hobbit-humanist

Reprehensible

One of my pet hates as an atheist (besides dogs, I really don’t like dogs!) is the indoctrination of young children into the Abrahamic faiths. Children up until the age of seven have minds that are basically sponges and soak everything up, like animals they go through a period of imprinting.

Parents that are serious about their faith like to begin brainwashing their children early and for reasons such as imparting their belief system on a child and of course using certain elements of religion as behavioural leverage. If challenged on this the parents usually react with its our child we do as we wish regardless of the fact the child is its own independent person/mind. Most religions of course seek to do away with independent reasoning early and rationality is replaced by dogmatic doctrine and submission.

Thankfully not all succumb, as children see past the myth that is Santa Claus in due time many see through the illusory nature of religion or at least question it.

Margaret Knight one of the most famous British atheist/humanists of the last century had this to say on the subject of religion and children;

If [a child] is normally intelligent, he is almost bound to get the impression that there is something odd about religious statements. If he is taken to church, for example, he hears that death is the gateway to eternal life, and should be welcomed rather than shunned; yet outside this he sees death regarded as the greatest of all evils, and everything possible is done to postpone it. The child soon gets the idea that there are two kinds of truth. The ordinary kind, and another rather confusing and slightly embarrassing kind, into which it is best not to inquire too closely. Now all this is bad intellectual training.

Religious parents, especially the more fundamental types like to get the ‘Sin’ word understood early but I think this Franz Kafka’s quote covers things nicely;

We are not sinful not merely because we have eaten of the tree of knowledge, but also because we have not eaten from the tree of life.

And of course religious dogma and indoctrination suppresses as much of life as it can. What doesn’t get embedded in the home will almost certainly try to be so in religious schools or mosques. As H.L. Mencken puts it;

Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

Though I also quite like this quote by Victor Hugo;

There is in every village a torch: The schoolmaster – and an extinguisher: The Parson.

Sycophantic religious people will answer the above with something like its not just their will as a parent but its more importantly gods will for children to know about him, as Ruth Hermence Green puts it;

It’s possible to pull out justification for imposing your will on others, simply by calling your will God’s will.

And how often do we hear God or Allah’s will these days for justification? All the time. I want to draw on another very apt quote in closing from Green which says;

If the concept of a father who plots to have his own son put to death is presented to children as beautiful and as worthy of societies admiration, what types of human behaviour can be presented to them as reprehensible?