Long ago, when the world was very young, I was in the process of writing a doctoral dissertation on children’s rights. It never got finished, mainly due to a serious problem with allergies which took two or three years to regulate. To this day most of the major food groups are simply inedible for me — no red meat, none of the cabbage family of vegetables: turnip, cauliflower, cabbage, etc., no oranges, bananas, mangoes, papayas, guavas, red grapes (though not, strangely, green ones) — which to this day makes eating a bit of conundrum. Of course, you don’t need to hear about my health problems, but the point of recounting them is simply to say that, while I did give up my PhD project years ago, I never lost my concern for the rights of children. During my life as a priest I was always vaguely troubled by the baptism of children, and the promises that parents are expected to make to bring their children up in the life of the church, inducting them into the faith, and ensuring that they remained faithful to the teachings of the church.
These promises, which are either outwardly or tacitly made by religious parents, to make sure that their children are indoctrinated with church or religious teachings, are reflected in other aspects of religious life. I remember now with amusement, but also cognisant of the seriousness of her deep conviction on the point, the occasion when my wife Elizabeth came with me to an ordination of someone as a priest (a woman as it chanced). In the ordination service the ordinand makes a number of promises and commitments. One of them has to do with seeing that the priest’s family is a model to the Christian community of faithfulness to the teachings of the church, and of the ideal of Christian marriage and family. When we came out of the service — well, there were mutterings under her breath during the service itself! — Elizabeth – no wilting violet she! — expressed her views very sharply both to me and to the bishop about the inappropriateness of the promises the ordinand was expected to make. There was no justification, as she said, to make a person make promises about what another person should believe or how they should live. She would make up her own mind, if you please, and would not be governed by, or limited by Christian ideals or beliefs. Had she been present at my ordination, she said, she would have got up at that point and objected publicly — as doubtless she would have done! (She was herself a nonbeliever, though fully supportive of me and the work I had undertaken to do.) Nor did she think it right for anyone to promise that children should be brought up to believe. What children ultimately believed was their own business, and not the business of the church or any other body with presumed authority.
Although I had made the same promises some years before, it was clear to me that she was right, and I always had problems with the church’s practice of baptising infants. This was brought home very powerfully to me this morning by a picture that PZ Myers has put up on Pharygula from an old Sunday School (or school) workbook for children. Here’s the picture.
Page from an Irish Schoolbook
The use of techniques like this becomes, it seems to me, seriously questionable when you consider how religions have evolved, and how religions have hijacked various features of the evolved human cognitive apparatus and put them to uses other than that of survival. These points are clearly made in the paper recommended by Andy Thompson, author of Why We Believe in God(s) in response to Egbert’s questions in the comment stream of the post “Read, Mark, Learn and Inwardly Digest.” There are so many aspects of the complex processes involved in the evolution of religion that we can scarcely do more than touch on the outskirts of the theory of religion. The paper recommended by Thompson as supplementary reading is by Scott Atran and Joseph Henrich , “The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions.” Aside from the cognitive mechanisms that lead to the telling of minimally counterintuitive religious stories, the truth seems to be that these stories are “cognitively sticky” (my own term); they remain in the memory much more effectively than stories of the mundane, or stories that include many counterintuitive features. In Atran’s and Henrich’s words:
Cognitive approaches hypothesize that although intuitive concepts transmit well, concepts that minimally deviate from intuition transmit better, while those that deviate greatly cannot transmit successfully because they overload cognitive processes that drive inferential reasoning and relevance. [20]
This is extremely important, and there is growing empirical evidence that this is true. It means that religious stories take advantage of certain aspects of human cognition to make them more compelling and memorable. This also clearly means that indoctrination of children with tall tales is much easier than teaching them science and math, so it is not much wonder that children come to school primed to oppose the things that they are taught, especially things that conflict with their deeply held religious beliefs, beliefs that are ingrained in them very often from very early childhood indoctrination, the kind of indoctrination that Christian parents promise to undertake when they have their children baptised. (Baptists, by the way, who do not practice infant baptism, have a similar commitment ceremony. They are not going to miss the opportunity to inculcate religious beliefs in children. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to think that Baptists are even more likely to try, at least, to guarantee that children will make a commitment to Christianity when they have come ”of age,” since their children’s failure to do so would reflect badly on their parents.)
What is it about religious stories that make them so compelling? I don’t know whether this has been studied yet or not, but I would hypothesise that they are so compelling precisely because they were learned, for the most part, in childhood. It is well-known that certain built-in (or hardwired) cognitive abilities and tendencies are very active in childhood. For example, the tendency to ascribe agency even to things which are not agents is very active in childhood. As Atran and Henrich say:
Young children spontaneously overattribute agency to all sorts of entities (clouds, computers), and may thus be predisposed to construct agent-based representations of many phenomena. … This reactive bias was likely adaptive [-- better to have lots of false positives than one false negative, when it comes to predators --], at least until supernatural agenst were harnessed by cultural evolution to begin demanding costly actions and cooperation, under threat of divine punishment or offers of sublime rewards. [20]
As Thompson and Aukofer explain in their book, we often see aspects of a reversion to childhood in the context of religious worship. The mention holding hands above one’s head when singing or praying as a gesture of supplication, much like the child asking to be picked up and coddled. There is a cocoon of relative safety within liturgical settings, many of which use techniques for giving the worshipper the sense of being safely enfolded in the arms of a loving creator (mild forms of trance induced by singing, dancing, and other means, for example). In Christian contexts this is often explicit. The leader is often called ‘Father’ or ‘Pastor’ (viz., shepherd), and members comprise, together, the family of God, and are all brothers and sisters of one another. But there is also almost always a menacing context too, in which failure to blend into this family and to believe appropriately in concert with it will be dealt with with condign punishment either here and now or in “the sweet by and by.”
However, I don’t want to overload this post with theory of religion, although I think it is important for all of us to have an understanding of how religion functions, how it evolved, and why it is so enduring. My point is this. If we know so much about how religion evolved, and how various cognitive mechanisms came to be hijacked in the process, we also know how to avoid making claims which have no reasonable basis in our understanding of the world. In addition to this, we are beginning to know just how these beliefs work in practice, as well as methods which make the teaching of these claims much more effective in bringing about loyalty and belief. We have less and less excuse for imposing these beliefs or using these methods in the education of children. Indeed, the more we come to know about religion — and all the declarations of human rights were made long before we had this understanding — the more it seems clear that inculcating religious beliefs in children may be understood as a violation of their rights. By what strange twist of logic can it be thought to be appropriate to teach children, as though it were true, that Jesus died for our sins, and ascended into heaven, or that Mohammed was visited by the angel Gabriel and conveyed to him the very words of God himself?
People think they have a right to pass on their religious beliefs and customs to their children, but by what right do they teach their children lies? Isn’t telling children lies, and making it more likely, by various means, that they will take these lies for the truth, an offence against the right of any person to know what is true and what is false? Human freedom (insofar as we are free — and I don’t want to get tangled up in the free-will problem here) depends on knowing the truth. Being told, and expected to believe, as Aristotle would have told us, that some persons are born to be slaves, is contrary to respect for human rights. But so is the teaching of religious stories, no matter how ancient, no matter how important they may be to us as parents or religious leaders, whose effect as by-products of a number of evolved cognitive abilities is to subvert our very capacity to know and understand the world and human life for what it is.
Take something that Veronica Abbass has just posted as a comment (thank you Veronica). This, from Frank Pavone, the National Director of Priests for Life:
the proclamation of the Gospel of Christ is that He alone has authority over life and death. Neither the mother, nor the father, nor the state, nor the individual herself, can claim absolute dominion over life. “Nobody lives as his own master, and nobody dies as his own master. While we live, we are responsible to the Lord, and when we die, we die as His servants. Both in life and death, we are the Lord’s” (Rom. 14:7-8).
Pavone quotes from Paul’s letter to the Romans as though it merely states facts. We belong to the Lord. Period. That’s why assisted dying or abortion are not within the power of human beings to carry out or to regulate. This, despite the fact that there is not a shred of evidence either for the Lord, or what it means to say that we are the Lord’s. Time to tell people like Pavone to hold their baseless superstitions if they like, but that it amounts to lying to try to convey these beliefs to others as though they were the truth, and that it is an unwarrantable intrusion into the lives of others to make these groundless beliefs determinative of our laws or of the way that we live together. Believe what you will, but be prepared to give evidence for your beliefs if you want to bring them into the public sphere and expect them to have an effect on how we organise our lives. This goes doubly for children, because children’s minds should not be perverted by being asked to believe superstitious tales. They should be given the ability to think for themselves and wisely, not to parrot the crazy beliefs of their elders.
My old French teacher, “Growler” Stephenson, always used to say that he found the the image of Christ as “The Good Shepherd” a telling one: in the final analysis, it is not for the benefit of the sheep that the shepherd protects them.
Interesting, but how do you then explain people like me (I know I’m not the only one), who listened to the tall tales told in Sunday school and immediately groked that it was a load of nonsense?
My atheism began at age 8, after I intuited that there could not ever have been such a thing as a big flood and a boat with ALL the animals on it. I don’t consider myself that exceptional … a bright child who liked to read everything.
How did I not get sucked in? And, importantly, how can we reproduce the effect so that other children can get the same “myths are myths” sensibility?
Kevin, I was going to ask the same question. I was enrolled in both Catholic grade school (1-8) and Catholic high school. Yet, I don’t think there was ever a time when I really bought into religion. Oh, I remember praying to god when I was young, but even as a child I could tell things like Noah’s flood and the Garden of Eden were just fanciful stories. And by 8th grade I more or less considered myself an atheist, even if I didn’t know the word. I remember being quite shocked when many of my friends expressed belief in god. I just assumed that, like me, they could see the inherent silliness of it all.
So what explains this? One explanation is that my indoctrination didn’t begin early enough. Perhaps 1st grade is too late. My parents weren’t particularly religious, and only my mother attended Sunday services with us children. That lack of fervency may have contributed to my early ambivalence.
A second explanation is that some people are simply born more skeptical than others, just as others may be more naturally talented in subjects like math or language.
A third explanation, and the one I prefer, is that rationality and skepticism are learned skills that can fostered early in children. I wasn’t born skeptical. In fact, I was naturally quite credulous, devouring any book about ghosts, aliens, cryptozoology or similarly weird paranormal phenomena. Ironically, it was the dismissal of these subjects by the authority figures in my life that led me to look for suitably convincing evidence. I knew that “scientists” considered ghosts (to use but one example) were considered unproven and unlikely. How could that be when I had seen convincing evidence? Had that not seen the same photos I had? Well, turns out they had seen the same evidence I had, but scientists had alternative explanations. Better explanations, as it turned out. And at some point I realized all the books I had been reading about “strange” phenomena were utterly worthless because they only presented the evidence in such a way that supported their contentions and excluding more compelling alternate explanations. Once I understood human bias and the worthlessness of anecdotal data, it was a short hop from disbelieving in the Loch Ness Monster to the risen Christ.
I know this doesn’t work for everybody. Even eminent scientists can compartmentalize their beliefs in such a way that they never subject their religious assumptions to the same level of critical scrutiny given to other topics. However, I’m convinced that best way to loosen the grip of religion on society is to teach children to think critically and skeptically at a young age–something which is not done in U.S. schools.
Reason is a muscle. It needs to be exercised to be effective. Religion flourishes where reason is allowed to atrophy.
If I may say so, this description itself is enough to enamor me of your late wife’s mind and spirit!
This also brings up something I would love to ask you about. How did your relationship work with you being a believer and her being a non? This is something that greatly concerns me, as an atheist guy who doesn’t meet a whole lot of atheist girls. I find that there are certain beliefs and values that two people need to share to make a relationship work. If I may ask, what was it for you and Elizabeth (before you became an atheist)? How were your differing religious beliefs not an obstacle?
H.H., you said:
In one sense this is not so. Reason is not science, and a lot of religion is quite elaborately and scholastically rational. The problem is that it is not empirical, not that it is not rational.
That’s the first point. The second point is that religion functions in the context of authority and costly sacrifice, as theory of religion puts it, and this has a tendency to lead one to secpticism of one’s own scepticism. As a child I was very sceptical, but scepticism was always expressed within the context of believing. There was no other context in a missionary family and church school. So, one expressed doubts within that context. The result is a strange amalgam of belief and disbelief, but at the heart of it was the heavy authority of religion, and, as part of that, the costly “sacrifice” that people made on religion’s behalf, in the sense of uprooting themselves and their families to spread the gospel to those who did not believe. However, living in India with servants, etc., was not a great hardship. The costly sacrifice was made by the children, more than by the adults.
Tim. Elizabeth’s and my relationship was in many ways very special. Of course, I was deeply influenced by her, and it was not long before I was speaking as sceptically as she, though still within the limits of being Anglican. In many ways, neither of us were Christians as my ministry wound down, but we were still Anglican. In fact, Elizabeth identified being Anglican as a possibility, in a cultural sense, but she would never have said that she was a Christian. We belonged to the Sea of Faith group in Britain for awhile, and read most of Don Cupitt’s books (still have them, and refer to them from time to time). The idea that religion might become a form of humanism seemed promising for awhile. However, scriptures have a way of reasserting themselves, and the humanist part tends to get lost along the way. During the nineties the Anglican Church was beginning to swing back towards evangelicalism, with the omnipresent Alpha Course, and it became less and less possible to treat religion as a human creation that could be freely modified to accommodate progress in science and cultural change. So, though a nonbeliever, Elizabeth fit very well into the kind of parish community we created (she and I together), but that was (as we saw it, for we did attend church on holidays and occasionally simply got up and left, and once, quite clearly indicating our disgust) a little island of sanity in what was becoming objectionably religious. In this respect Elizabeth’s and my relationship was, in a sense, sui generis.
Eric, I respectfully disagree that faith is reasonable or rational, even while acknowledging neither of these things alone constitute the whole of the scientific method.
Faith is inherently irrational. And the defense of faith (apologetics), which often tries to appear rational, could be considered pseudo-rational at best. Apologists routinely violate many of the rules which dictate rational discourse, such as when assuming their conclusion, for instance. Also, like my childhood books on ghosts, they largely ignore competing hypotheses and fundamental principles of reason like Occham’s razor. And “scholastically rational” sounds like another name for special pleading.
When theologians talk about reason, it is within the context of faith. John Wesley made a lot of noise concerning ‘Reason’ as one of the pillars of Methodism. The RCC theorists are deep into ‘Reason’. In all such cases, intricate and careful arguments based on logic and reason are immediately irrelevant in reality because the premises are unproven or just plain wrong. The most complicated explication of any religious doctrine, regardless of its length, is wrong without a proven premise, and in itself does not prove the premise.
As to the indoctrination of children in religious dogma, it truly is child abuse.
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Ah, but I did not say that faith was either reasonable or rational. Faith is quite different to theology. All I said was that religion includes rational aspects. In fact, if you read Atran’s and Henrich’s paper, you will see how people, when asked to tell about their god, immediately go all theological, and speak about their gods in apparently rational theological terms, but give them odd (counterintuitive) powers, but when asked to respond to narratives about their gods people interpreted their gods in terms of our intuitive ontology. This is interesting, because theology is the “rational” enterprise, and yet people are more “reasonable” when they are responding to stories about their gods.
All I wanted to point out is that, in one sense, theologians are obsessively rational, even though there is no evidence — or it is, I think, true to say that there is no evidence — for the things about which they reason. We often make the distinction between reason and rationalisation here, but it is hard to accuse Aquinas, for example, of irrationality, even though it is appropriate to say that the things about which he reasons do not exist! What Loren Amacher says is correct:
But since that is true about a lot of our reasoning, it is not immediately relevant to whether the people who indulge in such argumentation are or are not rational. Our disagreement, however, is not a substantive one, but merely about the meaning of the word ‘reason’. One can be quite rational — and wrong. If we restrict the word ‘rational’ to those who speak the truth, then very few of us are rational in that sense, since, even with the best will in the world, we will still be often wrong.
Yes, religious apologists may be “reasonable” only within clearly delineated and artificial constraints, which is why I balk at awarding them the label. Eric makes a good point that religion relies upon appeals to authority to enforce those boundaries.
Interesting post and comments. I wonder if the idea of innate temperaments might have some bearing on the issue of childhood beliefs ‘sticking’?
Although there are many models of temperament around, with only sketchy scientific explanation, the concept has been around for millennia. One of the ways of naming 4 basic temperaments is Hedonist/Idealist/Rationalist/Traditionalist. Each type has different primary values. I guess that Traditionalists are more likely to value ritual and routine. Idealists might value the social cohesion and moral advantages (I know, I know) of religion. Hedonists might be swayed by the pomp and experience.
I wonder if atheists are more likely to be temperamentally Rational? They certainly value truth and knowledge.
Ew that picture is horrible. So is the Pavone dictat.
They make me cross.
Yes, horrible and shocking. But when people suggest that the religious never thought of their god in quite a literal way as the big Sugar Daddy in the sky, that’s not really so. Even if at later ages kids are taught something a bit more sophisticated, it can be boiled down to this, which is a bit of a shock. “God loves some better than others, and those who are baptised best of all, and to them he gives gifts!” The Us-Them structure of that is very clear. And anyone who, like the present pope, says that his is the only true church is really saying that God loves people that belong to his church more than God loves anyone else. It’s pathetic.
As a small child I once slapped my Reverend during children’s story time at church; an auspicious start to a life of non-believing.
Quite right. But Aristotle’s failure to apply his own critical reasoning methodology to his culture’s unsupportable, oppressive, and transparently unjust treatment of slaves (and women) was just that: a failure, an inconsistency, something that one cannot help but find jarring and out of place while reading his ethical writings. In contrast, the oppression and injustice encouraged — indeed, insisted upon — by Christianity and other authoritarian religious traditions and institutions are not at all inconsistent or jarring, but rather flow naturally from the ideas at the core of them. As you correctly translate Paul:
At least Aristotle only claimed that some humans are born to be slaves. Christianity (and Islam, and Judaism) would make slaves of us all.
I have been reading Social Movements: Identity, Culture and the State (2002) edited by David S Meyers et al., and it mentions something interesting:
“If we can move beyond the crudest biological determinism, we recognize that the process of turning physical features or social practices into “identities” is forged from interaction between people and [the] state. By forcing some people to sit in the back of the bus, wear a yellow star, or hide their sexual orientations, states create the conditions in which particular identities develop. States can create identities by endorsing or prohibiting religious or sexual practices, by regulating access to social goods, and by setting rules of interaction between groups and individuals. Within these parameters, activists choose how to define themselves, by alliances, claims, and tactics” (Page 5.)
Now this makes sense to me (even if somewhat Marxist). Group identity forms because of external oppression (whether the state or society) or perhaps by circumstances and conditions. Differences, choices, activities of individuals become collective identity when they are under threat.
Left-handed tea-spoon stirrers do not recognize each other as a group identity, as far as I am aware, because no persecution currently takes place against left-handed tea-spoon stirrers.
But then once such an identity establishes, it then also seems to persist, and so too must the feeling of persecution, even when there is none. If religion is an identity, then perhaps it is a collective-identity based on the mythology of persecution.
I even think that it is the myth of being persecuted and the collective identity being confused with personal identity that is the mass-delusion that generates religious belief.
Thank you Eric. I am so pleased you found my comment useful.
Today, The Educated Imagination has posted a CBC video of an interview with Richard Dawkins and a quote from Northrop Frye on God. Frye’s quote is relevant to this discussion.
http://fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca/2011/06/22/24151/
This reminds me of Philip Roth’s great short story, “The Conversion of the Jews,” in which the little boy, Ozzie, makes everyone promise to “never hit anybody about God.”
I’m not a philosopher, and can quickly get bamboozled by obscure philosophical arguments. I was raised Catholic, and attended Catholic schools from first through twelfth grades. But as I grew up, I began to see Catholic theology as BS, and I remember getting marked down on work I did in high school religion classes because it wasn’t “religious” enough. Still, it took me a looong time as an adult to grow out of religion entirely; I had to see a lot of evidence before I could convince myself that it really was a load of compost.
The biggest regret I have is my mother’s Catholic background, where she was taught that sex was evil, only for the express purpose of satisfying men and making babies. She indoctrinated me young, and it took me years to get over the internalized self-suppression. My poor husband had to help me through it. For that I can never forgive the Catholic Church… and in my off moments I wonder if my parents ever had any true happiness in bed.
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Thank you.
Well, that may be why you didn’t get sucked in.
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