There is a form of child abuse that is pervasive in our society, and condoned by the majority. It preys upon the ignorance of the young. It damages the minds of those that are too young to understand what is happening to them. It is permeated with superstition and relies upon subtle forces to subvert the minds of children.
It is religious indoctrination.
Children do not come out of the womb with a supernatural belief. They happen to be born into a family with a particular religion. And although it is often said that they have religious needs, it actually refers to their parent’s need to indoctrinate their own children. Religious teaching to children, like the exposure to any ideology where critical examination is discouraged, and despite its negative connotation, is still indoctrination.
We try and protect our children from the physical abuse of pedophile priests, yet we consent to the priestly subversion of children’s minds. We violate their basic rights, and take away their innocence. We discriminate against a section of society by not giving them the information they need in order to make an intellectual choice at some point in their future. It is not that we need to withhold information, bur rather to provide an abundance of unbiased equal access to all of the information available on the world’s religions.
Daniel Dennett, Co-Director for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, suggests that there should be compulsory education on world religions in all of our public and private schools. He says we should teach our children religion in a matter-of-fact, historically, and biologically informed way- the same way we teach them about geography and history and arithmetic. “Let’s get more education about religion in our schools, not less. We should teach them creeds and customs, prohibitions and rituals, the texts and the music, and include the positive- the role of the churches in the civil rights movement, the role of Black Muslims in bringing hope to many inmates in our prison, the flourishing of science and art in early Islam…and we should teach them the negative- the Inquisition, anti-Semitism, and the role of the Catholic Church in spreading AIDS in Africa. No religion should be favored, and none ignored.”
All major religious and non-religious groups would be invited to create self-portraits, in effect, of their traditions, including all the material they would want others to know about them, within agreed-upon limits. It might be a political hot potato, but who today does not see the importance of shining the light of reason on the claims made by various religions? We can add another R to the three R’s. In this new century, is it any less important?
Of course there would be objections from all fronts. There would be disagreements on the facts. Teachers might object that there isn’t enough time in their day. Parents might object that only they have the right to teach their children about religion.
These objections can be answered…
The self-portraits could be subject to challenge on grounds of factual inaccuracy, and groups of representatives would have an opportunity to propose important facts left out of the self-portraits. There would be plenty of checks and balances available to prevent religions from censoring shameful but undeniable truths on the one hand, and to prevent religions from ganging up to vilify minority religions on the other hand.
Given the state of the world and our widespread ignorance about religion, as well as the emotional power behind that ignorance, it is dangerous to let that ignorance continue unabated. We must make it fit into the curriculum.
Parents do not own their children, and have no right to treat them as slaves. They have no right to disable them with ignorance. As a normal part of any free society, there should be access to the same knowledge that is readily available to everyone.
By teaching our children the facts of religion, and only the facts, we can defend against the future excesses of it. We can provide them with both religious and non-religious worldviews so that they may learn to think, to investigate, and to use their own senses to develop their minds and live useful and happy lives.
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