Should It Be Illegal To Indoctrinate Kids With Religion

In a 2014 piece by Zoltan Istvan writing in Church And State the question is raised of whether it should It Be Illegal To Indoctrinate Kids With Religion.

Religious child soldiers carrying AK-47s. Bullying anti-gay Jesus kids. Infant genital mutilation.

Teenage suicide bombers. Child Hindu brides. No matter where you look, if adults are participating in dogmatic religions, then they are also pushing those same ideologies onto their kids.

Regardless what you think and believe, science shows human beings know very little ...

… A child’s mind is terribly susceptible to what it hears and sees from parents, family, and social surroundings. When the human being is born, its brain remains in a delicate developmental phase until far later in life.

“Kids are impressionable,” said Dr. Eunice Pearson-Hefty, director of the Teaching Environmental Science program of Texas’ Natural Resource Conservation Commission. “Anything you tell them when they’re real small can have a lasting impression.”

It’s only later, when kids hit their teens that they begin to think for themselves and see the bigger picture. It’s only then they begin to ask whether their parent’s teachings make sense and are correct.

However, depending on the power of the indoctrination in their childhood, people’s ability to successfully question anything is likely stifled their entire lives ...

… “Religion should remain a private endeavor for adults,” says Giovanni Santostasi, PhD, who is a neuroscientist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and runs the 10,000 person strong Facebook group Scientific Transhumanism. “An appropriate analogy of religion is that’s it’s kind of like porn—which means it’s not something one would expose a child to.”

Continue Reading @ Church And State

1 comment:

  1. No - but let parents and churches do it in their own time and at their own cost. Religious indoctrination in State-funded schools should be illegal.

    ReplyDelete