Religious Indoctrination of Children

Excerpt from Alexander the Atheist's blog.

Cognitive Development of Children

Early in the 1920s, Swiss Biologist Jean Piaget started working on his theory of cognitive development. His theory, which remains dominant in educational psychology, describes four stages of logical reasoning capability (Ormrod, 25-30):

Sensorimotor stage
(birth until approximately 2 years of age)
Preoperational stage
(about 2 years until approximately 6 or 7 years of age)
Concrete Operations stage
(6 or 7 until approximately 11 or 12 years of age)
Formal Operations stage
(11 or 12 years of age through adulthood)

Note: While the age an individual reaches a particular cognitive stage of development varies, the sequence does not.

Unsurprisingly, not much religious indoctrination occurs during the Sensorimotor stage due to the fact that children do not really have the cognitive capacity to be indoctrinated and are still learning such basic functions as how to speak. Religious indoctrination really begins during the Preoperational stage and it often starts at this stage because anyone familiar with even the basics of the cognitive development of humans knows children do not have the capacity to use critical thinking to assess religious concepts that are presented as indisputable, absolute truth and reinforced by various authorities like parents and religious leaders. As a result, most indoctrinated children will simply assume the truth of everything they have been indoctrinated with when they become adults.

Two major characteristics of the Preoperational stage are Preoperational Egocentrism and Transductive Reasoning. Preoperational Egocentrism is the inability of children to see things from someone else's perspective because they view their own perspective as the only one possible (does this sound familiar?). Transductive Reasoning is where children combine facts that are not related and conclude there is a cause-and-effect relationship because the two events occurred within a short time of each other. (Ormrod, 27) At this stage of cognitive development there can be no reasonable expectation that children can assess any concepts based on an informed opinion and any form of critical thinking. As a result, religious doctrines must be taken on blind acceptance of authority and faith rather than on their supposed merits.

Even when we get to the Concrete Operations stage children can still not fully grasp all of the concepts they are presented or apply anything close to high-level critical thinking skills to them. While children at this stage begin to understand that others have different opinions, and can realize their own perspective may be incorrect, we are still not dealing with high levels of critical thinking. There is still a dependency on concrete reality, making children unable to reason about "abstract, hypothetical, or contrary-to-fact ideas," giving religious concepts the advantage of not having to face any informed criticism (Omrod, 29). Children at this stage are also incapable of controlling or separating variables or testing more than one hypothesis at a time. There is also a problem dealing with proportional reasoning. As a result, it is absurd to reach the conclusion that children are ready to handle concepts as heavy and abstract as the supernatural mover of the universe and saviour of all of mankind when they cannot even grasp how fractions and decimals are related (Ormrod, 29).

A Disturbing Story

My little sister is seven and in first grade (Yes there is a large age gap). The other evening I had a very disturbing conversation with her.

I forget exactly what she was saying, but I overheard her talking about hell, and even though she is seven and innocent and all that, I couldn't help but say to her "Shannon, there is no such thing as hell."

I didn't think this simple comment would create such a problem. I hadn't said anything about God, Heaven, Angels, fairies, Santa Claus, or any of that. I didn't that anything healthy could come out of the concept of a place where one might go to burn for eternity.

My little sister started crying when I told her that.

This goes back to the post I made a few weeks ago about how all children are atheists until they are converted or indoctrinated. Patrick pointed out an obvious flaw in my theory which is that Children, with their vivid imaginations and lack of real-world experience, are more predisposed to soak up any belief systems presented to them. Even I fell victim to this as a child.

But perhaps a bit of background information is necessary at this point. Though technically both Catholic, my parents are pretty atheistic, or at least apatheistic*. I was baptized only at the request of my Catholic grandmother. I was taken to church only on SOME Holidays -- every third Christmas or so. In our household, The Bible did have a place on the bookshelf, but it shared that space with the Bhagavad Gita, The Diamond Sutra (one of many Buddhist teachings), and a dozen or so books about Yoga (my parents were both Yoga teachers at the time).

The point is, in my parent's household, Yahweh is about as holy as Shiva, which is to say, not very.

And yet somehow my little sister has conceived this notion of Hell, and she was convinced that for not believing in it's existence, I would end up there. She stopped crying a little bit to explain this to me.

"If you don't believe, you will just see when you get there." she said.

Disturbing indeed.

I should further point out that my sister lives in Western Massachusetts and goes to a private, secular school. Evangelical Christianity, where hell is most stressed, must be almost non-existent amongst my sister's social networks, and even plain-vanilla Christianity is an uncommon site in the community. At her school, Bible stories are taught. But the stories that are taught have nothing to do with hell or any of the nastier aspects of Institutionalized religion, and they are taught right alongside Norse mythology.

Something is seriously gone wrong if even in such a theoretically secular community, a seven year old is condemning her older brother to hell.

Fortunately, her "faith" in this idea was not deeply held, and over the course of several days I was able to convince her that I was not, in fact, going to burn for an eternity in hell. She even said a few things which surprised me, without my prompting.

"Some people say, 'I've never seen God', and I tell them that they are silly. 'Look in front of you,' I say, 'God is not a person. God is everything. God is the world.'"

This was quite impressive for a seven year old, even my exceptionally intelligent sister (though I may be a bit biased on that count). My guess is that she picked this up from a religious moderate, most likely my Grandmother. These religious moderates are people who are brought up with a particular faith that is so ingrained in their psyche that even when faced with overwhelming evidence, they cannot bear to give it up, and so they "reshape" the faith to fit a more naturalistic world view. They fall under the category of "spiritual theists" as far as I am concerned, and in my previous posts you can read more about this.

But regardless, my little sister is now of the opinion that there is something Divine about the Universe itself, which is a belief that I am not all-too concerned about.

I know that I myself had more steadfast Christian beliefs even at the age of 11-12, and so I have hope for this next generation. I just wish people would stop talking about Hell to other people's children. Whether or not you agree with me that the religious indoctrination of children should be considered child abuse, surely attempts to convert OTHER people's susceptible and innocent children is no more noble than cigarette companies trying to get kids hooked on tobacco.

*Aptatheism is the idea that God's existence is a purely academic concern and of no serious concern. Apatheists are atheists in practice.

Everybody's an Atheist

Just a quick note for this week.

Everybody is born an atheist. Anybody who isn't probably falls under the category of "clinically insane" and may find that their calling in life is to start a religion. But other than that, we're all born as godless unbelievers.

That is our hope for the downfall of organized religion. Convincing true believers that their "God" is an immaginary friend is time consuming and generally futile. But children are born with the right idea. All we have to do is prevent the god-botherers from getting to them.

Cheers,

Josh