Inoculation for Atheism

In the shadow of all the antivax buzz lately, I'd like to recommend a process of intellectual inoculation for children. This post is based on Best Practices 5: Encourage religious literacy from The Meming of Life. It illustrates the benefit of teaching your children about religion, to protect them from its excesses. McGowan argues that parents who want their kids to follow in their secular (agnostic/atheist/ignostic/etc) footsteps should not obsessively protect them from all exposure to the churchy crowd. Rather one needs to gradually expose them to doses of gentle strains of all the relevant faith memes. If not, they will be vulnerable to the first virulent strain to come along when they begin independent thought, and have a "teen epiphany". (Excerpt)

Struggles with identity, confidence, and countless other issues are a given part of the teen years. Sometimes these struggles generate a genuine personal crisis, at which point religious peers often pose a single question: "Don't you know about Jesus?" If your child says, "No," the peer will come back incredulously with, "YOU don't know JESUS? Omigosh, Jesus is The Answer!" Boom, we have an emotional hijacking. And such hijackings don't end up in moderate Methodism. This is the moment when nonreligious teens fly all the way across the spectrum to evangelical fundamentalism.

A little knowledge about religion allows the teen to say, "Yeah, I know about Jesus"-and to know that reliable answers to personal problems are better found elsewhere.

It is best to start early. Bedtime stories should have consistency for the comfort of the child, and variety to hold the interest of the child. Maybe do a month of "how we got here" stories from various cultures. Kipling, Torah, Norse, Navajo, Hindu, and so on. Show the richness of cultures and the similarities of ideas that underlie all the world religions. But parents need to be prepared. Learn about oral traditions and the power of mythos. Read Joseph Campbell , Homer , and The Arabian Nights . Know of Gilgamesh and Beowulf and Odin , the Ring of the Nibelungen and the Bhagavad Gita , and certainly know the current local favorite, the Torah .

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The biggest religious divide: fundamentalists versus everyone else

In 2006, Andrew Sullivan wrote that there are many forms of belief and that fundamentalism is only one of many forms of religious belief: The alternative to the secular-fundamentalist death spiral is something called spiritual humility and sincere religious doubt. Fundamentalism is not the only valid form of faith, and to…

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We atheists and agnostics often have a lot in common with you religious moderates

I struggle to see through the rampant commercialism, the over-consumption and the glazed-eyed happiness of the holiday season.  But maybe I’ve had a break-through.  It keeps recurring to me this month that kind and thoughtful atheists/agnostics have an immense amount in common with millions of kind and thoughtful people who believe in God. 

Too many of us have too much in common, in fact, for me to stand by silently while the “new atheists” (led by Richard Dawkins) repeatedly belittle Believers.  Most of these new atheists claim that religious moderates, by their silence, are enabling the social destruction wrought by fundamentalists.  I think that is often true.  By the same token, moderate atheists/agnostics are adding unnecessary fuel to the belief/non-belief wars when they fail to speak up during the new atheist hyper-scoldings of believers. 

I suspect that many of the new atheist criticisms of religion underestimate the function served by the type of religion practiced by most religious moderates (I think that David Sloan Wilson has it right on this point) and that they over-estimate the ability of science to provide substitutes for whatever it is that religious moderates get out of their practice of religion (on this point, see this Salon.com interview of theologian John Haught).

In fact, many of the new atheist scoldings smell of schadenfreude and vengeance.  I agree that much of criticism is warranted on an intellectual level, but it seems like we really need to sit down and figure out how to get …

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More on Who changed the Bible and why? Bart Ehrman’s startling answers

Administrator’s Note: More than 530 comments have been posted to our original post regarding Bart Ehrman--  making that page too long for some computers to download and display quickly and properly.  Therefore, we are not allowing any new comments to be added to the original post. Please use this page to…

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