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.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
Comments
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.