In
chapter 9, Richard Dawkins begins with a story from 1858 detailing the
abduction of a small child on the basis of a questionable baptism. He writes, “It
passes all sensible understanding, but they sincerely believed they were doing
him a good turn by taking him away from his parents and giving him a Christian
upbringing. They felt a duty of
protection!” While I feel no
urge to try to justify the tragedy of a young boy being uprooted from his
parents, I feel Richard errs in his expression of outrage against religion as
the cause. The cause of evil is evil,
and not religion – for evil exists independent
of religion. Would he be OK if the boy
was removed by secularists, eager to ensure that the boy not have religion to
start with?
Apparently
he would, because he unabashedly equates teaching key Biblical doctrines to
minors with child sexual abuse. He
writes, “Once, in the
question time after a lecture in Dublin, I was asked what I thought about the
widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no
doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage
inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.” Not to let that
slide as a misquote, he continues, “I
am persuaded that the phrase ‘child abuse’
is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to
children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of
unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell.”
He
believes teaching about hell should be banned because it’s scary to people, especially children. Perhaps we should also ban teaching about
lions, tigers and bears. After all, they’re scary too! The
good news of course, is that you can educate yourself to avoid entering the
habitat of lions, tigers and bears, and we can teach children not to go there. It is a shame that the fact that you can also
avoid hell goes unnoticed in his book.
Instead, Dawkins goes on to argue against allowing parents to decide
what to teach their children. “Parents” he writes, “have
no God-given license to enculturate their children in whatever ways they
personally choose.”, “…we should no
more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the
literal truth of the Bible or that planets rule their lives, than we should
allow parents to knock their children’s teeth out or
lock them in a dungeon.”
So
according to Richard, any parent that takes their kid to Sunday School is
unfit. Such a parent cannot possibly be
trusted to raise children. A major flaw
in this argument is easily seen by asking the obvious question, “On what basis
should society qualify a parent to raise children?” Although I am
confident that Richard could qualify any who teach what he believes – as though atheism is the only acceptable worldview. One can only hope and pray that the world
never embraces the illogic and conceit so demonstrated.
Richard
seems to believe that the ability to think critically about religion can only
be granted by an atheistic worldview.
Yet everyone who has grown up in the church knows full well that
eventually you have to wrestle with the, “Why?” of the faith yourself.
No one is born Christian, no one gets to impose the Christian faith on
others. Unless you’ve chosen it for yourself, and approached Christ in
humility and repentance, you are not born again. A faith that brings you to the point of personal
decision is the only faith you can ‘own’ as your own.
The fact is,
there are some who are content with owning their faith privately – only sharing it when asked, and some who are zealous to
extend their faith to others through preaching and discussion (just as Richard
Dawkins is). There are also those too
who are so over-zealous in extending their faith to others that they seek to do
so by force, law or other inappropriate means.
Such methods are always ineffective in producing faith – they produce only passive-aggressive behavior and
resentment. Of course, if atheistic
secularism produces that in abundance, at least they cannot be accused of
producing faith.
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