We wait till people reach maturity before we allow them to choose their political affinity and vote based upon it. As Dawkins points out, labelling a small child a neo-marxist is absurd. So why don’t we let people choose their own religion when they grow up?
Religion is traditionally passed from adults to children.
The second part of Dawkin’s documentary on religion was shown in the UK last night – thankfully torrent files are already available.
This tackled the dirty little secret of all religion – that it requires people in a vulnerable state of mind to infect. Of course the best place to find vulnerable minds, as a matter of course, among the healthy is in schools. The program suggested, perfectly reasonably, that religious teaching in schools is a form of child abuse.
In the UK:
“The number of faith schools is increasing. More than half the Government’s proposed City Academies will be run by religious organisations and there’s a growing number of private evangelical Christian schools. ACE: Accelerated Christian Education has developed a curriculum which includes a mention of God or Jesus on every page of its science text book.”
For people who would like to see a world of both reason and understanding, then the best thing to do is to teach young children to have an open mind, to enjoy mysteries and fiction but to question and discover the wonder of the world around them – to teach children atheism, as I will teach my children.