In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense. Parents, correspondingly, have no god-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children’s knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith. And especially the education a child receives at home, where parents are allowed-even expected-to determine for their children what counts as truth and falsehood, right and wrong.Ĭhildren, I’ll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas-no matter who these other people are. I am talking about moral and religious education. to argue, in short, in favour of censorship, against freedom of expression, and to do so moreover in an area of life that has traditionally been regarded as sacrosanct. I shall probably shock you when I say it is the purpose of my lecture today. And the gist of his argument is in this excerpt: Though he’s passionate in his arguments, he also considers possible objections-before disposing of them.
Click on the screenshot to read the transcript. Humphrey’s lecture is the best thing I’ve seen written about why parents should not indoctrinate their children with religion, and I recommend it very highly. Further, all of us who have John Brockman as an agent, including Dawkins, read stuff on Brockman’s website Edge, where this essay was published. Surely Richard derived some of his views from Humphrey, for Humphrey’s are plain, courageous, and eloquent.
That was nine years before Dawkins’s The God Delusion publicized the “child abuse” argument to the world. Reader Andy called my attention to this 23-year-old transcript of a lecture by Cambridge neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey: his plenary lecture to Amnesty International. It is abuse to limit the lives of children by filling their minds with religious nonsense as soon as they can understand language. And although that term angered many, including parents who assert the right to control their children’s religious beliefs, Dawkins was not wrong. Famously, Richard Dawkins called it “child abuse”. I find this ineffably sad, for this kind of religious (and cultural) indoctrination is nothing less than brainwashing. They will never be exposed to alternative points of view, will never have the chance for lives different from those of their religiously regulated and constricted community. Those children are doomed-doomed to adopt via indoctrination the religious beliefs of their parents.
And as with the clothing and hair, so the beliefs. Or Amish and Mennonites, with the children exact miniatures of the adults. Or you see a Muslim family, with the little girls wearing hijabs and “modest” clothing. Many of you must have had this experience: walking through the airport, say, and seeing a family of ultra-Orthodox Jews, with the little girls dressed like their mothers, and the little boys sporting sidelocks and yarmukes-all destined to grow up into lives exactly like those of their parents.