologically illiterate approach to the topic ignores). When I think of religion in my own upbringing, my primary associations are learning, debating, celebrating and sharing, not fear, shame, hypocrisy or cruelty. The single biggest chunk of a traditional Jewish education is studying Talmud together, and the Talmud is basically a compendium of dialectical legal and exegetical arguments, so that underlined for me from an early age that making sense of our intellectual tradition is as much the preogative of the individual as the group, and the only "shame" would be to lack the ability to identify inconsistencies and inadequacies and call out
pilpul (pedantic bullshit) in the text, not whether your answer sounds insufficiently "pious." There was nothing passive or submissive about it, it was fun, and my brothers and I remember studying Talmud with our father with the greatest fondness. Our rabbi was a big burly overalls-wearing Southerner named Bubba (no, I'm not joking) who'd been a civil rights worker like my parents and warmly welcomed them into the community back when everyone else gawked warily at their foreign accents, he was great fun and I enjoyed Sabbath School classes with him too. So I remember things like that. I totally get that if someone has overbearing, authoritarian parents who "shared" their religious heritage in an overbearing, authoritarian manner, that will quite likely and understandably turn them off to organized religious anything. I also completely understand that many people who were "raised religious" and don't have any particularly negative feelings towards that often become agnostic or atheist too, for their own intellectual or other personal reasons. Fine by me; I've said it before, as a parent it's far more important to me that I succeed in imparting the core values of Judaism as I understand them--
chesed, tzedekah, tikkun olam (kindness, charity, social justice; yes, those are also "just" good human values, I agree)--than whether as adults they study Talmud with their own children, or choose to observe Jewish law as a spiritual discipline. But all three are beautiful, meaningful and valuable parts of our people's heritage and place in human history to me, so I will share them, and they'll take what speaks to them from it and make it their own, as all children do.
...
good lad
