Indoctrination

Sometimes it's easy to forget how impressionable children are. We are, apparently, evolved to listen to adults and do as they say. The child who listens to a grown-up when they say not to jump into the crocodile-infested waters has a far greater chance of surviving than the child who does not listen, and becomes some reptile's dinner.

But this very mechanism that keeps us out of harm's way - this nearly devout respect towards the advice of our elders - has another different, entirely unintended affect. In my mind, it is one of the chief reasons that religious thought and superstition are still so pervasive, even in a time where human understanding is greater than ever before. An adult tells a child that there's a god watching over all of them, the god of their clan, who empowers them to defeat their tribal enemies. The adult warns that the child should never, ever doubt this god or blaspheme against him, because he is wrathful and will bring harm on the child and the child's family. What is the child to do, except to take the advice as truth? When the child grows up, the ideas that he or she was raised with becomes inseparable from truth, and so the new adult teaches the children all the advice that was given all those years ago: stay away from the crocodile-infested water, don't jump from a high tree, and don't forget to pay homage to the clan's god, or great horrors will be visited upon them all.

The longer a mind is enslaved to dogma, the harder it becomes to remove the shackles. Eventually, you come to love the chains, make excuses for them, and despise anyone who does not wear them. As history tells us, all too often, dogma (religious and secular) has always led to harm. Moral absolutists will tell you that right and wrong are predetermined and never-changing (strangely enough, they seem to forget that at one time, slavery, the subjugation of women, racism, and genocide were all at one point deemed to be "right" if done in a certain manner. Sadly enough, the subjugation of women still exists in the modern world, yet not even the women being subjugated seem to want to put an end to it).

Religion is not going away any time soon. Its backwardness will be with us for a long time, slowing down progress in education, critical thinking, science, medicine, human rights, and the abolition of the various vice laws that put harmless people into the prison system, costing us vast amounts of taxpayer money. Our best bet in deterring this malevolent (though well-meaning) force is by continuing to battle on behalf of reason and rationality. We must protect education at all costs; after all, those impressionable youth that will one day be adults are listening to what we say, intently, with wide and curious eyes. We could fill their heads with superstition and they would believe every word of it. Or we could teach them about reality and how the world works. I think the latter would ensure a safer and more enlightened society.