Vic Reppert wrote an interesting post a while back on Richard Dawkins’ view that parents teaching their religion to children is child abuse.

First, this is what Dawkins said:

“God Delusion” author Richard Dawkins complains that “Our society, including the nonreligious sector, has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them — ‘Catholic child,’ ‘Protestant child,’ ‘Jewish child,’ ‘Muslim child,’ etc.”

Dawkins says those “labels” are “always a form of child abuse” and concludes:

“Maybe some children need to be protected from indoctrination by their own parents.”

Then Reppert writes:

The thinking that leads to religious persecution goes like this: those guys over there who are teaching false religious claims are exposing others to a greater likelihood of eternal damnation. So we have to stop these people no matter what it takes. Maybe people need to be protected from false teaching. Believe me, religious persecutors have everyone’s best interests at heart.

So do anti-religious persecutors. Removing eternal damnation from the picture doesn’t eliminate the temptation to persecute. They will say that these religious people may not be exposing people to hell, but they are spreading scientific illiteracy and possibly ushering in a new dark age, and they just have to be stopped.

If I were told that I could not teach Christianity to my children, you can bet I would consider myself to be a victim of persecution. (Unfortunately for Dawkins, we already “indoctrinated” our kids, and they are dedicated Christian adults now.)

Yes, yes, I know, Dawkins says maybe. And the next atheist that comes along will say definitely. And it will be more tempting for these people to say definitely the closer they are to acquiring political power.

I don’t agree with Vic Reppert on many things, but he’s right about this. And I think Dawkins’ views are particularly alarming given the moral relativism, anti-reason and anti-science ideas so dominant on the secular left. I posted recently about the atheist philosopher Arif Ahmed’s denial of moral facts, which is the view that is consistent with atheism and an accidental, materialistic universe. It was interesting to see how Ahmed’s denial of moral realism did not stop him from being politically active on the basis of his personal preferences. And he was perfectly happy forcing his personal preferences on other people despite admitting that morality is illusory when considered objectively.

Atheists don’t believe in moral realism, but they do believe in pursuing pleasure and avoiding moral sanctions from those who disagree with them. And the more militant ones liek Dawkins and Ahmed will use political power to pursue those ends. If you are religious, and you teach your children that some actions are objectively immoral, then your children may grow up and judge atheists or vote in policies that limit their hedonism. Then the more militant atheists would feel bad, or be prevented from doing things that make them happy – like killing inconvenient babies who appear after recreational sex. And the more militant atheists may want to put a stop to you making them feel bad. There is nothing in their worldview that prevents them from using violence to stop you from making them feel bad. On their view, the universe is an accident, and you have no “natural rights” like the right to life, objectively speaking.

So you can see how the denial of objective moral values and duties leads to things like abortion today. Their victims today are weak, and small. Many people are therefore inclined to agree with them that the right to happiness of the strong trumps the right-to-life of the weak, (a right not grounded by the atheism worldview, which denies objective human rights). Tomorrow, if they had more political power, perhaps the more militant atheists would graduate to more draconian acts, like other atheists (Stalin, Mao, etc.) have in the past.

Atheist Aldous Huxley explains what atheists believe about morality and why they believe it:

For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation.The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality.We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.

Atheism is just the denial of objective moral duties, achieved by denying the existence of the objective moral duty prescriber, also known as God.

Atheists oppose science and evidence

• Physicist Frank Tipler weighs in on Stephen Hawking’s theory
• Peter Atkins claiming that nothing exists, (the physical universe is actually nothing)
• Stephen Meyer debating Michael Shermer on the origin of life
• Richard Dawkins explains why he won’t debate William Lane Craig
• How good are the arguments in the new book by Richard Dawkins?
• Richard Dawkins cites fraudulent research, runs from public debate
• Richard Dawkins thinks that aliens may have caused the origin of life
• Richard Dawkins cites German professor as authority on historical Jesus
• Analyzing Christopher Hitchens’ case against God

Theists support science and evidence

• The origin of the universe from nothing
• The fine-tuning of the cosmological constants to permit life
• The fine-tuning of the galaxy, solar system, and planet to permit life
• Origin of the building blocks in the simplest replicating cell
• Origin of biological information in the simplest replicating cell
• Sudden origins of all major body plans in the Cambrian explosion
• Irreducible complexity in molecular machines
• The limits on what natural selection and random mutation can do
• Peer-reviewed paper says there is no atheistic explanation for the Cambrian explosion
• Does the Cambrian explosion disprove Darwinian evolution?