Children Must Choose Their Own Beliefs

By noted Author and Oxford Professor, RICHARD DAWKINS  

Article (abridged) in The Observer Sunday December 30, 2001

In an open letter to Estelle Morris, Richard Dawkins calls on the British Government to think again about funding yet more divisive faith schools.

“Dear Secretary of State,

”The Government has decided, reasonably enough, that heredity is no basis for membership of Parliament. Yet, in the very same year, you propose increasing the number of faith schools. Having disavowed the hereditary principle for membership of Parliament, you seem hell-bent on promoting the hereditary principle for the transmission of beliefs and opinions. For that is precisely what religions are: hereditary beliefs and opinions.

’When we come to religion, an extremely odd thing happens? “Where we might have said, 'knowing his father, I expect young Cowdrey will take up cricket,' we emphatically do not say, 'With her devout Catholic parents, I expect young Bernadette will take up Catholicism.' Instead we say, 'Bernadette is a Catholic', the day she is born, Bernadette has a label tied around her neck. This is a Catholic baby.

That is a protestant baby. This is a Hindu baby. That is a Muslim baby. This baby thinks there are many gods. That baby is adamant that there is only one. But it is preposterous that we do this to children. They are too young to know what they think. To slap a label on a child at birth - to announce, in advance, as a matter of hereditary presumption if not determinate certainty, an infant's opinions on the cosmos and creation, on life and afterlives, on sexual ethics, abortion and euthanasia - is a form of mental child abuse.

“…we need to raise our consciousness about the ‘faith labelling' of children.

“One of the more frightening aspects of human nature is a tendency to gravitate towards 'Us' and against 'Them'. Worse, Us versus Them disputes have a natural tendency to reach down the generations, leading to vendettas of frightening historical tenacity. Experiments have been done in which children, with no particular reason to sort themselves into gangs, are provided with, say, green or blue labels. In short order, enmities spring up between the greens and the blues: fierce loyalties to one's own colour, vendettas against the other. These can become surprisingly vicious.

”Now, imagine that you deliberately stamp a green or a blue label on a child at birth. Send this child to a blue school and that child to a green school. Encourage green boys to assume that they will grow up to marry green girls, while blue girls will marry blue boys. Take for granted that, the moment they have a baby of their own, it too must have the same coloured label tied around its neck. Passed on down the generations, what is all that a recipe for? Do I need to spell it out?

Source and you can (should) read the full article at:  

http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/2001-12-30morris_letter.shtml

Again by the Professor in an article "Time to Stand Up"

Short excerpts

Billy Graham, Mr Bush’s spiritual advisor, said in Washington Cathedral:

”But how do we understand something like this (World Trade Centre Incident)? Why does God allow evil like this to take place? Perhaps that is what you are asking now. You may even be angry at God. I want to assure you that God understands those feelings that you may have.

”What an honour, to be licensed to speak for God! But even Billy Graham’s patronising presumption now fails him: I have been asked hundreds of times in my life why God allows tragedy and suffering. I have to confess that I really do not know the answer totally, even to my own satisfaction. I have to accept, by faith, that God is sovereign, and he is a God of love and mercy and compassion in the midst of suffering. The Bible says God is not the author of evil. It speaks of evil as a “mystery"".

”Less baffled by this deep theological mystery were two of America’s best-known televangelists, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. They knew exactly where to put the blame. Falwell said that God had protected America wonderfully for 225 years, but now, what with abortion and gays and lesbians and the ACLU, ‘all of them who have tried to secularise America... I point the finger in their face and say you helped this happen.' ‘Well, I totally concur," responded Robertson.

“The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Religion fuels both. All violent enmities in the world today fuel their tanks at this holy gas station.

Source and complete article can be found at: http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/2001-09time_to_stand_up.shtml

And from

"No faith in the absurd" by Richard Dawkins

Times Education Supplement (London) 23/02/2001, page 17

‘…the existence of religious schools, dispassionately seen, is just (as) absurd? “But it is worse than absurd. It can be deeply damaging, even lethally divisive. Why do people in Northern Ireland kill each other? It is fashionable to say that the sectarian feuds are not about religion. The deep divides in that province are not religious; they are cultural, historical, and economic. Well, no doubt they are, in the sense that Protestant gunmen or Catholic pub bombers are not directly debating the Transubstantiation, the Assumption, or the Trinity. There is a "them-against-us" mentality burned deep into both sides of the Northern Ireland psyche and we can all agree that it is not directly related to theological disagreements. But how does each individual know which side he is on? How does he decide whether the victim of his violence is one of "them" or one of "us"? He knows because of centuries of historical division. And the basis of that division, generation after generation, is to a large extent sectarian schooling.

Full article and source:
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/church-schools.shtml

Finally from a truly great piece of advice “A Prayer for My daughter"

Good And Bad Reasons For Believing

Excerpts from a letter to his 10-year-old daughter.

"How we know the things that we know??- " Answer evidence

“… Now I want to move on from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something and warn you against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called ‘tradition', 'authority' and ‘revelation'.

He goes on to explain a televised discussion with children who when asked what they believed started their statements with? "We Hindus believe so and so"; "We Muslims believe such and such"; "We Christians believe something else." 

Firstly he explains a little on Tradition:

“Tradition means beliefs handed down from grandparent to parent to child, and so on. Traditional beliefs often start from almost nothing; perhaps somebody just makes them up originally, like the stories about Thor and Zeus. But after they've been handed down over some centuries, the mere fact that they are so old makes them seem special. People believe things simply because people have believed the same thing over the centuries. That's tradition. The trouble with tradition is that, no matter how long ago a story was made up, it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original story was.

Professor Dawkins then refers to the Roman Catholic belief that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was so special that she didn't die but was lifted bodily in to Heaven. “The tradition that Mary's body was lifted into Heaven is not an old one. The bible says nothing on how she died; in fact, the poor woman is scarcely mentioned in the Bible at all. The belief that her body was lifted into Heaven wasn't invented until about six centuries after Jesus' time. At first, it was just made up, in the same way as any story like "Snow White" was made up. But, over the centuries, it grew into a tradition and people started to take it seriously simply because the story had been handed down over so many generations. The older the tradition became, the more people took it seriously. It finally was written down as and official Roman Catholic belief only very recently, in 1950…” 

He goes on...‘The two other bad reasons for believing in anything: authority and revelation.

‘Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing in it because you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the Roman Catholic Church, the pope is the most important person (authority) and people believe he must be right just because he is the pope. In one branch of the Muslim religion, the important people are the old men with beards called ayatollahs. Lots of Muslims in this country are prepared to commit murder, purely because the ayatollahs in a faraway country tell them to.

?in 1950, the pope told people that they had to believe that Mary’s body was lifted to heaven. That was it. The pope said it was true, so it had to be true! …There is no good reason why, just because he was the pope, you should believe everything he said any more than you believe everything that other people say.  …not even the priests claim that there is any evidence for their story about Mary's body zooming off to Heaven.

“The third kind of bad reason for believing anything is called "revelation." If you had asked the pope in 1950 how he knew that Mary's body disappeared into Heaven, he would probably have said that it had been "revealed" to him. He shut himself in his room and prayed for guidance. He thought and thought, all by himself, and he became more and more sure inside himself. When religious people just have a feeling inside themselves that something must be true, even though there is no evidence that it is true, they call their feeling "revelation."

‘The child's brain has to be a sucker for traditional information. And the child can't be expected to sort out good and useful traditional information, like the words of a language, from bad or silly traditional information, like believing in witches and devils and ever-living virgins. It's a pity, but it can't help being the case, that because children have to be suckers for traditional information, they are likely to believe anything the grown-ups tell them, whether true or false, right or wrong. …Now, when the children grow up, what do they do? Well, of course, they tell it to the next generation of children. So, once something gets itself strongly believed - even if it is completely untrue and there never was any reason to believe it in the first place - it can go on forever. 

‘…Perhaps this is because they (children) were told to believe them (religious traditions)…when they were young enough to believe anything. 

Source: http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/dawkins2.html

You really should (must) read this article in full!