The Atheist Billboard Campaign v2.0
Following on from the Atheist Bus Campaign – “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life” – there’s a new billboard campaign with a slightly more political edge. The first one I’ve seen is on the huge advertising hoarding at the Old Street roundabout in London EC1.
The text reads “please don’t label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself.”
The logic behind the campaign is simple. We would find it very strange to describe a child as a Marxist child, a Keynesian child or a Schumpeterian child, but we have no problem in describing a child as an adherent of the religious philosophies of Christianity, Islam, Judaism or anything else, even though they are clearly far too young to understand the concepts involved and have not made a free, informed choice.
It is, perhaps, a little optimistic to hope that we will stop assigning religious labels to children who are far too young to know what those labels mean (except possibly in terms of ‘them’ and ‘us’ or ‘the other’) as religion is so tied in with culture and identity. Nevertheless, I subscribe to something said on the British Humanist Association website:
Labelling children as if they innately “belong” to a particular religion, while ascribing incompatible beliefs to infants who “belong” to other religions, can only serve as an obstacle to understanding between children around the world.
More information at humanism.org.uk/billboards.
xD.
November 19th, 2009 at 8:14 am
But the parallel between Marxism and Christianity doesn’t hold: whereas being a Marxist is about holding certain propositions to be true, part of being a Christian is being a member of a community. There is no problem with suggesting one may be born into a community, any more than there is of being born into a country; the understanding and profession of the community’s doctrines merely belong to a different stage of the member’s development.
November 19th, 2009 at 9:32 am
Mike,
That makes two assumptions; firstly that there is no Marxist community and that membership of the Christian community carries no doctrinal implication.
I would make two comparisons. Firstly, there are many Christian communities, especially Baptists, who only practice believer’s baptism. They don’t baptise children as they feel the child cannot understand the importance of the act and what it means. Only conscious baptism is acceptable. There is an acceptance of this in the C of E tradition, where baptism is used as a rite of passage to celebrate a new birth, while confirmation fulfils the function of conscious baptism.
I believe I am correct in saying that certain Amish communities, while they will ostracise those who make a firm, adult commitment to the Ordnung and then go back on their pledges, let people born into the community to remain members of the community if they don’t take on board the teachings of the church.
I have a real problem with this idea of community doctrine. It makes dissidence very hard. As we have discussed before, I have real problems with the idea of a grundnorm.
I have to go back to Thomas Paine on this one; if the idea of a hereditary monarch makes as much sense as a hereditary mathematician, why does hereditary philosophy make any sense?
November 19th, 2009 at 10:47 am
A large part of any person’s beliefs will be hereditary. A child is born into a community of people who have certain moral norms and a basic outlook on the world – a ‘worldview’, if you like – a large part of which won’t be consciously taught to the child, but will still inform his worldview. This implicit knowledge and tradition, in which the child is brought up, is what makes him a member of a community.
Now, as the child grows up, he should critically reflect upon his worldview, and either accept or reject this tradition, and decide upon his relation to his community like this. This is a very different stage of being a member of a community.
However, the two do not preclude each other, but each is appropriate for people at different levels of intellectual development. This tiresome ‘atheist bus’ campaign seems to suggest that only the second form of community membership is valid: a premise which I think is quite silly.
November 23rd, 2009 at 2:43 pm
There is a difference; religious education is hijacking the means by which children learn from their surroundings to indoctrinate them. Moreover, establishing a religion in that manner makes it harder for one to reject it (and I’d say, atm, that it’s a bigger issue in the US than the UK).