A Minnesota atheist group released the following pair of poorly-designed and face-palmingly stupid billboards:
Ah yes, the “all babies are atheists” argument: justifying disbelief by claiming that minds incapable of comprehending complex thought share said disbelief. (In that case, all houseflies are atheists too!) The argument goes that, since babies are born without belief in God, and that they need to be taught belief in God, that belief in God is, by default, false.
Let’s ignore the fact that the existence of God is so blatantly obvious within nature that mankind is without excuse (Rom 1:18-20). To show how much this argument fails, allow me to articulate it in full:
“You only believe in God because you were taught to believe in God. If you weren’t taught to believe in God, or you were born in a society that didn’t believe in God, then you wouldn’t believe in God. Therefore, belief in God is false.”Now replace the word “God” with anything else (gravity, germ theory, evolution) and you’ll quickly see why this is a stupid argument. Even most atheists agree that “all babies are atheists” is a poor defense of atheism.
As for not wanting children to be indoctrinated, it’s hard to believe that atheists want children to think for themselves when they send them to atheist summer camps, write atheist children’s books, and write articles on raising atheist children.
Also, if you don’t want your child indoctrinated, don’t send them to public school. If Christian schools teach children to follow Christianity, and Jewish schools teach children to follow Judaism, and Islamic schools teach children to follow Islam, what do state schools teach children to follow? This may explain why most atheists merely replace their faith in God with faith in the government.
I never bothered to run a religious household or made any effort to subject my own kids to religious indoctrination, and for about eight years now I've got four grandchildren living with us by way of my daughter having lost her home in the earliest days of our current Great Recession.
ReplyDelete(Thanks a boatload, Dubbya. It took our Mombasa Marxist Messiah to make YOU look good, didn't it?)
My eleven-year-old grandson is getting interested in military history, but his Internet access got chopped off recently (my daughter and my wife both have real punish-'em-until-they-bleed issues).
I'm an old wargamer with tons of books on the subject of military conflict. Discovering this, the kid has begun abating his Web-bereft boredom by raiding my library. Jeez, they actually used to PRINT this stuff on PAPER?
Now, to engage in the study of warfare it's necessary to understand why it is that people go to war. What motivates mass slaughter and devastation as a deliberate pursuit, and why are there all those pigeon-crap-covered statues of war heroes all over the place?
Religion explains a lot of it. "Deus vult!" and "Gott mit uns!" and "God defend the right!" and such, even during wars fought for what are supposed to be purely political reasons.
Now, how do you explain this kind of persistent institutionalized insanity to a kid who reposes precisely as much belief in God (and organized religion) as he does in Santa Claus?
Kids need to learn about religion not as a personal belief but rather as a social and political phenomenon, and the government schools - in their idiotic "political correctness" - don't teach about such stuff.
Might offend some religious whackjob to appraise children of stuff like the old "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" rule of thumb that was first formally articulated during the sack of Beziers in 1209 ("Caedite eos...").
So what's a conscientious atheist supposed to do when it comes to teaching the next generation or two ABOUT religion so that they can become informed and therefore conscientious atheists themselves?
Gotta "know the enemy," don't they?