While “Jesus Camp” grabs all the headlines, another documentary that chronicles Evangelical indoctrination of children should not be overlooked — HBO’s “Friends of God.”
A clip:
“As a Christian you cannot believe in evolution…”
One of the great paradoxes of dogmatic monotheistic religion is why their God should demand a blind reliance on faith over reason. If Man is created in God’s image (or more generally, if God created us), then He also created our rational faculty, no? How can using the brain that God supposedly gave us be a sin?
The resolution of the contradiction is of course that “faith in God” actually reduces down to “faith in clerics.” It’s not about obeying God; it’s about obeying the preacher.
Meanwhile, a factoid mentioned in “Jesus Camp” is that something like 73% of all home-schooled children are in Evangelical and other religious families. The parents of these children are not trying to provide a “better” education for their children, but rather a redacted education. Their primary, often their exclusive, goal is to “shield” their children from evolution and from science in general.
I am a fervent supporter of the right to home school, but I reject the premise that there is a right to neglect your child by starving them of basic instruction.
(Via badscience by way of Respectful Insolence.)
1 response so far ↓
Link Dave // Feb 19, 2007 at 12:16 pm
How do we reconcile "I reject the premise that there is a right to neglect your child by starving them of basic instruction" with the right of Christian Scientists to deny their children the right to health care? If parents have the right to murder their children through medical neglect doesn't it also follow that parents have the right to "starve them of basic instruction"? The former sounds more injurious than the latter.