/lit/ - Literature

Dear fellow e/lit/ists: How many of you were raised in the Christian faith and decided to come out of the closet as unredeemed atheists? Did you have any problems with your closest ones? Today we listen to your stories.

>Harry Potter has become the latest target for Professor Richard Dawkins who is planning to find out whether tales of witchdraft and wizardy have a negative effect on children.

>The prominent atheist is stepping down from his post at Oxford University to write a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in "anti-scientific" fairytales.

>Prof Dawkins is targeting children as the audience of his next project because he believes they are being "abused" by being taught about religion at school.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/3255972/Harry-Potter-fails-to-cast-spell-over-Professor-Richard-Dawk
ins.html

>If 'bringing a child up Catholic' is itself abuse, there can only be one solution: external authorities must protect children not only from religious institutions but from their own religious parents, too. One new atheist has proposed an age of consent for joining a religion: 14. In an Oxford Amnesty Lecture popular amongst new atheists, a liberal academic argued that children 'have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people's bad ideas', and parents 'have no god-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose'. Here, a simplistic leap is made from protecting children from paedophile priests to protecting them from their own parents, since in the new-atheist view strong beliefs and freedom of religion - which, yes, includes the freedom of parents to bring up their children as they see fit - are the real problem. They exaggerate the extent of Catholic sexual abuse in order to strengthen their prejudicial arguments.

These guys are starting to scare me :(