It is almost a given in our society that kids should be raised with religion, because if they aren’t they will grow up to be juvenile delinquents, right? Wrong. Wronger than wrong. Not even wrong. The assumption is so bigoted and breathtakingly inane that it doesn’t deserve a debunking, but it gets one nonetheless in this volume, from nonbelievers of all stripes, who show how and why raising children without religion is not only a loving and ethical approach to parenthood, it is an honorable one.
– Michael Shermer

The preceding quote is from the forward to Dale McGowan’s Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion, a collection of essays on raising children with a nonreligious, skeptical worldview.  Reasonable, honest atheists would never claim that raising a child with religious belief would by nature cause the child to grow up as a bad person (although some might argue that such belief can lead toward some unfortunate intellectual consequences), as no honest religious person would likewise claim about us.

The dishonest anti-atheist bigots, though, have no such scruples.  They ignore the fact that morals come from many sources, and that religion in practice has no historically valid claim to moral perfection.  That is, considering that the majority of people on our planet are religious to some degree, crime and acts that would be considered “immoral” by the religion’s own standards are still common by those who follow such faiths.  Clearly, being raised with religious belief does not in any way guarantee that one will be a “good person,” however that is defined.
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On Saturday, the New York Times published a commentary from Susan Jacoby, program director of the Center for Inquiry-New York City and author of the best-seller The Age of American Unreason.  In “Keeping the Faith, Ignoring the History,” Jacoby discusses and dismantles the assumption that religious groups being provided taxpayer funds for (supposedly) social services is both constitutional and something that has always been, or should be done.  She questions, as I have consistently here on SDR, that the predominant controversy has been how religious groups use the money they receive, rather than whether religious groups should be given tax payer funds at all.

I’m not going to go into all of my arguments against tax payer funding of religious social services organizations again.  I know when to admit I’ve been beaten; Jacoby presents those and further arguments much better than I ever could.  Read her article and you will get more out of it than I can give you.

Excerpt:

It is truly dismaying that amid all the discussion about President Obama’s version of faith-based community initiatives, there has been such a widespread reluctance to question the basic assumption that government can spend money on religiously based enterprises without violating the First Amendment. The debate has instead focused on whether proselytizing or religious hiring discrimination should be permitted when church groups take public money. This shows how easy it is to institutionalize a bad idea based on unexamined assumptions about service to a greater good.

Anti-atheist religious bigots have quite a knack for projection – projecting their faults onto those they are prejudiced against.  Take for instance serial atheist-basher Ray Comfort and his new book You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can’t Make Him Think: Answers to Questions from Angry Skeptics. He claims we are angry, yet he is the one constantly bashing a large population.

There are good and bad people, atheist and religious.  Atheists, in general, don’t go around bashing religious people for simply being religious.  We criticize religion and the beliefs themselves, but since when are those beyond criticism?  We disagree with and criticize their beliefs, but we don’t bash the people.  Now, this is not to say we don’t criticize religious people, but it is for their actions.  When actions that deserve criticism are religiously based or religiously justified, then are we not to bring that up?  A bigot is a bigot, people should expect to be criticized for damaging, dangerous, and disgusting public actions justified religiously.  Those are individual people, not all the religious.  Comfort doesn’t make the same distinction when talking about atheists.  He can’t get by his bigotry.

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