[geocentrism] Fw: The atheist indoctrination project
- From: "philip madsen" <pma15027@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "geocentrism list" <geocentrism@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 08:38:37 +1000
From our friend Dr. Bennett. Needs to be shared. Philip.
----- Original Message -----
From: Robert Bennett
To: Home
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2007 10:14 AM
Subject: The atheist indoctrination project
The atheist indoctrination project
By Dinesh D'Souza
Monday, October 22, 2007
It seems atheists have developed a comprehensive strategy to win the minds of
the next generation. The strategy can be described simply: let the religious
people breed them, and we will educate them to despise their parents’ beliefs.
Many people think that the secularization of the minds of our young people is
the inevitable consequence of learning and maturing. In fact, it is to a large
degree orchestrated by teachers and professors to promote anti-religious
agendas.
Why the hostility to religion? “Faith is one of the world’s great evils,
comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate,” writes Richard
Dawkins, author of The God Delusion. “Religion is capable of driving people to
such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental
illness.”
Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, writes, “How can we ever know
how many children had their psychological and physical lives irreparably maimed
by the compulsory inculcation of faith?” Religion, he charges, has “always
hoped to practice upon the unformed and undefended minds of the young.” He
wistfully concludes, “If religious instruction were not allowed until the child
had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.”
If religion is so bad, what should be done about it? It should be eradicated.
According to Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, belief in Christianity is
like belief in slavery. “I would be the first to admit that the prospects for
eradicating religion in our time do not seem good. Still the same could have
been said about efforts to abolish slavery at the end of the eighteenth
century.”
But how should religion be eliminated? Our atheist educators have a short
answer: through the power of science. “I personally feel that the teaching of
modern science is corrosive of religious belief, and I’m all for that,” says
physicist Steven Weinberg. If scientists can destroy the influence of religion
on young people, “then I think it may be the most important contribution that
we can make.”
One way in which science can undermine the plausibility of religion, according
to biologist E.O. Wilson, is by showing that the mind itself is the product of
evolution and that free moral choice is an illusion. “If religion…can be
systematically analyzed and explained as a product of the brain’s evolution,
its power as an external source of morality will be gone forever.”
By abolishing all transcendent or supernatural truths, science can establish
itself as the only source of truth, our only access to reality. The objective
of science education, according to biologist Richard Lewontin, “is not to
provide the public with knowledge of how far it is to the nearest star and what
genes are made of.” Rather, “the problem is to get them to reject irrational
and supernatural explanations of the world, the demons that exist only in their
imaginations, and to accept a social and intellectual apparatus, science, as
the only begetter of truth.”
What, then, happens to religion? Philosopher Daniel Dennett suggests that “our
religious traditions should certainly be preserved, as should the languages,
the art, the costumes, the rituals, the monuments. Zoos are now more or less
seen as second class havens for endangered species, but at least they are
havens, and what they preserve is irreplaceable.”
How is all this to be achieved? The answer is simple: through indoctrination in
the schools. In his book Breaking the Spell, Dennett urges that schools teach
religion as a purely natural phenomenon. By this he means that religion should
be taught as if it were untrue. Dennett argues that religion is like sports or
cancer, “a human phenomenon composed of events, organisms, objects, structures,
patterns.” By studying religion on the premise that there is no supernatural
truth underlying it, Dennett argues that young people will come to accept
religion as a social creation pointing to nothing higher than human hopes and
aspirations.
As for atheism, Sam Harris argues that it should be taught as a mere extension
of science and logic. “Atheism is not a philosophy. It is not even a view of
the world. It is simply an admission of the obvious….Atheism is nothing more
than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious
beliefs.”
Of course, parents—especially Christian parents—might want to say something
about all this. That’s why the atheist educators are now raising the question
of whether parents should have control over what their children learn. Dawkins
asks, “How much do we regard children as being the property of their parents?
It’s one thing to say people should be free to believe whatever they like, but
should they be free to impose their beliefs on their children? Is there
something to be said for society stepping in? What about bringing up children
to believe manifest falsehoods? Isn’t it always a form of child abuse to label
children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought out?”
Dennett remarks that “some children are raised in such an ideological prison
that they willingly become their own jailers…forbidding themselves any contact
with the liberating ideas that might well change their minds.” The fault, he
adds, lies with the parents who raised them. “Parents don’t literally own their
children the way slaveowners once owned slaves, but are, rather, their stewards
and guardians and ought to be held accountable by outsiders for their
guardianship, which does imply that outsiders have a right to interfere.”
Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey argued in a recent lecture that just as Amnesty
International works to liberate political prisoners around the world, secular
teachers and professors should work to free children from the damaging
influence of their parents’ religious instruction. “Parents have no god-given
license 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 superstition, or to insist they follow the
straight and narrow paths of their own faith.”
Philosopher Richard Rorty argued that secular professors in the universities
ought “to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic
religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.”
Rorty noted that students are fortunate to find themselves under the control
“of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious,
dangerous parents.” Indeed, parents who send their children to college should
recognize that as professors “we are going to go right on trying to discredit
you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious
community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than
discussable.”
This is how many secular teachers treat the traditional beliefs of students.
The strategy is not to argue with religious views or to prove them wrong.
Rather, it is to subject them to such scorn that they are pushed outside the
bounds of acceptable debate. This strategy is effective because young people
who go to good colleges are extremely eager to learn what it means to be an
educated Harvard man or Stanford woman. Consequently their teachers can very
easily steer them to think a certain way merely by making that point of view
seem fashionable and enlightened. Similarly, teachers can pressure students to
abandon what their parents taught them simply by labeling those positions as
simplistic and unsophisticated.
Children spend the majority of their waking hours in school. Parents invest a
good portion of their life savings in college education and entrust their
offspring to people who are supposed to educate them. Isn’t it wonderful that
educators have figured out a way to make parents the instruments of their own
undoing? Isn’t it brilliant that they have persuaded Christian moms and dads to
finance the destruction of their own beliefs and values? Who said atheists
aren’t clever?
This article is adapted from What’s So Great About Christianity, which is just
published by Regnery. Find out more at dineshdsouza.com.
Bestselling author Dinesh D'Souza's new book What's So Great About Christianity
will be published in October. D’Souza is the Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover
Institution.
Be the first to read Dinesh D'Souza's column. Sign up today and receive
Townhall.com delivered each morning to your inbox.
Copyright © 2006 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
See what's new at AOL.com and Make AOL Your Homepage.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.5.503 / Virus Database: 269.15.10/1091 - Release Date: 24/10/2007
2:31 PM
Other related posts:
- » [geocentrism] Fw: The atheist indoctrination project
