The latest atheist stunt is an unrolling of UK-wide billboards decrying the fact that children get labelled by their family faith before they can choose themselves. Philosophically this is facile and poorly considered. How else are adults to arrange the lives of children? Parents decide the names, schools, diets and doctors of children; what books they do or don't read; what bedtime stories they are told. Parents and other adults help shape childhood's imagination. Atheist parents are free to raise their kids sans God. It hardly makes sense for a Catholic family to do so. The atheist campaigners argue children should not have to decide a belief system until they are adults. That is rather like saying children should not have to go to school or eat greens until they are 18. Adulthood is precisely the moment for questioning childhood beliefs: not the moment for adopting them. Further, the soul is present at the start and cannot be left unsupported for so long. If adults choose to become atheists that is their rational choice. The soul of a child and a child's mind need loving guidance. Love is forever ignored by such campaigns as if faith was mainly about malice. It doesn't have to be.
THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that
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Oh wait, a second look -- well, the first look for most of us -- shows that it's about LABELS, not the presence or absence of God. As the FAQ below makes plain, it is understood that religious families will engage in religious practice. The simple request is that children be made to know that the choice of religious identity is their own in the long run.
http://www.humanism.org.uk/billboards/critical-thinking
My father was an atheist and my mother was an agnostic. I often thank my lucky stars that I was not brainwashed from birth as I would have been had I been born into a Catholic family. I am now a Church-of-England Buddhist which is a belief system that I have worked out for myself.
Best wishes from Simon
You seem to be inventing your own campaign, rather different to the one pursued by the Humanists - and then you go on to criticise your own false projections.
I suspect from this piece that you are one of those people who believe that someone was killed, remained dead for three days and then got up and walked about. Am I right?
LIke Christopher Hitchens, I am a strong atheist. However, like him, I would NEVER advocate that atheists be treated as an elite and be called "brights" as Richard Dawkins would have it. Not that Dawkins isn't intelligent. He is. Very. And, of course, he has many good ideas. But, he goes to far on his hobby horse.
"Atheist parents are free to raise their kids sans God." Up to a point. A very limited point in a world where god is shoved down their throats every day at school and in which most of the media persists in the pernicious lie that morality is in some way dependent upon religion, as if the two things had anything whatever to do with each other.