In last year's post "The Default", I quoted this astonishing concession from theist Andrew Sullivan:
I have lived with the voice of Jesus read to me, read by me, and spoken all around me my entire life - and I heard it that day. If I had been born before Jesus' birth, would I have realized this? Of course not. If I had been born in Thailand and raised a Buddhist, would I have interpreted this experience as a function of my Buddhist faith rather than Jesus? If I were a pilgrim right now in Iraq, would I attribute this epiphany to Allah? An honest answer has to be: almost certainly.
This is the kind of honesty one doesn't often see in discussions of religious faith. Sullivan admits, as atheists have long said, that people's religious faith is shaped and molded by the culture they grow up in. To quote myself, "Whenever and wherever [religious experiences] occur, they are almost invariably believed to be manifestations of the local god, whichever one that is."
From the memetic perspective, it's understandable reasons why this happens. Religious beliefs thrive in large part because they're taught to children, who in turn have sound evolutionary reasons for being susceptible to believe whatever their parents and authority figures tell them. Children make willing converts to almost anything, and few people shake off the beliefs they're taught early in life. If, for some reason, there arose a fair-minded religion that only sought converts in mature and rational adults, it would rapidly be outcompeted and driven to extinction by the faiths that seek to get a foot in the door before the powers of reasoning are fully developed.
The religious practice of child indoctrination has stacked the deck against us atheists. If we're to win the culture wars, we need to put a stop to it. For both moral and practical reasons, it's not feasible to outlaw the religious indoctrination of children. The next best thing is to do what several of the new atheists have set out to do, as Richard Dawkins aims to do with The God Delusion: we need to engage in consciousness-raising. We should enlighten people to the evils of this practice: exposing children to one perspective and no others, keeping them ignorant of alternatives, teaching them not to question, teaching them to act as if they were faithful members of a religion when they cannot possibly be old enough to give informed consent.
Religious groups can be expected to fight fiercely against this, for the simple reason that if children were taught objectively about all the various religious beliefs, it's inconceivable that they'd find one far more compelling than the others. What would make Yahweh or Allah stand out from Zeus or Poseidon? What would differentiate Jesus from the many other dying and rising gods of the corn? Why hail Mohammed as the supreme prophet rather than Zoroaster or Apollonius of Tyana? These questions are unanswerable unless parents, teachers and religious leaders make a conscious effort to maintain the mystery - to teach children that their particular religious belief is unique and supreme and beyond questioning.
What religions fear - what they must fear - is a fair and unbiased comparison of the options. After all, how could they ever stand out from the crowd? The idea of a "leap of faith" seems a lot less compelling once you realize that there are thousands of religions each urging you to take a leap in a different direction.
When you investigate and compare different religions critically, it's inevitable that their pretense of mystery and authority will soon be pierced. There really is nothing substantial setting any one of them apart from all the rest. This truth is atheists' greatest asset, and making it clear to everyone should be our mission.
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I was raised in my youth in a (very) marginally Christian household, but was exposed to other religious traditions. My mom also read us Greek mythology and explained that the appeal of these stories was that they explained things most people didn't understand. She also pointed out that we were lucky that were lucky to live in a time that we have come to understand many of these things. The parallel between Pandora's Box and The Fall was obvious and religion never had a chance. I decided I didn't believe in any gods and that admitting that I simply didn't know things rather than playing a "Let's Pretend" game that gave me a ready answer made the wold a more interesting and mysterious place and was more likely to lead to doing something important.
I asked my parents point blank shortly thereafter whether they believed in god. Got a double "No", but was also warned not to share this with my extended family or with the general public as it could be dangerous. They sure were right about that. I shared my newfound disbelief with my second grade classmates. Grade A beatdowns folowed at school and a couple of the teachers looked on as two students held me down while a third beat me with a twirling baton. Those teachers thought I had it coming to me.
I became somewhat violent and antisocial at thta time and was eventually tracked into the Special Education gulag for the remainder of the year. I call it "the gulag" because while I believe that most of us "retards" really did have genuine learning disabilities, a good percentage of us were quite bright, but troubled. The thing that cinched my diagnosis as developmentally disabled when they called in a psychologist who pointed out that I was not able to skip. Well, the reason I couldn't was that since around my 6th birthday I had been subjected to severe abuse in the form of social deprivation as a result of my mother's severe depression following her fathers suicide. I had no peer interaction since that time.
I do not mean to sound whiny by describing this as severe abuse. This went on for twelve years until the day I left for college. Where you miy have memores of swimming lessions, skating at the roller rink, going to a friend's birhday party, having a birthday party, riding your bike, taking swimming lessions, first kiss, High School dance, first date, or whatever else you might look back on. Where you have memories of your young lives I have NOTHING, pure emptiness.
I'm just glat my mother didn't believe in heaven. There was a day she pulled me out of school and drove me around on some back roads. She would have done an Andrea Yates on me that day if she could have.
Oviously I turned out OK enough to get through college and hold down jobs log enough to maintain a roof over my head. I even have a gf. Not too many partners in my life, but as you might imagine, I'm quite kinky.
Comment by: Eric | October 16, 2008, 1:38 am