Excerpt #11 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
Brainwashing Children
“On a hot summer afternoon in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, hundreds of young Muslin students sleep in the shadow of a mosque’s arches, enduring the hard stone floor and swarming cloudsof flies. Suddenly the call to prayer resounds through a loudspeaker. The boys spring up to wash in the ritual preparation.
“Starting as young as 8, these boys spend six hours a day memorizing the Koran, with breaks only for rest and prayer.
“The students get no lessons in math, geography, history or computers. Allah’s will as recorded in the holy Koran, the teacher say, is all they need to understand the universe.”
“The system of belief is summed up this way by student Syed Ayaz Ali Shah: ‘Since the days of the Prophet, there are only two forces on earth, Muslims and infidels. And their fight will go on until Judgment Day.” Time Magazine
“Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.” – Kurt Vonnegut
My study of religion at Yale and Harvard, costly in time and funds, was a liberating and rewarding experience.
It cleared my mind of religious dogma that as child I was brainwashed by the Catholic church to believe, as children continue to be today by one religion or another.
Today, children continue to be controlled by religious leaders.
“Give me a child before the age of seven, and I will have him for life.” – St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order
My personal clearance of religious dogma was the second most valuable benefit I derived from my divinity school experience.
The most valuable benefit was the discovery, on my own, of that for which I was searching.
It happened like this.
With a cleared mind, I compared and contrasted our present circumstances with our ancient past.
To paraphrase sociologist Lester Milbrath, over time we have developed a complex and integrated social, technical, economic, and military system so powerful that we can dominate and destroy each other and the rest of the natural world.
Alongside it, we have retained an ethical system based on very old ideas.
Ancient western religions, for example, would have us believe that a god exists as a monarch, rules over a kingdom, is distant from the world, relates primarily to humans, and saves whatever he chooses, thus relieving us of our responsibility for saving ourselves and otherliving things.
Science, on the other hand, explains our physical world but provides no moral guidance for living within it.
The lack of congruence between our major inherited religions and the power and exuberance of our modern world is gravely problematic.
This is a reality that most of us choose to deny, or one of which we are unaware, and one that is perpetuated by clinging to ancient fictional notions of what is sacred.
“It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and experiment.” – Galileo Galilei, The Authority of Scripture in Philosophical Controversies