Only if it danced and had a huge speaker that looked like an eye.
Apparently, Dawkins believes that lying to children about about the basic nature of the universe constitutes child abuse. Granted, the term “child abuse” generally evokes images of beatings, deprivation, sexual behavior, etc. None of that happened to me. But my fundamentalist upbringing fucked me up big time. My mother has died, and my father is a gentle man who wishes no one any harm. Still, I wish I could tell him just how royally he screwed my life.
Being wrong =/= lying. However, you believe that your current belief system is correct. The problem here is that atheism is treated as morally neutral, which it is not. Everyone is taught a belief system of some kind. Either they are treated to an atomized existance which has it’s own frailties, or they can be inculcated into a community.
Is it child abuse to teach a child that they are an American, or a Russian?
Also, the debate about whether these religions are incorrect or correct is still going. You act as though it’s been settled just because YOU have settled it. Plenty of people are raised religious and grow up without feeling as though they were abused. That is a subjective bias that you hold, and does not necessarily correlate to all religious people’s upbringings.
You cannot bring someone up with a neutral belief. There is no such thing, in terms of belief you are always indoctrinated into the beliefs of your parents.
A person’s religion is not determined by their birthright. People should freely choose their religion when they are old enough to understand what it means.
At least, that’s the way it should be.
It’s ok to teach children what you believe. It is not ok to tell children what they believe.
They are talking about schools, and what the state should teach about religion. He says that the schools should teach comparative religion, but that they should never label the children, and that this would be child abuse. I don’t hear him say anything about the parential upbringing of children. He also specifies later on: Sending a child to a school where there are only catholic children or only muslim that children, that is what I think is wicked.
Atheism, being merely an absence of belief in Gods, cannot be anything other than morally neutral, and by rights should be imbued with the same moral significance as a healthy scepticism of the continued animation of Elvis Presley. Atheists may not be morally neutral, but the fact of their unbelief does not, indeed cannot, possess the slightest moral weight.
While certainly true (even children raised as atheists are raised with other, unrelated beliefs), you cannot deny that some belief systems are objectively less moral than others. Lynx & Lamb Gaede, teen stars of the charming White Nationalist duo ‘Prussian Blue’ have, from birth, been inculcated with the belief that all the world’s problems can be traced back to the persistence of Jews in Western society. Their mother has, as interviews have made startlingly clear, raised her children in a comfy bubble of absolute moral rectitude. Suffice it to say, the notion that indoctrinating ones children with a malicious belief system constitutes child abuse is not, in and of itself, especially controversial.
The question is “Does raising ones child with conventional Religious beliefs constitute child abuse?” I would say that it depends on both the nature of the beliefs and the emphasis parents choose to place on certain of those beliefs over others. I have no doubt that a mortal terror of the Hellfire, instilled at a young age by overzealous parents, is at the root of a great many stultifying neuroses.
Only if teaching a child that they are an American or a Russian requires they be taught concomitant beliefs, such as a visceral loathing of non-Americans or non-Russians.
Yet I know through personal experience that the reverse is also true.
This is a fair point. However, I am of two minds about its validity. On the one hand, you are certainly correct when you state that a great many people value their religious backgrounds. On the other hand, Lynx & Lamb Gaede may very well have reacted against their own upbringing by founding a teen anti-racism society. That wouldn’t have made their mother’s attempt to raise them as bigots in her own image any less abhorrent. I am inclined to think that one should not entwine the moral status of childhood religious inculcation with the opinions of those raised in religious households. It all comes back to the moral status of religious beliefs. Since the beliefs of every major religion are so many and so varied, I doubt society will ever reach a consensus on this issue.
ETA:
Oh, totally. Without the eye it’s nothing 
Yes, you believe that your beliefs should be the neutral standard of moral belief, just as a Christian or a Muslim believes that their beliefs should be the neutral standard of moral belief. Interesting how that works right? There is no such thing as morally neutral. Christians, Muslims and Jews think it is morally wrong to say that God does not exist, it’s called Blasphemy, and is one of the greatest sins. So again, what you are saying is NOT morally neutral. You are saying that it ‘should’ be the morally neutral but you are just putting forth and argument like everyone else.
Well, it depends on how one defines malicious. As I said, many people consider atheism to be malicious.
Yes, I tend to agree with that, but I can only claim the moral weight of my own opinion. Perhaps there is some objective morality that determines what is neutral, what is positive and what is malicious, but we in our imperfect perceptions can only glimpse at it. Meanwhile, we all argue that it is our perception that is keen and others who have the flawed sight.
A visceral loathing of non-religious people isn’t a standard part of most religious doctrine. Christianity preaches love for all people, even those not of the faith. This is expressed through the mission, which many non-Christians found malicious but if taken from their point of view is the purest manifestation of love, being that they are out wrangling lost sheep bringing them back to the flock. America, has a very specific and individualistic ideology, it does not preach hatred for the other, it preaches embrace of the other, but only insofar as the other can be assimilated into the American fabric. I won’t speak on the Russian national impetus as I’ve only recently been introduced to it and know very little of it.
Absolutely, as people who are raised without any sort of inculcated belief system often grow up feeling like something is missing, while some grow up feeling free from dogmatic notions. YMMV, it’s all subjective.
In traditional (read pagan) societies the religion is synonymous with the tribal identity. With so-called Universal religions like Christianity and Islam, the moral life is felt through the religion, ie the church or the mosque. I would argue that one is not born, ‘moral’, that morality is taught like any other skill. Certainly people are born with or at least incur tendencies to go with the flow of normative society, such that they often appear moral due to the fact that they are just trying to fit in, but that cannot be depended upon. The attempt to teach a child morality informs upon them their identity, like it or not. By teaching a child morals you are teaching them that they are, X, whether you call it that or not. If I teach a child Christian morality, they are Christian until they decide to break from that. If they live within that ambient culture and have those morals inculcated within them, they will gravitate toward those who are of a like mind, barring some sort of inciting incident that causes them to reject it.
The problem here is that Dawkins is calling a particular act ‘child abuse’. Certainly what he claims to be done about it is action within the public sphere, he is not arguing against the rights of parents, but plainly it is the ‘act’ that is child abuse, and not the perpetrating party. As for the solution, he is saying the state can play a role in not reinforcing the abuse. The fact that he rejects sectarian schooling shows that he feels that the state has an obligation to play a role in mitigating the religious upbringing of a child. As an American I find that sort of state intervention in a child’s upbringing to be rather pernicious. Certainly public schools need to play as neutral a hand as they can, but to remove sectarian schools is to my mind going a step too far, this puts far too much power in the hands of the state. This is why many religious people talk about the ‘religion of the state’, when referring to modern liberalism. By removing the choice for sectarian schooling, you are removing some bit of freedom from the parents to bring their child up within the moral bounds that they see fit.
So Dawkins isn’t really for the freedom of a parent to raise their child as they believe, he just is picking his battles carefully, arguing for solutions that are within his power to argue for. As I see it, he has gone to the extreme edge of what he can get away with, and that the choice to go that far was carefully weighed and measure.
Ultimately Dawkins wants to see active religion done away with, and I am not ok with using state coercion to that end.
Not all religious people are bigots. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Ghandi were both devoutly religious people.
Christian chiming in here. I don’t think it’s morally wrong to say that God doesn’t exist unless the person saying it is being a jerk about it or knowingly lying, and maybe a few other circumstances such as intellectual dishonesty, and then only to the extent that it’s morally wrong to be a jerk or lie. It is much, much worse to say that god does exist and hates someone.
Certainly, but for some Chrisitians it is morally wrong. They have a moral problem with atheism in and of itself, and would not consider it to be morally neutral.