How to Stop Your Child From Becoming Religious?

Rod Dreher has some useful advice for how to make sure your child does not grow up to be religious :

Make sure they never learn that many brilliant men and women throughout history and even today — scientists, philosophers, artists and others — were and are religious believers. Children must accept that religion is only something for dupes and fools, and that no intelligent person could ever believe in God.

Lie to them constantly about the way the world works. Teach them to think that science and its methods are the only valid ways of knowing anything. If it can’t be measured empirically, it cannot exist.

Make them loathe their own soul and its functions. Convince them to mistrust and despise any intimations they have about its existence. Teach them to believe that they are proud and strong and entirely self-sufficient, and that to intuit and wonder that there is some power or reality greater than themselves at work in the universe is an occasion of shame and disgrace that must be rejected, never explored or admitted into serious consideration.

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