No More Learning

And I shuddered. I felt I was slipping off the raft.
And then I thought, 'But I can't. I don't know if I can not believe in God. I need God. I mean, we have a his- tory' . . .
'But I don't know how to not believe in God. I don't know how you do it. How do you get up, how do you get through the day? ' I felt unbalanced . . .
I thought, 'Okay, calm down. Let's just try on the
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not-believing-in-God glasses for a moment, just for a sec- ond. Just put on the no-God glasses and take a quick look around and then immediately throw them off. ' And I put them on and I looked around.
I'm embarrassed to report that I initially felt dizzy. I actually had the thought, 'Well, how does the Earth stay up in the sky? You mean, we're just hurtling through space? That's so vulnerable! ' I wanted to run out and catch the Earth as it fell out of space into my hands.
And then I remembered, 'Oh yeah, gravity and angular momentum is gonna keep us revolving around the sun for probably a long, long time. '
When I saw Letting Go of God in a Los Angeles theatre I was deeply moved by this scene. Especially when Julia went on to tell us of her parents' reaction to a press report of her cure:
My first call from my mother was more of a scream. 'Atheist? ATHEIST? ! ? ! '
My dad called and said, 'You have betrayed your family, your school, your city. ' It was like I had sold secrets to the Russians. They both said they weren't going to talk to me any more. My dad said, 'I don't even want you to come to my funeral. ' After I hung up, I thought, 'Just try and stop me. '
Part of Julia Sweeney's gift is to make you cry and laugh at the same time:
I think that my parents had been mildly disappointed when I'd said I didn't believe in God any more, but being an atheist was another thing altogether.
Dan Barker's Losing Faith in Faith: Front Preacher to Atheist is the story of his gradual conversion from devout fundamentalist minister and zealous travelling preacher to the strong and confident atheist he is today. Significantly, Barker continued to go through the motions of preaching Christianity for a while after he had become an atheist,
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because it was the only career he knew and he felt locked into a web of social obligations. He now knows many other American clergy- men who are in the same position as he was but have confided only in him, having read his book. They dare not admit their atheism even to their own families, so terrible is the anticipated reaction. Barker's own story had a happier conclusion. To begin with, his parents were deeply and agonizingly shocked. But they listened to his quiet reasoning, and eventually became atheists themselves.
Two professors from one university in America wrote to me independently about their parents. One said that his mother suffers permanent grief because she fears for his immortal soul. The other one said that his father wishes he had never been born, so con- vinced is he that his son is going to spend eternity in hell. These are highly educated university professors, confident in their scholarship and their maturity, who have presumably left their parents behind in all matters of the intellect, not just religion. Just think what the ordeal must be like for less intellectually robust people, less equipped by education and rhetorical skill than they are, or than
Julia Sweeney is, to argue their corner in the face of obdurate family members. As it was for many of Jill Mytton's patients, perhaps.
Earlier in our televised conversation, Jill had described this kind of religious upbringing as a form of mental abuse, and I returned to the point, as follows: 'You use the words religious abuse. If you were to compare the abuse of bringing up a child really to believe in hell . . . how do you think that would compare in trauma terms with sexual abuse? ' She replied: 'That's a very difficult question . . . I think there are a lot of similarities actually, because it is about abuse of trust; it is about denying the child the right to feel free and open and able to relate to the world in the normal way . . . it's a form of denigration; it's a form of denial of the true self in both cases. '
IN DEFENCE OF CHILDREN
My colleague the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey used the 'sticks and stones' proverb in introducing his Amnesty Lecture in Oxford
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in 1997.
is not always true, citing the case of Haitian Voodoo believers who die, apparently from some psychosomatic effect of terror, within days of having a malign 'spell' cast upon them. He then asked whether Amnesty International, the beneficiary of the lecture series to which he was contributing, should campaign against hurtful or damaging speeches or publications. His answer was a resounding no to such censorship in general: 'Freedom of speech is too precious a freedom to be meddled with. ' But he then went on to shock his liberal self by advocating one important exception: to argue in favour of censorship for the special case of children . . .
. . . moral and religious education, and especially the education a child receives at home, where parents are allowed - even expected - to determine for their children what counts as truth and falsehood, right and wrong. Children, I'll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people's bad ideas - no matter who these other people are. Parents, corres- pondingly, have no God-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children's knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and super- stition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith.
In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense, and we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children's teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.
Of course, such a strong statement needs, and received, much qualification. Isn't it a matter of opinion what is nonsense? Hasn't the applecart of orthodox science been upset often enough to chasten us into caution? Scientists may think it is nonsense to teach astrology and the literal truth of the Bible, but there are others who
Humphrey began his lecture by arguing that the proverb
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think the opposite, and aren't they entitled to teach it to their children? Isn't it just as arrogant to insist that children should be taught science?
I thank my own parents for taking the view that children should be taught not so much what to think as how to think. If, having been fairly and properly exposed to all the scientific evidence, they grow up and decide that the Bible is literally true or that the move- ments of the planets rule their lives, that is their privilege. The important point is that it is their privilege to decide what they shall think, and not their parents' privilege to impose it by force majeure. And this, of course, is especially important when we reflect that children become the parents of the next generation, in a position to pass on whatever indoctrination may have moulded them.
Humphrey suggests that, as long as children are young, vulner- able and in need of protection, truly moral guardianship shows itself in an honest attempt to second-guess what they would choose for themselves if they were old enough to do so. He movingly quotes the example of a young Inca girl whose 500-year-old remains were found frozen in the mountains of Peru in 1995. The anthropologist who discovered her wrote that she had been the victim of a ritual sacrifice. By Humphrey's account, a documentary film about this young 'ice maiden' was shown on American television. Viewers were invited
to marvel at the spiritual commitment of the Inca priests and to share with the girl on her last journey her pride and excitement at having been selected for the signal honour of being sacrificed. The message of the television pro- gramme was in effect that the practice of human sacrifice was in its own way a glorious cultural invention - another jewel in the crown of multiculturalism, if you like.
Humphrey is scandalized, and so am I.
Yet, how dare anyone even suggest this? How dare they invite us - in our sitting rooms, watching television - to feel uplifted by contemplating an act of ritual murder: the murder of a dependent child by a group of stupid, puffed
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up, superstitious, ignorant old men? How dare they invite us to find good for ourselves in contemplating an immoral action against someone else?
Again, the decent liberal reader may feel a twinge of unease. Immoral by our standards, certainly, and stupid, but what about Inca standards? Surely, to the Incas, the sacrifice was a moral act and far from stupid, sanctioned by all that they held sacred? The little girl was, no doubt, a loyal believer in the religion in which she was brought up. Who are we to use a word like 'murder', judging Inca priests by our own standards rather than theirs? Perhaps this girl was rapturously happy with her fate: perhaps she really believed she was going straight to everlasting paradise, warmed by the radiant company of the Sun God. Or perhaps - as seems far more likely - she screamed in terror.
Humphrey's point - and mine - is that, regardless of whether she was a willing victim or not, there is strong reason to suppose that she would not have been willing if she had been in full possession of the facts. For example, suppose she had known that the sun is really a ball of hydrogen, hotter than a million degrees Kelvin, con- verting itself into helium by nuclear fusion, and that it originally formed from a disc of gas out of which the rest of the solar system, including Earth, also condensed . . . Presumably, then, she would not have worshipped it as a god, and this would have altered her perspective on being sacrificed to propitiate it.
The Inca priests cannot be blamed for their ignorance, and it could perhaps be thought harsh to judge them stupid and puffed up. But they can be blamed for foisting their own beliefs on a child too young to decide whether to worship the sun or not. Humphrey's additional point is that today's documentary film makers, and we their audience, can be blamed for seeing beauty in that little girl's death - 'something that enriches our collective culture'. The same tendency to glory in the quaintness of ethnic religious habits, and to justify cruelties in their name, crops up again and again. It is the source of squirming internal conflict in the minds of nice liberal people who, on the one hand, cannot bear suffering and cruelty, but on the other hand have been trained by postmodernists and relativists to respect other cultures no less than
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their own. Female circumcision is undoubtedly hideously painful, it sabotages sexual pleasure in women (indeed, this is probably its underlying purpose), and one half of the decent liberal mind wants to abolish the practice. The other half, however, 'respects' ethnic cultures and feels that we should not interfere if 'they' want to mutilate 'their' girls. * The point, of course, is that 'their' girls are actually the girls' own girls, and their wishes should not be ignored.
Trickier to answer, what if a girl says she wants to be circumcised? But would she, with the hindsight of a fully informed adult, wish that it had never happened? Humphrey makes the point that no adult woman who has somehow missed out on circumcision as a child volunteers for the operation later in life.
After a discussion of the Amish, and their right to bring up 'their own' children in 'their own' way, Humphrey is scathing about our enthusiasm as a society for
maintaining cultural diversity. All right, you may want to say, so it's tough on a child of the Amish, or the Hasidim, or the gypsies to be shaped up by their parents in the ways they are - but at least the result is that these fascinating cultural traditions continue. Would not our whole civilization be impoverished if they were to go? It's a shame, maybe, when individuals have to be sacrificed to maintain such diversity. But there it is: it's the price we pay as a society. Except, I would feel bound to remind you, we do not pay it, they do.
The issue came to public attention in 1972 when the US Supreme Court ruled on a test case, Wisconsin versus Yoder, which con- cerned the right of parents to withdraw their children from school on religious grounds. The Amish people live in closed communities in various parts of the United States, mostly speaking an archaic dialect of German called Pennsylvania Dutch and eschewing, to varying extents, electricity, internal combustion engines, buttons and other manifestations of modern life. There is, indeed, some- thing attractively quaint about an island of seventeenth-century life as a spectacle for today's eyes. Isn't it worth preserving, for the sake of the enrichment of human diversity? And the only way to preserve
* It is a regular practice in Britain today. A senior Schools Inspector told me of London girls in 2006 being sent to an 'uncle' in Bradford to be circumcised. Authorities turn a blind eye, for fear of being thought racist in 'the community'.
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it is to allow the Amish to educate their own children in their own way, and protect them from the corrupting influence of modernity. But, we surely want to ask, shouldn't the children themselves have some say in the matter?
The Supreme Court was asked to rule in 1972, when some Amish parents in Wisconsin withdrew their children from high school. The very idea of education beyond a certain age was contrary to Amish religious values, and scientific education especially so. The State of Wisconsin took the parents to court, claiming that the children were being deprived of their right to an education. After passing up through the courts, the case eventually reached the United States Supreme Court, which handed down a
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split (6:1) decision in favour of the parents. The majority opinion,
written by Chief Justice Warren Burger, included the following: 'As the record shows, compulsory school attendance to age 16 for Amish children carries with it a very real threat of undermining the Amish community and religious practice as they exist today; they must either abandon belief and be assimilated into society at large, or be forced to migrate to some other and more tolerant region. '
Justice William O. Douglas's minority opinion was that the children themselves should have been consulted. Did they really want to cut short their education? Did they, indeed, really want to stay in the Amish religion? Nicholas Humphrey would have gone further. Even if the children had been asked and had expressed a preference for the Amish religion, can we suppose that they would have done so if they had been educated and informed about the available alternatives? For this to be plausible, shouldn't there be examples of young people from the outside world voting with their feet and volunteering to join the Amish? Justice Douglas went fur- ther in a slightly different direction. He saw no particular reason to give the religious views of parents special status in deciding how far they should be allowed to deprive their children of education. If religion is grounds for exemption, might there not be secular beliefs that also qualify?
The majority of the Supreme Court drew a parallel with some of the positive values of monastic orders, whose presence in our society arguably enriches it. But, as Humphrey points out, there is a crucial difference. Monks volunteer for the monastic life of their
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own free will. Amish children never volunteered to be Amish; they were born into it and they had no choice.
There is something breathtakingly condescending, as well as inhumane, about the sacrificing of anyone, especially children, on the altar of 'diversity' and the virtue of preserving a variety of religious traditions. The rest of us are happy with our cars and computers, our vaccines and antibiotics. But you quaint little people with your bonnets and breeches, your horse buggies, your archaic dialect and your earth-closet privies, you enrich our lives. Of course you must be allowed to trap your children with you in
your seventeenth-century time warp, otherwise something irretriev- able would be lost to us: a part of the wonderful diversity of human culture. A small part of me can see something in this. But the larger part is made to feel very queasy indeed.
AN EDUCATIONAL SCANDAL
The Prime Minister of my country, Tony Blair, invoked 'diversity' when challenged in the House of Commons by Jenny Tonge MP to justify government subsidy of a school in the north-east of England that (almost uniquely in Britain) teaches literal biblical creationism. Mr Blair replied that it would be unfortunate if concerns about that issue were to interfere with our getting 'as diverse a school system
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as we properly can'. The school in question, Emmanuel College
in Gateshead, is one of the 'city academies' set up in a proud initiative of the Blair government. Rich benefactors are encouraged to put up a relatively small sum of money (? 2 million in the case of Emmanuel), which buys a much larger sum of government money (? 20 million for the school, plus running costs and salaries in perpetuity), and also buys the benefactor the right to control the ethos of the school, the appointment of a majority of the school gover- nors, the policy for exclusion or inclusion of pupils, and much else.
Emmanuel's 10 per cent benefactor is Sir Peter Vardy, a wealthy car "salesman with a creditable desire to give today's children the education he wishes he had had, and a less creditable desire to imprint his personal religious convictions upon them. * Vardy has
* H. L. Mencken was prophetic when he wrote: 'Deep within the heart of every evangelist lies the wreck of a car salesman. '
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unfortunately become embroiled with a clique of American- inspired fundamentalist teachers, led by Nigel McQuoid, sometime headmaster of Emmanuel and now director of a whole consortium of Vardy schools. The level of McQuoid's scientific understanding can be judged from his belief that the world is less than ten thou- sand years old, and also from the following quotation: 'But to think that we just evolved from a bang, that we used to be monkeys, that seems unbelievable when you look at the complexity of the human body . . . If you tell children there is no purpose to their life - that
144 they are just a chemical mutation - that doesn't build self-esteem. '
No scientist has ever suggested that a child is a 'chemical mutation'. The use of the phrase in such a context is illiterate non- sense, on a par with the declarations of 'Bishop' Wayne Malcolm, leader of the Christian Life City church in Hackney, east London, who, according to the Guardian of 18 April 2006, 'disputes the scientific evidence for evolution'. Malcolm's understanding of the evidence he disputes can be gauged from his statement that 'There is clearly an absence in the fossil record for intermediate levels of development. If a frog turned into a monkey, shouldn't you have lots of fronkies? '
Well, science is not Mr McQuoid's subject either, so we should,
in fairness, turn to his head of science, Stephen Layfield, instead.
On 21 September 2001, Mr Layfield gave a lecture at Emmanuel
College on 'The Teaching of Science: A Biblical Perspective'. The
text of the lecture was posted on a Christian website (www.
christian. org. uk). But you won't find it there now. The Christian
Institute removed the lecture the very day after I had called
attention to it in an article in the Daily Telegraph on 18 March
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2002, where I subjected it to a critical dissection.
ever, to delete something permanently from the World Wide Web. Search engines achieve their speed partly by keeping caches of information, and these inevitably persist for a while even after the originals have been deleted. An alert British journalist, Andrew Brown, the Independent's first religious affairs correspondent, promptly located the Layfield lecture, downloaded it from the Google cache and posted it, safe from deletion, on his own website, http://www. darwinwars. com/lunatic/liars/layfield. html. You will notice that the words chosen by Brown for the URL make enter-
It is hard, how-
CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND RELIGION 333.
taining reading in themselves. They lose their power to amuse, however, when we look at the content of the lecture itself.
Incidentally, when a curious reader wrote to Emmanuel College to ask why the lecture had been removed from the website, he received the following disingenuous reply from the school, again recorded by Andrew Brown:
Emmanuel College has been at the centre of a debate regarding the teaching of creation in schools. At a practical level Emmanuel College has had a huge number of press calls. This has involved a considerable amount of time for the Principal and senior Directors of the College. All of these people have other jobs to do. In order to assist we have temporarily removed a lecture by Stephen Layfield from our website.
Of course, the school officials may well have been too busy to explain to journalists their stance on teaching creationism. But why, then, remove from their website the text of a lecture that does precisely that, and to which they could have referred the journalists, thereby saving themselves a great deal of time? No, they removed their head of science's lecture because they recognized that they had something to hide. The following paragraph is from the beginning of his lecture:
Let us state then right from the start that we reject the notion popularised, perhaps inadvertently, by Francis Bacon in the 17th century that there are 'Two Books' (i. e. the Book of nature & the Scriptures) which may be mined independently for truth. Rather, we stand firm upon the bare proposition that God has spoken authoritatively and inerrantly in the pages of holy Scripture. However fragile, old-fashioned or naive this assertion may ostensibly appear, especially to an unbelieving, TV-drunk modern culture, we can be sure that it is as robust a foundation as it is possible to lay down and build upon.
You have to keep pinching yourself. You are not dreaming. This
334 THE GOD DELUSION
is not some preacher in a tent in Alabama but the head of science at a school into which the British government is pouring money, and which is Tony Blair's pride and joy. A devout Christian himself, Mr Blair in 2004 performed the ceremonial opening of one of the
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later additions to the Vardy fleet of schools. virtue, but this is diversity gone mad.
Diversity may be a
Layfield proceeds to itemize the comparison between science and scripture, concluding, in every case where there seems to be a conflict, that scripture is to be preferred. Noting that earth science is now included in the national curriculum, Layfield says, 'It would seem particularly prudent for all who deliver this aspect of the course to familiarise themselves with the Flood geology papers of Whitcomb & Morris. ' Yes, 'Flood geology' means what you think it means. We're talking Noah's Ark here. Noah's Ark! - when the children could be learning the spine-tingling fact that Africa and South America were once joined, and have drawn apart at the speed with which fingernails grow. Here's more from Layfield (the head of science) on Noah's flood as the recent and rapid explanation for phenomena which, according to real geological evidence, took hundreds of millions of years to grind out:
We must acknowledge within our grand geophysical paradigm the historicity of a world-wide flood as outlined in Gen 6-10. If the Biblical narrative is secure and the listed genealogies (e. g. Gen 5; 1 Chro 1; Matt 1 & Lu 3) are sub- stantially full, we must reckon that this global catastrophe took place in the relatively recent past. Its effects are every- where abundantly apparent. Principal evidence is found in the fossil-laden sedimentary rocks, the extensive reserves of hydrocarbon fuels (coal, oil and gas) and the 'legendary' accounts of just such a great flood common to various population groups world-wide. The feasibility of maintain- ing an ark full of representative creatures for a year until the waters had sufficiently receded has been well documented by, among others, John Woodmorrappe.
In a way this is even worse than the utterances of know-nothings like Nigel McQuoid or Bishop Wayne Malcolm quoted above,
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because Layfield is educated in science. Here's another astonishing passage::
As we stated at the beginning, Christians, with very good reason, reckon the Scriptures of the Old & New Testaments a reliable guide concerning just what we are to believe. They are not merely religious documents. They provide us with a true account of Earth history which we ignore at our peril.
The implication that the scriptures provide a literal account of
geological history would make any reputable theologian wince. My
friend Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford, and I wrote a joint letter
to Tony Blair, and we got it signed by eight bishops and nine senior
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scientists.
Royal Society (previously Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser), both the biological and physical secretaries of the Royal Society, the Astronomer Royal (now President of the Royal Society), the director of the Natural History Museum, and Sir David Attenborough, perhaps the most respected man in England. The bishops included one Roman Catholic and seven Anglican bishops - senior religious leaders from all around England. We received a
perfunctory and inadequate reply from the Prime Minister's office, referring to the school's good examination results and its good report from the official schools inspection agency, OFSTED. It apparently didn't occur to Mr Blair that, if the OFSTED inspectors give a rave report to a school whose head of science teaches that the entire universe began after the domestication of the dog, there just might be something a teeny weeny bit wrong with the standards of the inspectorate.
Perhaps the most disturbing section of Stephen Layfield's lecture is his concluding 'What can be done? ', where he considers the tactics to be employed by those teachers wishing to introduce fundamentalist Christianity into the science classroom. For example, he urges science teachers to
note every occasion when an evolutionary/old-earth paradigm (millions or billions of years) is explicitly
The nine scientists included the then President of the
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mentioned or implied by a text-book, examination question or visitor and courteously point out the fallibility of the statement. Wherever possible, we must give the alternative (always better) Biblical explanation of the same data. We shall look at a few examples from each of Physics, Chemistry & Biology in due course.
The rest of Layfield's lecture is nothing less than a propaganda manual, a resource for religious teachers of biology, chemistry and physics who wish, while remaining just inside the guidelines of the national curriculum, to subvert evidence-based science education and replace it with biblical scripture.
On 15 April 2006, James Naughtie, one of the BBC's most experienced anchormen, interviewed Sir Peter Vardy on radio. The main subject of the interview was a police investigation of allegations, denied by Vardy, that bribes - knighthoods and peerages - had been offered by the Blair government to rich men, in an attempt to get them to subscribe to the city academies scheme. Naughtie also asked Vardy about the creationism issue, and Vardy categorically denied that Emmanuel promotes young-Earth cre- ationism to its pupils. One of Emmanuel's alumni, Peter French, has
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equally categorically stated,
6000 years old. '* Who is telling the truth here? Well, we don't know, but Stephen Layfield's lecture lays out his policy for teaching science pretty candidly. Has Vardy never read Layfield's very explicit manifesto? Does he really not know what his head of science has been up to? Peter Vardy made his money selling used cars. Would you buy one from him? And would you, like Tony Blair, sell him a school for 10 per cent of its price - throwing in an offer to pay all his running costs into the bargain? Let's be charitable to Blair and assume that he, at least, has not read the Layfield lecture. I suppose it is too much to hope that his attention may now be drawn to it.
Headmaster McQuoid offered a defence of what he clearly saw as his school's open-mindedness, which is remarkable for its patronizing complacency:
the best example I can give of what it is like here is a sixth- form philosophy lecture I was giving. Shaquille was sitting
* To get an idea of the scale of this error, it is equivalent to believing that the distance from New York to San Francisco is 700 yards.
'We were taught that the earth was
CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND RELIGION 337
there and he says, 'The Koran is correct and true. ' And Clare, over here, says, 'No, the Bible is true. ' So we talked about the similarities between what they say and the places where they disagree. And we agreed that they could not both be true. And eventually I said, 'Sorry Shaquille, you are wrong, it is the Bible that is true. ' And he said, 'Sorry Mr McQuoid, you are wrong, it is the Koran. ' And they went on to lunch and carried on discussing it there. That's what we want. We want children to know why it is
149 they believe what they believe and to defend it.
What a charming picture! Shaquille and Clare went to lunch together, vigorously arguing their cases and defending their in- compatible beliefs. But is it really so charming? Isn't it actually rather a deplorable picture that Mr McQuoid has painted? Upon what, after all, did Shaquille and Clare base their argument? What cogent evidence was each one able to bring to bear, in their vigorous and constructive debate? Clare and Shaquille each simply asserted that her or his holy book was superior, and that was that. That is apparently all they said, and that, indeed, is all you can say
when you have been taught that truth comes from scripture rather than from evidence. Clare and Shaquille and their fellows were not being educated. They were being let down by their school, and their school principal was abusing, not their bodies, but their minds.
CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING AGAIN
And now, here's another charming picture. At Christmas-time one year my daily newspaper, the Independent, was looking for a seasonal image and found a heart-warmingly ecumenical one at a school nativity play. The Three Wise Men were played by, as the caption glowingly said, Shadbreet (a Sikh), Musharaff (a Muslim) and Adele (a Christian), all aged four.
Charming? Heart-warming? No, it is not, it is neither; it is grotesque. How could any decent person think it right to label four- year-old children with the cosmic and theological opinions of their
338 THE GOD DELUSION
parents? To see this, imagine an identical photograph, with the
caption changed as follows: 'Shadbreet (a Keynesian), Musharaff (a
Monetarist) and Adele (a Marxist), all aged four. ' Wouldn't this be
a candidate for irate letters of protest? It certainly should be. Yet,
because of the weirdly privileged status of religion, not a squeak
was heard, nor is it ever heard on any similar occasion. Just imagine
the outcry if the caption had read, 'Shadbreet (an Atheist),
Musharaff (an Agnostic) and Adele (a Secular Humanist), all aged
four. ' Mightn't the parents actually be investigated to see if they
were fit to bring up children? In Britain, where we lack a con-
stitutional separation between church and state, atheist parents
usually go with the flow and let schools teach their children what-
ever religion prevails in the culture. 'The-Brights. net' (an American
initiative to rebrand atheists as 'Brights' in the same way as homo-
sexuals successfully rebranded themselves as 'gays') is scrupulous in
setting out the rules for children to sign up: 'The decision to be a
Bright must be the child's. Any youngster who is told he or she
must, or should, be a Bright can NOT be a Bright. ' Can you even
begin to imagine a church or mosque issuing such a self-denying
ordinance? But shouldn't they be compelled to do so? Incidentally,
I signed up to the Brights, partly because I was genuinely curious
whether such a word could be memetically engineered into the
language. I don't know, and would like to, whether the trans-
mutation of 'gay' was deliberately engineered or whether it just
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happened. The Brights campaign got off to a shaky start when it
was furiously denounced by some atheists, petrified of being branded 'arrogant'. The Gay Pride movement, fortunately, suffers from no such false modesty, which may be why it succeeded.
In an earlier chapter, I generalized the theme of 'consciousness- raising', starting with the achievement of feminists in making us flinch when we hear a phrase like 'men of goodwill' instead of 'people of goodwill'. Here I want to raise consciousness in another way. I think we should all wince when we hear a small child being labelled as belonging to some particular religion or another. Small children are too young to decide their views on the origins of the cosmos, of life and of morals. The very sound of the phrase 'Christian child' or 'Muslim child' should grate like fingernails on a blackboard.
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Here is a report, dated 3 September 2001, from the Irish Radio station KPFT-FM.
Catholic schoolgirls faced protests from Loyalists as they attempted to enter the Holy Cross Girls' Primary School on the Ardoyne Road in north Belfast. Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers and British Army (BA) soldiers had to clear the protestors who were attempting to blockade the school. Crash barriers were erected to allow the children to get through the protest to the school. Loyalists jeered and shouted sectarian abuse as the children, some as young as four years of age, were escorted by the parents into the school. As children and parents entered the front gate of the school Loyalists threw bottles and stones.
Naturally, any decent person will wince at the ordeal of these unfortunate schoolgirls. I am trying to encourage us to wince, too, at the very idea of labelling them 'Catholic schoolgirls' at all. ('Loyalists', as I pointed out in Chapter 1, is the mealy-mouthed Northern Ireland euphemism for Protestants, just as 'Nationalists' is the euphemism for Catholics. People who do not hesitate to brand children 'Catholics' or 'Protestants' stop short of applying those same religious labels - far more appropriately - to adult terrorists and mobs. )
Our society, including the non-religious sector, has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them - 'Catholic child', 'Protestant child', 'Jewish child', 'Muslim child', etc. - although no other comparable labels: no conservative children, no liberal children, no Republican children, no Democrat children. Please, please raise your consciousness about this, and raise the roof whenever you hear it happening. A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that
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religion is something for her to choose - or reject - when she becomes old enough to do so.
A good case can indeed be made for the educational benefits of
teaching comparative religion. Certainly my own doubts were first
aroused, at the age of about nine, by the lesson (which came not
from school but from my parents) that the Christian religion in
which I was brought up was only one of many mutually incompat-
ible belief-systems. Religious apologists themselves realize this
and it often frightens them. After that nativity play story in the
Independent, not a single letter to the Editor complained of
the religious labelling of the four-year-olds. The only negative letter
came from 'The Campaign for Real Education', whose spokesman,
Nick Seaton, said multi-faith religious education was extremely
dangerous because 'Children these days are taught that all religions
are of equal worth, which means that their own has no special
value. ' Yes indeed; that is exactly what it means. Well might this
spokesman worry. On another occasion, the same individual said,
'To present all faiths as equally valid is wrong. Everybody is entitled
to think their faith is superior to others, be they Hindus, Jews,
Muslims or Christians - otherwise what's the point in having
151 faith? '
What indeed? And what transparent nonsense this is! These faiths are mutually incompatible. Otherwise what is the point of thinking your faith superior? Most of them, therefore, cannot be 'superior to others'. Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own con- clusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether any are 'valid', let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so.
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AS A PART OF LITERARY CULTURE
I must admit that even I am a little taken aback at the biblical ignorance commonly displayed by people educated in more recent
CHILDHOOD, ABUSE AND RELIGION 341
decades than I was. Or maybe it isn't a decade thing. As long ago as 1954, according to Robert Hinde in his thoughtful book Why Gods Persist, a Gallup poll in the United States of America found the following. Three-quarters of Catholics and Protestants could not name a single Old Testament prophet. More than two-thirds didn't know who preached the Sermon on the Mount. A substantial number thought that Moses was one of Jesus's twelve apostles. That, to repeat, was in the United States, which is dramatically
more religious than other parts of the developed world.
The King James Bible of 1611 - the Authorized Version - includes passages of outstanding literary merit in its own right, for example the Song of Songs, and the sublime Ecclesiastes (which I am told is pretty good in the original Hebrew too). But the main reason the English Bible needs to be part of our education is that it is a major source book for literary culture. The same applies to the legends of the Greek and Roman gods, and we learn about them
without being asked to believe in them. Here is a quick list of biblical, or Bible-inspired, phrases and sentences that occur commonly in literary or conversational English, from great poetry to hackneyed cliche, from proverb to gossip.
Be fruitful and multiply ? East of Eden ? Adam's Rib ? Am I my brother's keeper? ? The mark of Cain ? As old as Methuselah ? A mess of potage ? Sold his birthright ? Jacob's ladder ? Coat of many colours ? Amid the alien corn ? Eyeless in Gaza ? The fat of the land ? The fatted calf ? Stranger in a strange land ? Burning bush ? A land flowing with milk and honey ? Let my people go ? Flesh pots ? An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth ? Be sure your sin will find you out ? The apple of his eye ? The stars in their courses ? Butter in a lordly dish ? The hosts of Midian ? Shibboleth ? Out of the strong came forth sweetness ? He smote them hip and thigh ? Philistine ? A man after his own heart ? Like David and Jonathan ? Passing the love of women ? How are the mighty fallen? ? Ewe lamb ? Man of Belial ? Jezebel ? Queen of Sheba ? Wisdom of Solomon ? The half was not told me ? Girded up his loins ? Drew a bow at a
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THE GOD DELUSION
venture ? Job's comforters ? The patience of Job ? I am escaped with the skin of my teeth ? The price of wisdom is above rubies ? Leviathan ? Go to the ant thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise ? Spare the
rod and spoil the child ? A word in season ? Vanity of vanities ? To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose ? The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong ?