THE GOD DELUSION, by Richard Dawkins

THE GOD DELUSION, by Oxford Professor and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, has become particularly meaningful for me recently with my post about Biology Teacher Whit Weatherford and His Shockingly-Heartless Students. Weatherford held an after school presentation where he tormented a rabbit by waving her in front of a python until the python finally ate her. Someone videotaped it and put it on YouTube, and the entire world can watch a room of students laugh, jeer and cheer as the rabbit is killed. This all occurred at the Trinity Christian Academy (check out Christian School Confidential for more on them) in Jacksonville, Florida. (As always, we here in Florida provide our country with the most hideously embarrassing fodder for the evening news.)

As someone who writes books for a living, I’m thrilled when I see a book with a helpful Table of Contents. They’re all supposed to be helpful, but they’re not. I’ve even been known to buy a book I wouldn’t have otherwise bought because it has a great Table of Contents. Here’s Dawkins’ Table of Contents:

1. A Deeply Religious Non-Believer (okay, this is the least helpful title. Keep going.)
2. The God Hypothesis
3. Arguments for God’s Existence
4. Whey There Almost Certainly is No God
5. The Roots of Religion
6. The Roots of Morality: Why are we Good?
7. The ‘Good’ Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist
8. What’s Wrong With Religion? Why Be So Hostile?
9. Childhood, Abuse and the Escape from Religion
10. Much Needed Gap? (kind of an inside joke–you have to read the first few sentences to get it)

And these are only the primary headings. Each chapter has a handful of equally helpful sub-headings.

Today I’ll deal with Chapter 9, which considers whether indoctrinating a child into a religion, and indeed referring to that child as, for example, a Christian child, is a form of child abuse. Let me first say that I’ve always told me husband if we were ever to have a child, I’d like to teach her about all of the world’s religions and the history of religious belief. I’d want her to read the stories of Jesus, Buddha, Shiva, and all of the Greek and Roman Gods. For me, who studied literature undergrad and grad, I see how my education helps me understand human behavior. It also informs me by providing me a historical context with which to appreciate painting, sculpture, music and architecture. The stories of a time create what life looks like during that time.

A student at Trinity Christian Academy e-mailed me wondering why I was so appalled at what occurred during the python incident. He was there, and saw nothing wrong with it. The public apology from the school notwithstanding, "Whit Weathorford is my biology teacher," the student wrote, "and knows what he is doing, he would not do anything that is wrong or displeases the Lord. Thank you for your time and have a blessed day in Jesus." Would Jesus have done what Whitford did?

I explained my position, and also that I was conflicted because this young person is someone ELSE’S child. There’s no way he came up with that response on his own (and there was a lot more of that over the subsequent couple of days), and though I am a grown-up, I am not his caregiver or teacher. For some reason, I felt it would be inappropriate for me to tell him–or even refer him to–the truth. I nudged him and accepted him for where he is, noting that with college and life experience and further reading, he might discover that what he is certain about now, he might not be so certain about later. I encouraged him to ask questions about the Bible and how it came to be, and to actually read it and decide for himself if the idea of God makes sense. I encouraged research into the science of evolution.

The reality is that he is so brainwashed with half-truths that it terrified me. He writes:

"And about evolution it says that we are all accidents and we just happened do you really think of yourself as an accident or something that just happened? I just don’t understand that. ‘Some’ Scientist say that evolution happened billions and billions of years ago. Well was anyone there when it happened?"

What’s worse, he claims that he is taught to think critically, and that what he says he knows to be true. Prior to this week, I don’t know if I would’ve been bold enough to call raising a child as a fundamentalist Christian child abuse. But if he were being brought up in a less socially-acceptable cult, I’d have no problem doing that.

What does all this have to do with animals? Dawkins writes of morality and how it evolves, which is clear over the centuries. Perhaps either because we know how much suffering we create or because we realize the injustice of the property status of animals, some of us are evolving toward using them less. There are always some people who are ahead of the moral zeitgeist, and those who lag behind. Perhaps atheists and vegans are simply ahead of the curve and others will catch up later. Much later.

Furthermore, and back to my imaginary child again, is raising her vegan the same as raising her as a Christian? I would say the opposite. I was raised as a meat-eater and Catholic (and Buddhist, sort of), and here’s my problem with that, not that it matters now. When you raise your child a vegan, when she gets old enough to make her own decisions based on her own critical thinking and research, she’s likely to remain a vegan. When you raise your child on animal products, when she gets old enough to make her own decisions based on her own critical thinking and research, she is likely to wonder why you killed so many animals in the name of feeding her when it wasn’t necessary.

So do vegan parents brainwash their kids? To some extent, everybody brainwashes their kids; we just don’t call it that. At least vegan parents are attempting to create an environment of compassion and nonviolence, and aligning what they do–including what they eat–with that moral code.