In a post a week ago I picked up from Martin, and discussed, the claim ‘that imposing parental beliefs on children is a form of child abuse’. Martin had ascribed it to Richard Dawkins. I have since had a couple of emails registering their doubts about whether Dawkins has ever said anything like this.
Well from the link here, it is clear that Dawkins doesn’t subscribe to such a view in any general form. He says, for example:
We vary in our opinions and our tastes, and it is one of our glories. Some of us are left-wing, others right. Some are pro-euro, others anti-. Some listen to Beethoven, others Armstrong. Some watch birds, others collect stamps. It is only to be expected that our elders should influence us in all such matters. All this is normal and praiseworthy.
In particular, it is normal and pleasing that parental impact should be strong. I’m not talking particularly about genes, but about all the influences that parents inevitably bring. It is to be expected that cricketing fathers will bowl to their sons – or daughters – on the back lawn, take them to Lord[‘]s, and pass on their love of the game. There will be some tendency for ornithologists to have bird-watching children, bibliophiles book-loving children. Beliefs and tastes, political biases and hobbies, these will tend, at least statistically, to pass longitudinally down generations, and nobody would wish it otherwise.
All of which is pretty much in line with what I wrote in my post in opposition to the view ascribed to Dawkins. At the same time, with regard to identifying young children by a religious affiliation, Dawkins also writes the following:
To slap a label on a child at birth – to announce, in advance, as a matter of hereditary presumption if not determinate certainty, an infant’s opinions on the cosmos and creation, on life and afterlives, on sexual ethics, abortion and euthanasia – is a form of mental child abuse.
It isn’t hard to see how the view ascribed to Dawkins that I took as my point of departure might be inferred, by generalization, from this last statement. In any event, so far as my own post gave a misleading impression of what Dawkins thinks on this score, I offer the above by way of correction – of correcting as much as needs to be corrected. (Thanks: CL / GF.)