Bef at Footbullet.net has a few good answers to this question.

(Warning:  Two disturbing photos. Don’t read while eating spaghetti with meatballs.)

Yeah, you may have noticed I’m doing my BBC headline check I do every once in a while. I’m shamefully lax when it comes to checking news sites, I’ll admit. I invariably get horribly depressed by the crappy state of the world, not to mention the endless amounts of un-news I have to sift through to find anything remotely interesting.

This article (I posted the image here but it broke the tables, so I removed it) caught my eye. I much prefer this statement to the original “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Not that I disagree with that, but I felt that it was unlikely to change anyone’s minds. I actually have (perhaps a foolishly optimistic) hope that this one might actually make a few people stop and think. 

I think it would be very hard not to share what you believe to be the truth with your child. I have no intention of having children, but if I did I honestly do not know how I would approach it. I believe Atheism to be the natural state – I believe that there is no God, and so the only reason that people believe there is one is that they have been told to. Obviously, religious people believe the opposite. It’s certainly a tricky one, and not one I’m sure I have the perfect answer to. 

I suppose the ideal might be to teach a child about all beliefs as a theory, from the context of history and sociological effect, and for the mythology. There’s no denying the Bible is an important piece of literature in the Western world, with many names and quotations coming from it. Teaching a child to always question things and think them through before accepting them as fact, teaching them acceptance of others and not to be judgemental. I believe that the outcome of this would be a strong turn towards secularism, or at least less organized religion (the dangerous kind) and more general vague spirituality, which I think is nutty but fairly harmless.

The second article I want to share with you is certainly related. It is on the matter of faith schools. Can you guess how I feel about faith schools? Really fucking angry, that’s how I feel about faith schools! How is this shit legal? How in the hell do people get away with brain washing on such a grand scale? You know what, I don’t even care about the discrimination issues here! I don’t care about the working rights of anyone who would willingly attach themselves to such an establishment. 

So you have a child, a child that you supposedly love and care for. You believe in God and want your child to live a good life and go to heaven. I don’t agree with you, but I can understand the mindset. I get it, I really do. If we could make our loved ones immortal just by telling them so, wouldn’t we all? So while I think that indoctrinating children is wrong, there are degrees. I can appreciate the reasons for doing it, even if I cannot condone the actions.

But when you take away from your child the right to hear dissenting opinions, you have crossed a line. When you wrap them up in cotton wool and bubble wrap and blinkers to keep them from the world, blotting out the option of free thought and skepticism (not to mention alternative religious beliefs) then you are taking away their rights as a human. You are giving them no choice, no alternate forms of influence, no way to learn and grow.

The strongest minded children may be able to shake that off and find their own path. My boyfriend came up with his own (and, to my knowledge, unique) reason for being an atheist at age five. That’s some impressive stubbornness, I didn’t start thinking about anything along those lines until age eleven, and I wasn’t ever at a faith school. But for many, how you are raised is how you stay. With parents on one side and teachers on the other, both force feeding one set of unshakable beliefs down your throat, what chance do you stand?

I want to tell you, finally, about a girl I work with. I’ll not share her name. She is close to my age, and is a very friendly, happy person. She describes herself as Catholic. She does not know what the word Atheist means. She also did not understand my meaning when I said that, although my boyfriend’s mother is a vicar and we live in a vicarage, he and I will not be attending church this Christmas. She literally could not comprehend the possibility that someone with Christian parents might not follow their beliefs. It was completely outside the realm of her experience and thought. 

That is brainwashing in action. And it is terrifyingly successful.

Story time, every body. My parents like to listen to Radio 4. Well, correction, my mum likes to listen to Radio 4. My dad prefers Classic FM, but my mum can’t take the advertising. Anyway, off topic. Point is, every day before school I would hear Thought for the Day while I was eating my breakfast. It always bugged me that, whether it was saying something I could agree with or not (and don’t get me wrong, there are occasionally some good points made), it was always from a religion or faith based perspective. 

I bitched about it a little, and my mum said that she had heard humanists on it before. I doubted this (my mum’s not a liar but she has the leakiest of all memories) but left it alone. Well, it turns out I was right. 

The BBC Trust has rejected complaints about a ban on non-religious contributors to the Thought For The Day slot on Radio 4’s Today programme.

Allowing only religious content did not breach BBC guidelines on impartiality or its duty to reflect religious and other beliefs, its governing body said.

Well then, the BBC needs new guidelines, because those are a heap of shit.

I have a whole fuckton of respect for the BBC most of the time, because they have rules about impartiality. I mean, it’s infuriating sometimes when they’re reporting on something I think is disgusting (pro-lifers, for example) and acting like there’s two sides to it. But I take comfort in the fact that somewhere out there a fundie fucktard is fuming as the BBC reports on my rights with the same relaxed, fact based impartiality. 

But how? How is it goddamn* impartial to ignore the opinions and beliefs of an entire section of your audience? The title of the program is not “Religious Indoctrination for the Day”, nor is it “Entirely Unfounded Belief for the Day”. It is “Thought for the Day”. And goodness knows, thinking is something that Atheists, Skeptics and Humanists are good at. 

The BBC are very good at ignoring complaints, but I have made complaints that caused changes before and it’s worth a shot. The complaints form can be found here. 

*I hope my fellow atheists will forgive, but I like blasphemous slang. Not because it pisses of Christians, although that is a plus, but because all through my childhood I wasn’t allowed to use it and I hate censorship.

Edited to add my complaint to the BBC, because I got all wordy ‘n shit. The way I do. You get two posts in one!

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Kiva is a charitable organization that lets people give small loans to entrepreneurs around the world. As of October 4, 2009, Kiva has distributed $95,136,910 in loans from 568,810 lenders. A total of 135,613 loans have been funded. The average loan size is $406.45. Its current repayment rate is 98.42% [Wikipedia]. As of today, the largest community on Kiva is the Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious group which has raised, as of today, a total of $1,168,650.00. The next largest group is the Kiva Christians, which have raised $727,000. I’m not trying to spark a competition, but I’d like to make a point. Morality, charity, and compassion are not attributes that the religious community, or any community for that matter, can monopolize. The Atheist group gives, in their own words, because “we care about the suffering of human beings”.

I would encourage all of our readers to do what they can, not because of any desire to be competetive and to beat out the Christian group (though I won’t deny that was one of my motivations for joining), but to show people that people can still be good, moral people without living in fear of eternal punishment and hellfire. I know I don’t.

P.S. I’m sorry I was gone for so long. School stuff got a bit busy. I’ll be posting more often in the coming days and weeks.