By RICHARD DAWKINS - RDFRS
Added: Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:12:36 UTC - An RDFRS Original

My oft-repeated (some might say too oft) point about the absurdity – indeed wickedness – of automatically labelling children with the religion of their parents (“Would you speak of a ‘Postmodernist child’, or a ‘Gramscian Marxist child’?”) is usually effective. People nearly always get the point immediately (although whether their future consciousness is raised to the point of actually wincing, as I do, whenever they hear ‘Catholic child’ or ‘Muslim child’ is another matter). But there is one counter-argument that I often meet, and it sounds superficially plausible. It is my purpose here to deal with it.

The objectors I am speaking of often invoke the special case of Judaism, but the point can be made more generally. It is ridiculous and wrong, they say, to discourage parents from passing on their cultural traditions to their children. Language, accent, styles of dress, diet, mealtime habits, proverbs, poetic allusions, games, non-verbal signals or greetings such as head-shaking or nodding or social kissing, these are all culturally transmitted. Humanity would be the poorer if we lost them, and lost the local differences between them. Religion, so it is claimed, is just another member of the list.

I accept much of that and rejoice in the colourfully varying traditions of world culture. But religion is not just another member of the list. It is completely different. Here’s why.

Religion makes truth claims about the real world. This sets it apart from other traditions handed down, such as games, styles of dress or cookery. If a ‘Jewish child’ is labelled by a yarmulke on his head and peyot curls, that seems to me to be unobjectionable in itself: no more sinister than a culturally transmitted preference for cricket or baseball, or a habit of wearing a kilt and sporran rather than trousers. The problem arises when the ‘Jewish child’ is assumed to hold, by virtue of his Jewishness, a belief about some factual proposition: a factual proposition, say, about the age of the world, whose truth depends upon evidence and cannot be culturally determined. Such faith-based beliefs about reality all too often actively contradict the evidence and therefore subvert genuine education.

There are many ways in which people differ from one another by virtue of traditions handed down through the generations, and these are often admirable and worthy of respect. But there is a qualitative difference between a cultural tradition and factual evidence, and we should not feel obliged to respect, or encourage the perpetuation of, beliefs about reality which we know to be untrue, simply because they form part of a tradition, even an ancient tradition.  When you put it like that, I find it hard to imagine how any person of goodwill and intelligence could seriously disagree. Yet because it is usually not put like that, there are many people, even non-religious people, who have been duped into confusing the ‘cultural tradition’ side of religion with the ‘statement of facts’ side, and endowing both with the respect due only to one.

TAGGED: CHILDREN, RELIGION, RICHARD DAWKINS