Richard Dawkins: Children need to be "protected" from religion

Irish Times ^ | February 24, 2015 | Joe Humphreys

[Heartlander]

Richard Dawkins: Children need to be ‘protected’ from religion

‘You have to write off those people’ who put the Bible ahead of science, author says

Children need to be “protected” from religious indoctrination in schools, biologist and atheist campaigner Richard Dawkins has said, backing a campaign by Atheist Ireland to overhaul our education system.

Speaking to The Irish Times in advance of a public talk at Trinity College Dublin on Tuesday evening, Prof Dawkins said: “There is a balancing act and you have to balance the rights of parents and the rights of children and I think the balance has swung too far towards parents…

“Children do need to be protected so that they can have a proper education and not be indoctrinated in whatever religion their parents happen to have been brought up in.”

Prof Dawkins was in Dublin on the second-leg of a pair of talks organised by Arizona State University’s Origins Project, which is aimed at promoting public understanding of science.

While his address focused primarily on genetics, Darwinism and “misconceptions about science”, he also answered questions from the floor about religion and those forces in society “against rationality”.

After Stephen Fry’s much-publicised comments on God, Prof Dawkins is perhaps only the world’s second most famous atheist right now. But he still pulls a crowd and several hundred people coughed up £35 (€50) a head for his lecture in Edmund Burke theatre with cosmologist and Origins Project founder Lawrence Krauss.

Prof Dawkins, who spent Monday in Belfast, praised the work of Atheist Ireland in campaigning to separate church and state in education.

Warning against the “power of childhood indoctrination”, he said it was futile debating with people who put the Bible ahead of scientific evidence. “You have to write off those people” but you can try to convince younger people to avoid superstition, Prof Dawkins said.

His plea for reform was backed by Prof Krauss who said: “Parents, of course, have concerns and ‘say’ but they don’t have the right to shield their children from knowledge. That is not a right, any more than they have the right to shield their children from healthcare or medicine.”

In his address, Prof Dawkins spoke of “the replication bomb” that gave rise to human life as we know it. He said the laws of chemistry showed that before DNA there was another “self-replicating entity”, probably RNA.

But could this process have occurred elsewhere? He said people were “perfectly entitled to believe” that earth was unique in containing life but this was highly improbable.

He said life in the universe could be as rare as “one in a billion stars” but if it existed “the one thing I will put my shirt on is that it will be Darwinian life”, namely it would depend on some information-bearing, self-replicating entity.

Recommending that people “put flying saucers out of your mind,” however, he said “it’s far more likely that we would discover it by radio than we would be visited.”

[Heartlander]

I have argued that the discontinuous gap between humans and 'apes' that we erect in our minds is regrettable. I have also argued that, in any case, the present position of the hallowed gap is arbitrary, the result of evolutionary accident. If the contingencies of survival and extinction had been different, the gap would be in a different place. Ethical principles that are based upon accidental caprice should not be respected as if cast in stone.
- Dawkins

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In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.
– Richard Dawkins River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

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[chajin]

Children need to be protected from Richard Dawkins.

[RoosterRedux]

And from atheists.

[HLPhat]

 

 

"...who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world, and through all time;

 

...

 

 that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them. "

 

"I HAVE SWORN UPON THE ALTAR OF GOD ETERNAL HOSTILITY TO EVERY FORM OF TYRANNY OVER THE MIND OF MAN"

--The Virginia Act For Establishing Religious Freedom
--Thomas Jefferson, 1786

https://www.google.com/webhp?#q=truth%20is%20great%20and%20will%20prevail%20if%20left%20to%20herself

 

What does this mean?

[stars & stripes forever]

Are you saying that Christians should once again be salt and light in America? /s

[mykroar]

I’ll agree they need protected from Islam. But as usual, this mental midget points to the Bible as the root of all evil.

[FlingWingFlyer]

I agree. Normally, this is the way slave owners, pedophiles, God haters and DemocRATS talk.

[a fool in paradise]

“Children need to be groomed in atheism...”

There, I fixed it.

There are evangelical atheists who are fundamentalist and demand that everyone believe as they do.

[BigCinBigD]

The whole idea should be to expose the child to both sides. Then when mature he or She can make their own minds up.

[petercooper]

Survey says!

[RoosterRedux]

The Left and Muzzies are driving us into a revival.;-)

[MeshugeMikey]

Im thinking that as a vicitm of what dawkins referred to as “mild” sexual abuse” and the fact that he appears to be in DENIAL of the damage he incurred due to said abise....that he might well be likely to PERPETRATE against children

[chajin]

Are you saying that Christians should once again be salt and light in America? /s

"For we must consider that we shall be the City upon a hill. They eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our god in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present from us, we shall be made a story and a by word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors of God's sake. We shall shame the faces of the ways of God, and all professors for God's sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into Curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are a going." - John Winthrop, A Modell of Christian Charitie

[<1/1,000,000th%]

That’s the same thing I thought.

[txrefugee]

“Children are a heritage from the Lord.” Psalm 127:3.

The only thing you can leave your children that lasts forever is faith in Jesus as their Savior. That reaches throughout eternity. That faith is a gift from the Holy Spirit and can never be taken away from them. As Jesus said, “My sheep hear My voice, and they follow Me, and I will give them eternal life. They shall never perish, and no man can pluck them out of My hand.” John10:27,28.

That faith enables little children to be killed by the evil Muslims rather than deny Jesus. May the Holy Spirit give us such steadfast faith when challenged by lesser evils, such as Dawkins.

[stars & stripes forever]

AMEN! It is time for the Church to arise.

ISAIAH 60:1-2

1 “Arise, shine, for your light has come,
and the glory of the Lord rises upon you.
2 See, darkness covers the earth
and thick darkness is over the peoples,
but the Lord rises upon you
and his glory appears over you.

[bigtoona]

Big governments have killed more people in the 20th century alone than all of the religions combined through all of human history combined. Yet, douches like this guy still accuse Christianity as the prime offender even though it is by far the smallest offender and arguably killing in defense as in the crusades.

[AppyPappy]

Ya’ll miss the point. Dawkins is pushing the narrative that Religion and Science are in opposition to one another. e.g. a religious person believes all science is a myth.

The narrative is that Fundamentalists/Evangelicals do not support vaccines or science, thereby making them a danger.

[AppyPappy]

State-sponsored Atheism has killed more people than any other belief.

[Vaquero]

Why doesn’t Dork-ins concentrate on protecting children from the so called ‘Islamic religion’. He would have a lifetime of work denigrating this cult and if he opens his mouth enough about Moe-hamid it won’t be a long one.