1. Comment #434235 by j.mills on November 23, 2009 at 7:32 pm

Er, as I write, we already have 105 comments on this already-posted article here:

http://richarddawkins.net/articles/4641

I hope we don't have to go through it all again...

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2. Comment #434237 by hayden_scott on November 23, 2009 at 7:33 pm

'Gerald Coates ... said: “I think it is hilarious that the happy and liberated children on the atheist poster are in fact Christian.”'

Liberated? From what?

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3. Comment #434244 by SilentMike on November 23, 2009 at 7:49 pm

Children who front Richard Dawkins' atheist ads are evangelicals

No. They are CHILDREN. The whole point is that there is no such thing as an X child, so it doesn't really matter what family these happy looking kids come from.

Sigh. Maybe... cartoon children next time?

EDIT: Blimey! that is the exact same article. I didn't click the link last time and I thought it was another article on the same topic.

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4. Comment #434250 by chewedbarber on November 23, 2009 at 7:57 pm

Liberated from sin obviously. Oh, you didn't know, yes non-christian children are bound to their sinful nature and destined for hell.

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5. Comment #434251 by blakjack on November 23, 2009 at 7:59 pm

Isn’t that the whole point? Children are incapable of being evangelicals/radicals/atheists or whatever.

It does seem that non-believers are proving very competent at producing the very reaction that makes believers look foolish. Keep it up

Jack

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6. Comment #434255 by ohdotoh on November 23, 2009 at 8:01 pm

Wow. Actors and models aren't the characters they portray. Alert the media.

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7. Comment #434296 by Steven Mading on November 23, 2009 at 9:10 pm

This article seems to think that using these kids represents some kind of mistake for the campaign... but I don't think it does. If these are young children whom are being labelled as evangelicals, then they are kids who are in exactly the situation the ad is talking about. Having this news come out might be a win if we point this out - that the kids being called evangelicals because they're from an evangelical family in fact makes them hihgly appropriate for the message in question.

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8. Comment #434298 by Stonyground on November 23, 2009 at 9:13 pm

To Ruth Gledhill.
Had the BHS sifted through the picture library to ensure that they used only pictures of humanist children in their poster, then you would have had a scoop.

As it turns out, they just used "children" ordinary, unlabelled children, to illustrate their poster about not labelling children. So you, like the mindless fool that you are, labelled them in order to score a cheap point.

Atheists are often accused of being smugly superior in their attitude toward theists. Can you think of any reason why they might have taken on such an attitude?

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9. Comment #434300 by RonnieM on November 23, 2009 at 9:15 pm

The first day I went to a Boys School at 11 , I met up with all the other boys and we got on well. Then came Day Two. The masters sent all the Jews into one classroom, all the Catholics into another, the Muslims into yet another and one poor Hindu was sent to a classroom all on his own. The rest of us were deemed to be Anglican Christians whether we liked it or not and sent to the main hall for Assembly Service. Yes I really learnt some good Christian values that day, which gave me the right perspective on life.

Day Three and a pair of us slipped away to sit with the boy left on his own. You see, us kids didn’t know, about the labels; we thought we were just kids.

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10. Comment #434315 by zeerust2000 on November 23, 2009 at 9:36 pm

Richard has never said that "religious baggage" is necessarily a cause for misery. In some people, yes, in others quite the opposite. So what if these children have evangelical parents. The fact that they look happy means that they are normal, happy kids. Gledhill is obviously trying hard to find a way to say "Oh Yeah!" to those awful atheists. This attempt misfires badly.

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11. Comment #434326 by John P on November 23, 2009 at 10:06 pm

It's a bit ironic, isn't it that the Times needs to label these children in order to make their point? If these children are actually from evangelical parents, then their request is precisely what they should be saying in the ad - "Help! we have evangelical parents. Let us be unlabeled and grow up to make up our own minds".

They couldn't have picked better models.

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12. Comment #434340 by BigJohn on November 23, 2009 at 10:55 pm

Those kids might be seven and eight now, but, they sure weren't when the pictures on the billboard were taken. They look about two or three to me. Just the right age to represent children who should not be labeled. Of course, by the time they are seven and eight they will already be indoctrinated in the religion of their parent's choice.

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13. Comment #434351 by Mayhemm on November 23, 2009 at 11:24 pm

I agree that this reaction is a victory for the cause.

However, if the people reacting to it are too utterly dense to see that said reaction was exactly the point we were trying to make, is it truly a victory?

It was the same with the bus campaign. They entirely missed the point again and again. At this juncture, calling these ads a victory against people who are too stupid or too ignorant to understand them is kind of like going around bragging that you beat a two-year-old at chess.

Are there NO unbiased journalists out there who can verify the campaign was successful?

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14. Comment #434374 by lazlow on November 24, 2009 at 1:14 am

Children who front Richard Dawkins' atheist ads are evangelicals

Doesn't that make them the tools of the devil?

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15. Comment #434380 by black wolf on November 24, 2009 at 2:18 am

Sigh. Commenters at the article like Ken Edwards still don't get it. Not distinguishing between a person, his education and his label, he bovinely asserts

"The ad itself is ridiculous to anyone brought up in the real world. Of course parents, whether atheist or Christian or Muslim, are going to bring their kids up according to their beliefs, if they hold them sincerely. You can't bring a kid up in a vacuum. Just shows how little the Humanist Society actually think things through."

I am so sick of people who don't have the patience to read an article of less than 3000 characters (less than many typical blog reader comments!), notice that according to most comments there is something wrong with the core claim of the article, don't bother to understand any of these comments or check their validity either way, and just blather away asserting that it's, of course, the other side that isn't paying attention.
It's exactly this mindless regurgitating of agreeable authors's opinions that brought us this insidious labeling of minors. Nobody of note said that parents should not be allowed to teach their children religious ideas - and yet faitheists and faithheads sing this falsehood in unison
!Craw!Craw!Dawkins!Dawkins!

And as Richard correctly responds to Brown's new Guardian article, this falsehood has by now been repeated and politely corrected often enough to make it quite evident that anyone still peddling it is either someone comfortably residing under a rock, or someone aware of the issues - as any writer getting paid should be - who is simply spreading lies.

To any puzzled person reading this and thinking 'I don't get why these militant atheists are so deluded about what parents would, could and should teach children, and what's this label stuff anyway?': if you're calling a child by the worldview its parents have decided they adhere to themselves, it is wrong. Because precisely that leads to the child being segregated from other children its age, which in turn promotes prejudice, tribalism and racism. A child growing up in awareness that 'those others are different and we are correct' can not be expected to be a socially well-adjusted and reasonably tolerant person in adulthood. Now, some manage anyhow, shedding the ballast of their upbringing when confronted with the reality that all that had been tought about 'fundamental differences' between people was false and harmful. Those that become intolerant, bigoted, fanatical, militant, extremist, dogmatic and narrow-minded adults are very often that way because they were selected and grouped at a very young age. And they will continue the cycle until we all make it stop.

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16. Comment #434412 by Lucas on November 24, 2009 at 6:00 am

[applause]

Thank you Sir black wolf.

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17. Comment #434450 by gcdavis on November 24, 2009 at 10:27 am

Ruthie baby can you not see that the point is made even more strongly by this happenchance!

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18. Comment #434455 by Tyler Durden on November 24, 2009 at 10:55 am

Except that they are about as far from atheism as it is possible to be.

Really? Did you ask them? What did the two children have to say for themselves?

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19. Comment #434461 by John Locke on November 24, 2009 at 11:51 am

are they doing it on purpose? i think it's a wind-up personally.

(edit): in addition it's even funnier she's calling them evangelicals...after play school do they actively go out and preach to convert?

wind up i tell you

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20. Comment #434579 by Koreman on November 24, 2009 at 6:22 pm

... like 'communist children', 'fascist children', whatever fairytale and/or ideology-children?

Children are children. Children may believe in invisible magical zombies under their bed, completely natural, but then it's up to their parents to tell them there is no such thing. Unfortunately there are parents who tell their children that there actually are invisible magical zombies. One zombie is everywhere. Not only under the bed but in their head as well.

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