Re: [asa] Dawkins, religion, and children

Pim,
 
Dawkins contradicts what you claim for him. He says this (in the article you sent me off-list):
 
"that is precisely what religions are: hereditary beliefs and opinions. To quote the headline of a fine article in the Guardian last week by the Reverend Don Cupitt: 'We need to make a clean break with heritage religion and create something better suited to our own time.'"
 
He wants a "clean break" from "heritage religion." He is talking about the right of parents to pass their religion to their children. He wants the state to intervene so that parents cannot do that any more. He wants the state to have a role in giving the children freedom from their parents' religion. This directly contradicts what you say (falsely) below.
 
Now I wish that children in non-Christian religions had some choice even while young. That is because I truly believe that all religions are NOT equal. I believe Christianity alone is correct and therefore it would be best if all children hear the gospel, along with their parents. On the other hand, Muslims feel the same way about educating everybody's children into Islam. And others like Dawkins presume that all religions are false and so they want children to have a secular education to help them get free from all religions and to make a "clean break" from "heritage religion." This raises the old question, who gets the right to determine what children are taught? Do the Christians get to decide? Do Muslims? Does Dawkins? We as a society have already fought this battle over the past 200 years and we have agreed that it is the parents who get to decide for their own children. The state was taken out of the equation.
 
Dawkins wants to overturn this, and he is using unworthy arguments by trying to pick out the worst examples of religion and then broadbrush all the same. His main arguments seem to be religious violence (ignoring Marxist and other violence) and fear of hell. Now I don't teach any violence to my children, but I have on a few occaisions mentioned to my children about the "dark place" (where I could not avoid it), or I have said that it is sad when people don't get to know God when they have died. I never paint any pictures that would be terrifying to children. Dawkins would have us believe that all Christian truth is horrifying to children, and he does so as a strategy, because that is the **wedge** (like the ID "wedge") that he is using to convince society to take freedoms away from religious people as a class and put education of children more completely into the hands of a secularized state. He is also using the "labeling" argument about children as another wedge to try
  to take freedom away from religious families.
 
He is a sad, sick, evil man. I have no problem in stating this obvious fact.
 
Phil
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: pvm.pandas@gmail.com

I am sure that Dawkins dislikes the concept of indoctrination, who
wouldn't but he also has stated that it is the parents role and right
to determine what the chid does and does not believe.
 
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Received on Sun Apr 29 15:46:50 2007