I believe in the fact of evolution. I even believe in it with passionate conviction. To some, this may superficially look like faith. But the evidence that makes me believe in evolution is not only overwhelmingly strong; it is freely available to anyone who takes the trouble to read up on it. Anyone can study the same evidence that I have and presumably come to the same conclusion. But if you have a belief that is based solely on faith, I can’t examine your reasons. You can retreat behind the private wall of faith where I can’t reach you
Richard Dawkins, Is Science a Religion?
Dawkins goes on to describe religious indoctrination of children a form of mental child abuse. As someone obliged by parents to attend church every Sunday and Sunday School too I wonder whether Dawkins isn’t being hyperbolic about this. After all, I ended up a healthily sceptical atheist, my doubts being partly provoked by the sexual shenanigans of the Rev (he ran off with a parishioner) and of a senior respected church elder who had a stash of the most explicit pornography imaginable in the days way back before the Web.
I coped with the sexual hypocrisy by assuming everyone was lying about everything for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom. I suppose now that they were partly fooling themselves, too, more for social reasons than for any supernatural revelation. I don’t think anyone at the Van Road United Reformed Church was doing a Julian of Norwich. The place was a club for people who preferred the easy comfort of small dishonesties to the difficulty of thinking.
Where I might have missed out is in what I wasn’t introduced to. Nobody bothered to tell me about the Enlightenment and Hume and the grand history of dissent, agnosticism and atheism in the UK and abroad. Nobody told me about Darwin.
Religion is the one field in our culture about which it is absolutely accepted, without question without even noticing how bizarre it is that parents have a total and absolute say in what their children are going to be, how their children are going to be raised, what opinions their children are going to have about the cosmos, about life, about existence. Do you see what I mean about mental child abuse?
Richard Dawkins, Is Science a Religion?
