Is Religious Education Child Abuse?

Human babies born today are more or less the same neurologically and biologically as human babies born ten of thousand years ago. We tend to think of humans from the past as more primitive than us, less capable of advanced thinking, less smart. But humans haven't evolved significantly in that regard in millennia. The scale required to really see noticeable changes in structures like brains in that regard is millions of years, not thousands. So it's not that a human born ten thousand years ago was less neurologically advanced than us--they weren't dumber. They just had access to less of the knowledge of the world that we had.

So really the only difference between a baby born today and one born ten thousand years ago is what you put into them. If you give them a first rate education that capitalizes on all the most recent advances of science and history, if you feed them well, if you nurture them in all the ways that we now know through science are the best for them, then you maximize their potential in the era of human history that they happened into.

But in our culture, a very strong presumption in favor of the parents' rights to control their child's upbringing has developed. It is so strong, that we let them teach the children anything they want, take them anywhere they want, and in effect indoctrinate them in any way they see fit. The parents' treatment of the child has to reach extremes before we will intervene. If there is outright physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, we legally intervene.

But consider educational child abuse. If we take a medieval or ancient worldview that makes simplistic and demonstratively false claims about the world, and if we teach that child that that is the truth, we rob them of thousands of years of important advances in science, physics, biology, history, and medicine. Consider the large percentage of the population who still believes that the earth was created 6,000 years ago. Consider how many people don't understand the rudiments of the scientific method. Consider the $40 billion or so that Americans spend on alternative, unproven medical treatments. The majority of Americans believe in ghosts, psychic powers, communication with the dead, and other paranormal phenomena. Every time a parent passes some of that to a child, the child has lost the opportunity to find out the truth, she's less equipped to deal with the real world as we know it, and her life will be filled with more ignorance, fear, and superstition. And she goes on to propagate those ideas, miring all of us in the past.

If we inculcate child with a simplistic set of moral principles from an ancient culture, we leave them ill equipped to deal with the radically different social, technological, medical, and psychological issues that face us now when we have to make responsible moral decisions. Consider the Ten Commandments that are so often touted as the pinnacle of moral guidance. It's naïve to think that we can resolve complicated new moral dilemmas like the morally acceptable use of stem cells to cure disease, or end of life euthanasia, or other medical decisions that are made complicated by 21st century advances in technology with a handful of aphorisms from the 2nd century. You will not find any clear answers to moral questions about in vitro fertilization, or fetal genetic testing in the Bible. But you will find some thoughtful guidance and relevant information in the works of moral philosophers, researchers, and analysts in the 21st century.

When parents impart a religious worldview that is 1,000 years old, or 2,000 years old to their children that ignores what humanity has learned about the universe, about history, about human psychology, about medicine, and everything else, they do a grievous harm to that child. The point would be obvious if a parent decided to only teach their child addition, but refused to let them learn multiplication, algebra, and calculus. And if a parent told their child that the food in the grocery store nourishes because it is inhabited by friendly benevolent spirits that help the body from the inside, we'd also be scandalized. If a parent told their child that everything that people think about history is a myth--there was no American revolution, there was no discovery of electricity, there was no World War I and II--but instead, all of the humans on the planet were put here last week by magical fairies, it would be obvious that the parent is not fit and the child's interests are not being served. So how is giving a child a religious education any different?