The GOD Delusion (49 page)

In
short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by
nonsense, and we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So
we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for
example, in the literal truth of the Bible or that the planets rule
their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children's
teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.

Of
course, such a strong statement needs, and received, much
qualification. Isn't it a matter of opinion what is nonsense? Hasn't
the applecart of orthodox science been upset often enough to chasten us
into caution? Scientists may think it is nonsense to teach astrology
and the literal truth of the Bible, but there are others who think
the opposite, and aren't they entitled to teach it to their children?
Isn't it just as arrogant to insist that children should be taught
science?

I
thank my own parents for taking the view that children should be taught
not so much
what
to think as
how
to
think. If, having been fairly and properly exposed to all the
scientific evidence, they grow up and decide that the Bible is
literally true or that the movements of the planets rule their lives,
that is their privilege. The important point is that it is
their
privilege to decide what they shall think, and not their
parents' privilege to impose it by
force tnajeure.
And
this, of course, is especially important when we reflect that children
become the parents of the next generation, in a position to pass on
whatever indoctrination may have moulded them.

Humphrey
suggests that, as long as children are young, vulnerable and in need of
protection, truly moral guardianship shows itself in an honest attempt
to second-guess what they
would
choose for
themselves if they were old enough to do so. He movingly quotes the
example of a young Inca girl whose 500-year-old remains were found
frozen in the mountains of Peru in 1995. The anthropologist who
discovered her wrote that she had been the victim of a ritual
sacrifice. By Humphrey's account, a documentary film about this young
'ice maiden' was shown on American television. Viewers were
invited 

to
marvel at the spiritual commitment of the Inca priests and to share
with the girl on her last journey her pride and excitement at having
been selected for the signal honour of being sacrificed. The message of
the television programme was in effect that the practice of human
sacrifice was in its own way a glorious cultural invention - another
jewel in the crown of multiculturalism, if you like.

Humphrey
is scandalized, and so am I.

Yet,
how dare anyone even suggest this? How dare they invite us - in our
sitting rooms, watching television - to feel uplifted by contemplating
an act of ritual murder: the murder of a dependent child by a group of
stupid, puffed up,
superstitious, ignorant old men? How dare they invite us to find good
for ourselves in contemplating an immoral action against someone else?

Again,
the decent liberal reader may feel a twinge of unease. Immoral by our
standards, certainly, and stupid, but what about Inca standards?
Surely, to the Incas, the sacrifice was a moral act and far from
stupid, sanctioned by all that they held sacred? The little girl was,
no doubt, a loyal believer in the religion in which she was brought up.
Who are we to use a word like 'murder', judging Inca priests by our own
standards rather than theirs? Perhaps this girl was rapturously happy
with her fate: perhaps she really believed she was going straight to
everlasting paradise, warmed by the radiant company of the Sun God. Or
perhaps - as seems far more likely - she screamed in terror.

Humphrey's
point - and mine - is that, regardless of whether she was a willing
victim or not, there is strong reason to suppose that she would not
have been willing if she had been in full possession of the facts. For
example, suppose she had known that the sun is really a ball of
hydrogen, hotter than a million degrees Kelvin, converting itself into
helium by nuclear fusion, and that it originally formed from a disc of
gas out of which the rest of the solar system, including Earth, also
condensed . . . Presumably, then, she would not have worshipped it as a
god, and this would have altered her perspective on being sacrificed to
propitiate it.

The
Inca priests cannot be blamed for their ignorance, and it could perhaps
be thought harsh to judge them stupid and puffed up. But they can be
blamed for foisting their own beliefs on a child too young to decide
whether to worship the sun or not. Humphrey's additional point is that
today's documentary film makers, and we their audience, can be blamed
for seeing beauty in that little girl's death - 'something that
enriches
our
collective culture'. The same
tendency to glory in the quaintness of ethnic religious habits, and to
justify cruelties in their name, crops up again and again. It is the
source of squirming internal conflict in the minds of nice liberal
people who, on the one hand, cannot bear suffering and cruelty, but on
the other hand have been trained by postmodernists and relativists to
respect other cultures no less than their
own. Female circumcision is undoubtedly hideously painful, it sabotages
sexual pleasure in women (indeed, this is probably its underlying
purpose), and one half of the decent liberal mind wants to abolish the
practice. The other half, however, 'respects' ethnic cultures and feels
that we should not interfere if 'they' want to mutilate 'their' girls.*
The point, of course, is that 'their' girls are actually the girls'
own
girls, and their wishes should not be ignored. Trickier to
answer, what if a girl says she wants to be circumcised? But
would
she, with the hindsight of a fully informed adult, wish that
it had never happened? Humphrey makes the point that no adult woman who
has somehow missed out on circumcision as a child volunteers for the
operation later in life.

* It
is a regular practice in Britain today. A senior Schools Inspector told
me of London girls in 2006 being sent to an 'uncle' in Bradford to be
circumcised. Authorities turn a blind eye, for fear of being thought
racist in 'the community'.

After
a discussion of the Amish, and their right to bring up 'their own'
children in 'their own' way, Humphrey is scathing about our enthusiasm
as a society for 

maintaining
cultural diversity. All right, you may want to say, so it's tough on a
child of the Amish, or the Hasidim, or the gypsies to be shaped up by
their parents in the ways they are - but at least the result is that
these fascinating cultural traditions continue. Would not our whole
civilization be impoverished if they were to go? It's a shame, maybe,
when individuals have to be sacrificed to maintain such diversity. But
there it is: it's the price we pay as a society. Except, I would feel
bound to remind you, we do not pay it,
they
do.

The
issue came to public attention in 1972 when the US Supreme Court ruled
on a test case, Wisconsin versus Yoder, which concerned the right of
parents to withdraw their children from school on religious grounds.
The Amish people live in closed communities in various parts of the
United States, mostly speaking an archaic dialect of German called
Pennsylvania Dutch and eschewing, to varying extents, electricity,
internal combustion engines, buttons and other manifestations of modern
life. There is, indeed, something attractively quaint about an island
of seventeenth-century life as a spectacle for today's eyes. Isn't it
worth preserving, for the sake of the enrichment of human diversity?
And the only way to preserve it
is to allow the Amish to educate their own children in their own way,
and protect them from the corrupting influence of modernity. But, we
surely want to ask, shouldn't the children themselves have some say in
the matter?

The
Supreme Court was asked to rule in 1972, when some Amish parents in
Wisconsin withdrew their children from high school. The very idea of
education beyond a certain age was contrary to Amish religious values,
and scientific education especially so. The State of Wisconsin took the
parents to court, claiming that the children were being deprived of
their right to an education. After passing up through the courts, the
case eventually reached the United States Supreme Court, which handed
down a split (6:1) decision in favour of the parents.
¹⁴²
The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice Warren Burger, included
the following: 'As the record shows, compulsory school attendance to
age 16 for Amish children carries with it a very real threat of
undermining the Amish community and religious practice as they exist
today; they must either abandon belief and be assimilated into society
at large, or be forced to migrate to some other and more tolerant
region.'

Justice
William O. Douglas's minority opinion was that the children themselves
should have been consulted. Did they really want to cut short their
education? Did they, indeed, really want to stay in the Amish religion?
Nicholas Humphrey would have gone further. Even if the children had
been asked and had expressed a preference for the Amish religion, can
we suppose that they would have done so if they had been educated and
informed about the available alternatives? For this to be plausible,
shouldn't there be examples of young people from the outside world
voting with their feet and volunteering to join the Amish? Justice
Douglas went further in a slightly different direction. He saw no
particular reason to give the
religious
views of
parents special status in deciding how far they should be allowed to
deprive their children of education. If religion is grounds for
exemption, might there not be secular beliefs that also qualify?

The
majority of the Supreme Court drew a parallel with some of the positive
values of monastic orders, whose presence in our society arguably
enriches it. But, as Humphrey points out, there is a crucial
difference. Monks volunteer for the monastic life of their own
free will. Amish children never volunteered to be Amish; they were born
into it and they had no choice.

There
is something breathtakingly condescending, as well as inhumane, about
the sacrificing of anyone, especially children, on the altar of
'diversity' and the virtue of preserving a variety of religious
traditions. The rest of us are happy with our cars and computers, our
vaccines and antibiotics. But you quaint little people with your
bonnets and breeches, your horse buggies, your archaic dialect and your
earth-closet privies, you enrich our lives. Of course you must be
allowed to trap your children with you in your seventeenth-century time
warp, otherwise something irretrievable would be lost to us: a part of
the wonderful diversity of human culture. A small part of me can see
something in this. But the larger part is made to feel very queasy
indeed.

The
Prime Minister of my country, Tony Blair, invoked 'diversity' when
challenged in the House of Commons by Jenny Tonge MP to justify
government subsidy of a school in the north-east of England that
(almost uniquely in Britain) teaches literal biblical creationism. Mr
Blair replied that it would be unfortunate if concerns about that issue
were to interfere with our getting 'as diverse a school system as we
properly can'.
¹⁴³
The school in question,
Emmanuel College in Gateshead, is one of the 'city academies' set up in
a proud initiative of the Blair government. Rich benefactors are
encouraged to put up a relatively small sum of money (£2
million in the case of Emmanuel), which buys a much larger sum of
government money (£20 million for the school, plus running
costs and salaries in perpetuity), and also buys the benefactor the
right to control the ethos of the school, the appointment of a majority
of the school governors, the policy for exclusion or inclusion of
pupils, and much else. Emmanuel's 10 per cent benefactor is Sir Peter
Vardy, a wealthy car salesman with a creditable desire to give today's
children the education he wishes he had had, and a less creditable
desire to imprint his personal religious convictions upon them.* Vardy
has unfortunately
become embroiled with a clique of American-inspired fundamentalist
teachers, led by Nigel McQuoid, sometime headmaster of Emmanuel and now
director of a whole consortium of Vardy schools. The level of McQuoid's
scientific understanding can be judged from his belief that the world
is less than ten thousand years old, and also from the following
quotation: 'But to think that we just evolved from a bang, that we used
to be monkeys, that seems unbelievable when you look at the complexity
of the human body ... If you tell children there is no purpose to their
life - that they are just a chemical mutation - that doesn't build
self-esteem.'
¹⁴⁴

* H.
L. Mencken was prophetic when he wrote: 'Deep within the heart of every
evangelist lies the wreck of a car salesman.'

No
scientist has ever suggested that a child is a 'chemical mutation'. The
use of the phrase in such a context is illiterate nonsense, on a par
with the declarations of 'Bishop' Wayne Malcolm, leader of the
Christian Life City church in Hackney, east London, who, according to
the
Guardian
of 18 April 2006, 'disputes the
scientific evidence for evolution'. Malcolm's understanding of the
evidence he disputes can be gauged from his statement that 'There is
clearly an absence in the fossil record for intermediate levels of
development. If a frog turned into a monkey, shouldn't you have lots of
fronkies?'

Well,
science is not Mr McQuoid's subject either, so we should, in fairness,
turn to his head of science, Stephen Layfield, instead. On 21 September
2001, Mr Layfield gave a lecture at Emmanuel College on 'The Teaching
of Science: A Biblical Perspective'. The text of the lecture was posted
on a Christian website (www. christian.org.uk). But you won't find it
there now. The Christian Institute removed the lecture the very day
after I had called attention to it in an article in the
Daily
Telegraph
on 18 March 2002, where I subjected it to a
critical dissection.
¹⁴⁵
It is hard, however, to
delete something permanently from the World Wide Web. Search engines
achieve their speed partly by keeping caches of information, and these
inevitably persist for a while even after the originals have been
deleted. An alert British journalist, Andrew Brown, the
Independent's
first religious affairs correspondent, promptly located the
Layfield lecture, downloaded it from the Google cache and posted it,
safe from deletion, on his own website,
http://www.darwinwars.com/lunatic/liars/layfield.html
.
You will notice that the words chosen by Brown for the URL make
entertaining
reading in themselves. They lose their power to amuse, however, when we
look at the content of the lecture itself.