Truth and the Devil

In one of the last sections of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, he talks about religion as child abuse. I think it might even be more coherently spelled out in his The Root of All Evil? television documentary. His main argument addresses the idea of raising children to promote sectarian divisions among pluralistic societies. Raising children in strictly Jewish or Muslim or Protestant or Catholic schools (among others), promotes a deep-seated division between people of a society who would otherwise be recognized as friends, or at least members of the same community. These faith-divisions are imposing the ideological dispositions of the parents onto the children, who, initially, have no idea what it means, and are not of sufficient age where they can make such extremely important philosophical decisions themselves.

Think of labeling a 4-year-old as a democrat or a communist or a capitalist. It would be a perfectly ludicrous statement, and yet the equivalent statement, with regards to religious belief gives no one a second thought.

Well, parents should have the right to raise their children as they deem fit, you might say. But how far does that right go until the right of a child is violated? Shouldn’t a child have the right to be free of indoctrination of any kind when they grow up? Shouldn’t matters of deep significance, such as the nature of reality or questions of life after death, be left to a mind capable of conceiving them? Is this, as Dawkins has put forth, a form of child abuse?

Take, for example, these twin sisters Lamb and Lynx Gaede. They are a 13-year-old music duo singing songs about white supremacy.

Known as “Prussian Blue” — a nod to their German heritage and bright blue eyes — the girls from Bakersfield, Calif., have been performing songs about white nationalism before all-white crowds since they were nine.

“We’re proud of being white, we want to keep being white,” said Lynx. “We want our people to stay white … we don’t want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race.”

Is this the type of indoctrination that parents should be freely allowed to promote? The ideas that these girls sing about are meant as a hook for a younger audience that will hopefully grow up to listen to more extreme supremacist bands like Shawn Sugg.

One of Sugg’s songs is a fantasy piece about a possible future racial war that goes: “Let the cities burn, let the streets run red, if you ain’t white you’ll be dead.”

Some might argue that these beliefs don’t necessarily hurt the child, but I disagree. I think this type of thinking is to promote an extremely distorted picture of reality filled with hate. The example Dawkins uses of indoctrination leading to psychological damage is the belief in hell. The woman he interviews for his documentary, who is a recovering Christian, must compose herself when the feelings she had when hearing descriptions of the torments of hell were described to her. And can we really say that a belief in a hell where non-believers are tormented and ripped-apart are any less damaging to the psyche of a child than belief that your neighbor deserves to die because of their skin or religion? I can’t see much of a difference.

I am certainly aware of the potential slippery-slope for the suggestion of possible government intervention in the rights of parents to raise their children according to their religious beliefs, but for now, perhaps we can instead encourage the type of consciousness-raising dialogue that might get people thinking about the labeling of children. We should begin to look at the labeling of children as Muslim, Christian, or something else, as to labeling them Democrats, capitalists, or Neo-Nazis.