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The quote is making the same point I’ve often heard Richard Dawkins make about how it ought to make us uncomfortable to hear a phrase like “Christian Child” or “Muslim Child” or “Hindu Child”. Every single child ever born was an atheist until the indoctrination of their parents gets a hold of them. We would feel uncomfortable calling an infant a “communist child” because we all know intuitively that the future indoctrination of that child with a deplorable ideology is not the child’s fault and is damaging to that child’s future prospects. We ought to view religious indoctrination with the same tsk tsk of regret.
While we’re at it, if a religion is so all-fired great and obvious to those that profess it, why don’t they skip the indoctrination and just expect that once the child is a young adult they will come to the true religion of their own volition? Aren’t so confident, are they?
Marcus Brigstocke is simply stating a fact – not an opinion. Unfortunately that 4 year old child is in a society where it will be taught WHAT to think and not HOW to think. It will not be taught how to differentiate fact from opinion, but will be instructed to treat opinion as fact or else it will suffer ‘eternal damnation’. As that child embarks on what should be a happy and fulfilled life, it will be constantly bombarded by a marketing industry, a political establishment and a religious movement all seeking for their own selfish ends to alter that child’s perception of right and wrong, good and bad without giving it the tools to be able to make its own rational decisions.
The church is a false front concealing organized pedophilia. The religious narrative is a diversion. The ceremony too is all part of of a grand scheme to insert the predators into the bounty of young victims. A fox in the henhouse, only dressed as the farmer so as to not cause alarm.
Holding dominion over a child excites a clergy person in all the wrong ways. Delivereing gods will to a child as if he was god. Sick really! just sick!
I have a four year old boy – he thinks he is a dinosaur… a T-Rex to be exact. That is what you get with pure imagination. The little kid who thinks he saw jesus when he was in the hospital and his preacher dad wrote a book about it, “Heaven is Real” – that is what you get from a little kid who has been spoonfed religious ideology since birth. I am teaching my kids how to think – not what to think… That is my goal.
How about them miracles? As in god stepping in to save one person, attributed to prayer and faith, as if to suggest someone else’s misfortune or lack of similar miracle is somehow related to not enough prayer or faith?
Or that god would step in and alter the events surrounding a specific person but not large groups of people. I’m thinking of tsunamis, hurricanes, et cetera. God doesn’t seem to have the capacity to alter the really big things does he.
I mean for a guy that supposedly made heaven and Earth in 6 days what happened? Did he used up most of his mojo? Why now can he only do these tiny little miracles? And why do doctors, and seatbelts, and more human stuff have to be so involved? Can’t god perform a miracle without the help of a surgeon?
I mean god is like a great cosmic fat guy couch potato these days. Sedentary and weak, limp, dysfunctional when it comes to being erect?
June 20th, 2012 at 1:30
i gently disagree.
at 4, a little person is very aware that he is alive….a human…
has wants and needs…and is cognizant of the structure based
upon the BIGS taking care of the SMALLS.
the point of the quote , i think, is to emphasize how pliable
human thinking can be.
that is, at least in the tender years…………..
and possibly for decades after that.
June 20th, 2012 at 5:01
The quote is making the same point I’ve often heard Richard Dawkins make about how it ought to make us uncomfortable to hear a phrase like “Christian Child” or “Muslim Child” or “Hindu Child”. Every single child ever born was an atheist until the indoctrination of their parents gets a hold of them. We would feel uncomfortable calling an infant a “communist child” because we all know intuitively that the future indoctrination of that child with a deplorable ideology is not the child’s fault and is damaging to that child’s future prospects. We ought to view religious indoctrination with the same tsk tsk of regret.
While we’re at it, if a religion is so all-fired great and obvious to those that profess it, why don’t they skip the indoctrination and just expect that once the child is a young adult they will come to the true religion of their own volition? Aren’t so confident, are they?
June 20th, 2012 at 8:38
Marcus Brigstocke is simply stating a fact – not an opinion. Unfortunately that 4 year old child is in a society where it will be taught WHAT to think and not HOW to think. It will not be taught how to differentiate fact from opinion, but will be instructed to treat opinion as fact or else it will suffer ‘eternal damnation’. As that child embarks on what should be a happy and fulfilled life, it will be constantly bombarded by a marketing industry, a political establishment and a religious movement all seeking for their own selfish ends to alter that child’s perception of right and wrong, good and bad without giving it the tools to be able to make its own rational decisions.
June 20th, 2012 at 12:19
Well said Geoff and Capt’Z
Wasn’t Huckleberry Finn a lucky boy?
Pity about the apostrophe Marcus.
June 20th, 2012 at 14:50
The church is a false front concealing organized pedophilia. The religious narrative is a diversion. The ceremony too is all part of of a grand scheme to insert the predators into the bounty of young victims. A fox in the henhouse, only dressed as the farmer so as to not cause alarm.
Holding dominion over a child excites a clergy person in all the wrong ways. Delivereing gods will to a child as if he was god. Sick really! just sick!
June 20th, 2012 at 18:00
I have a four year old boy – he thinks he is a dinosaur… a T-Rex to be exact. That is what you get with pure imagination. The little kid who thinks he saw jesus when he was in the hospital and his preacher dad wrote a book about it, “Heaven is Real” – that is what you get from a little kid who has been spoonfed religious ideology since birth. I am teaching my kids how to think – not what to think… That is my goal.
June 20th, 2012 at 18:37
How about them miracles? As in god stepping in to save one person, attributed to prayer and faith, as if to suggest someone else’s misfortune or lack of similar miracle is somehow related to not enough prayer or faith?
Or that god would step in and alter the events surrounding a specific person but not large groups of people. I’m thinking of tsunamis, hurricanes, et cetera. God doesn’t seem to have the capacity to alter the really big things does he.
I mean for a guy that supposedly made heaven and Earth in 6 days what happened? Did he used up most of his mojo? Why now can he only do these tiny little miracles? And why do doctors, and seatbelts, and more human stuff have to be so involved? Can’t god perform a miracle without the help of a surgeon?
I mean god is like a great cosmic fat guy couch potato these days. Sedentary and weak, limp, dysfunctional when it comes to being erect?
June 21st, 2012 at 1:08
Sinjin Smythe you give god too much credit.