Education for atheists

One of the atheist arguments against bringing up your children in any kind of faith is that it's abusive, forcing children to accept fairy stories (like the Bible) as fact, before their minds can learn to think critically. I've always had a couple of reservations about this, not least that I think it's better for the parent-child relationship if parents are truthful, as far as possible, and congruent: that what they think, do, say and believe should all fit together. It's bad for children if parents say "I really love you" and then punch them: obviously punching them is bad for them, but longer-lasting harm is done by the lack of congruence: how does that child learn to trust someone else who says "I love you"? So no matter whether or not you think that telling children about God is a terrible thing to do, I'm sure that believing in God but not telling your children about him will cause harm to a child. What will a child make of an adult who lives their life by certain rules but doesn't talk about them - or talks about them as if they are matters of little consequence? Besides which, if we shouldn't talk to children about religion before they have learned to think critically, should we talk to them about rational humanism? Do we teach them to think before we give them anything to think about?

As an aside, I'm always a little perturbed by the use of words like "brainwashing" and "indoctrination" which get applied to how believers bring up their children. I have to say that if we were seriously carrying out the kind of mind-control techniques that the caricature Christian is supposed to do, we'd be a bit better at it. Thousands and thousands of young people leave the church every year. Either our brainwashing is, frankly, a bit rubbish, or (shock!) they haven't been brainwashed at all, just brought up by their parents and chosen (like millions of other young people) to seek out alternatives. Of course, as a Christian, I strongly believe that one of the things the church should do with teenagers is to teach them to think for themselves, to ask hard questions and to be dissatisfied with facile answers. That way there is a chance that they won't get to 18 and suddenly discover that a simple Sunday-school faith doesn't really help to make sense of a complex adult world.

Anyway, this post was sparked by a piece on the Theos site, with research that suggests that converts to atheism appear to be less well-educated than converts to theism. If true, this would seem to run counter to the New Atheist proposition that if only everyone learned to think for themselves, religion would die out. In fact, it seems that if you come out of school with few or no qualifications, you may stop believing in God, but if you go to university and can write a dissertation, you may start believing in God, even if you weren't indoctrinated brought up that way.

Conversation

I have kind of mixed feelings about last night's Conversation. On the one hand, having Celia provide a focus for it - and giving notices about this - meant we had a lot more people come than have attended recently. On the other hand, those who attended were also quite a bit older than our usual demographic, which meant that we had to lose the background music, which I guess I always saw as part of the "cafe-style" atmosphere we were trying for.

But... people were very willing to move around, there was a lot of very animated conversation going on, including (from what I observed) some really thoughtful stuff about how we as a church may appear to others who are different in some way from us. I suppose we'll have to see what kind of feedback we get over the next week or so. I can't even really pin down what I imagined Conversation would look like if it really took off, but I know last night was different from whatever that mental picture might be.

The other interesting thing, from my point of view, was that I invited in a couple of lads who were playing football outside when I arrived. They didn't last long in the main room with everyone else - though it did make me wonder if that might have been different with the usual smaller and younger crowd - but did stay and chat for a bit with me and James in the Welcome Area. It made me realise that I've missed that kind of conversation, where you can be talking about the Atonement and someone else just talks over you with some violent/gross anecdote, so you stop and then backtrack again. It also reminded me that actually I'm quite happy to talk to people about Jesus/Christianity/the Bible (why doesn't it have a blurb on the back, wondered one of the girls who came in), and I feel quite happy talking about that and answering questions like "Are you a Jew? You been circumcised?", "Why do good things happen to bad people?" or "When God wanted to kill everyone, why didn't he just snap his fingers and kill them straightaway instead of sending a flood so that they died slowly and horribly?" Hmmm. Slightly sad that I can't do talking to young people about Jesus for a job, but glad that I had a chance to do it last night.

Young people happier in developing countries

Reuters carries a story about a survey conducted by MTVNI, which finds that overall young people in developing countries are happier and feel they have more to look forward to. There's a comment in the article that the happier young people tend to be more religious; I'd love to know if living in developing countries is enough of an indicator for likelihood of religious faith, or if religious faith by itself is a factor in young people's happiness. I thought this was worrying:

MTVNI said one of the trends they spotted was that young people with access to mass media tended to feel less safe as they did not have the cognitive skills to interpret real risk.

In the UK, more than 80 percent of 16- to 34-year-olds said they were as afraid of terrorism as they were of the getting cancer -- though the latter was far more likely to hurt them.

Not only worrying that young people may be as (un)likely to take positive steps to look after their health as they are to avoid the danger of terrorism, but that 16-34 year olds (34 year olds!) don't have the cognitive skills to spot the difference between scaremongering and actual danger.