Is Teaching your Children Religion Child Abuse?

[bryant69]

Poll question: Is Teaching your Children Religion Child Abuse?

Richard Dawkins suggested that it was in in an interview with Salon. ". . . they could teach children that there are such things as religious beliefs. But to teach children that it is a fact that there is one god or that God created the world in six days, that is child abuse." - http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/10/13/dawkins/index1.html

He did soften this statement in a later interview - changing it pretty completely "What I think may be abuse is labeling children with religious labels like Catholic child and Muslim child. I find it very odd that in our civilization we're quite happy to speak of a Catholic child that is 4 years old or a Muslim of child that is 4, when these children are much too young to know what they think about the cosmos, life and morality. We wouldn't dream of speaking of a Keynesian child or a Marxist child. And yet, for some reason we make a privileged exception of religion. And, by the way, I think it would also be abuse to talk about an atheist child." http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/04/30/dawkins/index.html This is of course standard behaivor - if you make a statement that people find offensive, simply pretend you said something completely different.

But back to the main question - do you agree with Dawkins when he says teaching that there is one God is child abuse?

Bryant
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