Francis Beckett ? Tribune ? Comment, news and reviews from ...

One of the many benefits I discovered when I left the Roman Catholic Church is that we atheists are not expected to believe in the infallibility of Richard Dawkins. So when Professor Dawkins said that calling a child a Christian just because the parents are Christian is a form of child abuse, I dissented. No move for my excommunication was made in the British Humanist Association. Keith Wood, who runs the National Secular Society, did not look speculatively at my hands and murmur: ?Were you fond of those fingernails, then??

Now, once again, I feel grateful for the freedom to be a heretic among heretics. Education Secretary Michael Gove has just approved the first creationist free school. After September 2013, children at Newark Business Academy are likely to be taught that superstition is at least as reliable as science. That?s a rather poor show, of course, but nothing like as new or as shocking as the British Humanist Association thinks it is.

For Gove?s New Labour predecessors have already handed a growing number of schools over to other religious organisations, with the result that thousands of children are going to state schools where they are taught to believe that a round, white, edible wafer magically transmogrifies into the body and blood of Jesus Christ when a man in colourful robes mutters an incantation over it.

Others are learning that it is wrong to turn on an electric light on a Saturday unless you live in a district of the city around which someone wearing a hat has ceremonially placed string, muttered incantations over it and called it an eruv.

Christianity, Judaism, Islam and the rest are full of this sort of spookery ? and children are taught it as fact. We also teach our children about Father Christmas and the tooth fairy, but at least we have the decency, at some point early in their lives, to take them quietly aside and explain that it?s all rubbish. We never tell them the truth about Baby Jesus.

But then parents have always passed their beliefs onto their children, however quirky those beliefs may be. I think telling them about Saviour Jesus or Prophet Mahomet is rather like telling them to believe that the great Jub-Jub under the sea makes the sun shine. But perhaps a fervent Christian, Muslim, Sikh or religious Jewish parent might find equally odd the ideas of equality and a fairer world which I tried fitfully to pass onto my children. My children will keep the bits they want and throw away the rest, and so will theirs.

But I think it does get uncomfortably close to child abuse when, in addition to telling them that these things are true, you send them to a school where your religious belief is the official belief of the school, where all the children are forced to pray to your God every day; where they are taught, as fact, the dogmas of your faith, and where, as far as possible, all the teachers and pupils are of your faith.

Home and school together become an artificial world in which no serious person doubts the dogmas of your faith, and, as in Plato?s cave, you are forcing children to suppose that it is the real world.

That?s child abuse; and it doesn?t make a jot of difference whether the walls of their prison are papered with a Catholic cross to ward off vampires, or a creationist magic wand lest you should want to build a world.

None of this has stopped Education Secretaries for the past 30 years from handing ever-bigger chunks of our state education system to religions to control. Michael Gove does it partly because he is himself a Christian and wants to spread his faith, which is pretty disreputable. Charles Clarke, who is an atheist, does it because he thinks religious belief makes for a better society. Even if he were right (which he isn?t), the idea of a useful lie is even more disreputable.

So I?m less shocked by Gove?s action than I was when New Labour started the business of getting religion to control an increasing number of schools. The ?belief of the creationists ? that scientific research is wrong, because they and their God say so ? may be a bit more absurd than those of their ?co-religionists, but it?s only a matter of degree.

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Source: http://www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2012/07/francis-beckett/

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