.png){kind=logo}
February 7, 2012 at 11:15 am 
Al Stefanelli The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational Inquiry - Richard Dawkins
Youth-driven activities within many churches include activities that appeal to the societal desires of children to learn through enjoyable experiences. Sunday school lessons for very young children are modeled after kindergarten and primary school. For the older children there are sports camps and field trips. The entirety of the Contemporary Christian Music genre is designed to mirror modern and post-modern secular music.
Indoctrinating children does very well to perpetuate the circular logic and the fear of eternal punishment that will likely keep a child locked in a prison that contains no allowance for investigation of factual science, but replaces it with religious pseudo-sciences to feed the natural desire to learn well into their adulthood, and often all the way to the grave.
Infecting A Spotless Mind…
When children are not fully educated, they are unable to comprehend the reason and logic behind what they are told. Through evolution, human children are predisposed to adhere to the authority of an adult. This makes children very easy to evangelize. The sheer number of children in our public schools is the reason why there exists a vigorous movement amongst the fundamentalists to infiltrate our schools with evangelical programs such as “The Good News Club” and “The Fellowship of Christian Athletes.” As well, it is the driving force behind the religious right’s quest to return prayer and biblical teaching to that venue, as well as illogical and disproved ideologies such as creationism and Intelligent Design.
Dr. Richard Dawkins states:
A human child is shaped by evolution to soak up the culture of her people. Most obviously, she learns the essentials of their language in a matter of months. A large dictionary of words to speak, an encyclopedia of information to speak about, complicated syntactic and semantic rules to order the speaking, are all transferred from older brains into hers well before she reaches half her adult size. When you are pre-programmed to absorb useful information at a high rate, it is hard to shut out pernicious or damaging information at the same time. With so many mindbytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort.
Dr. Dawkins compares the virus of Christianity to a computer virus, stating that,
“successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won’t know it, and may even vigorously deny it.”
Dr. Dawkins defines faith as a conviction that doesn’t seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but feels totally compelling and convincing. As well, he points out the fact that the infected believer sees the absence of evidence a virtue, and that this paradoxical idea that lack of evidence is a positive virtue gives the virus it’s ability to replicate itself due to its self-sustaining and self-referential nature. He states that,
“Once the proposition is believed, it automatically undermines opposition to itself. The `lack of evidence is a virtue’ idea could be an admirable sidekick, ganging up with faith itself in a clique of mutually supportive viral programs.”
This also ties into the conviction that “mystery” is a good thing and it’s not virtuous to solve one. Their insolubility should be enjoyed.
It’s Just A Fantasy…
The experiences that surround the conversion process are designed to be attractive to the part of the mind that controls fantasies. This is why there are more “conversions” at venues that resemble rock concerts or have smoke and mirror shows like we see on the broadcasts by Televangelists. Millions of dollars are spent on light shows that rival anything seen at a secular event of the same magnitude. The whole process is designed to make “receiving Christ and the Holy Spirit” invoke “warm and fuzzy” feelings. These feelings are then explained as having a genuine interaction with the divine.
Telling someone who is mentally vulnerable that they have been personally touched by the supernatural is a powerful way to convince them that their religious experience is real, and that it must be reciprocated with a confession of sin and dedication of service to the faith. This serves as the perfect venue to convince the new believer of the validity of doctrine and dogma, in spite of the fact that many of these doctrines have been disproved many years ago. Of course, in reality, this experience is a purely physical one that is the result of the stimulation of the temporal lobes of the brain. It can be duplicated in a lab.
Highlights Of Lowlifes….
Here are some highlights from a documentary called “The Jesus Camp.” Many of you are familiar with it. If not, it’s worth watching if you want an idea of the lengths that the fundamentalist church will go through to indoctrinate children.
Here’s the clip:
And The Beat Goes On...
Indoctrinating a child with fundamentalist religious doctrine warps their instinctive attributes and causes them to contradict reason by default. The main purpose of youth evangelism is to sequester their minds against outside attacks of a discredited “world” by disallowing any evidence that is contrary to doctrine. They are taught to be willfully ignorant from a very young age, and then when they are called out on their ignorance, they are taught that it is persecution.
As far as I am concerned, this is child abuse…
Posted in 
Filling the minds of children with religion is usually a consequence of adults having swallowed those poison pellets at some point in their past. No doubt for many it was passed on by their parents and they must pass it on to their children, as a result. It’s evident that a meme must do something of the sort to survive. To do so is associated with feelings of well-being; doing conversions reinforces the feelings in the evangelist that they’re right to believe as they do.
I note that atheism and rational thought are also memes that have a similar drive to survive. This discussion is evidence for that. They aren’t religions, though – they’re based on evidence of the fact that science and logic actually work; its principles can be tested and validated by anyone who wishes to do so.
Oh my, Al. This the one of the best encapsulations of the insidious horror of child evangelism that I have ever read. I have tried so often to articulate this to people – and usually failed miserably. Now I can just point them to this. Linking again on Facebook.
Bought an ebook copy of your book, btw, but I am about to order a hard copy, too. I find it a great comfort to be able to hold in my hands evidence of the existence of rational, reasonable minds and voices in the murk that is our religion-soaked world right now.
Just finished reading Katherine Stewart’s The Good News Club- and it is scary; how are we to protect our public schools against people who act on “if you can’t own it, break it”?
Child abuse is right. Nice exposé on a topic that’s unpleasant to think about.
I wrote a blog post on the Ark Encounter proposed theme park, which is another way of getting to kids, and I think you would enjoy it.
http://biblefunmentionables.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/the-top-7-bible-themed-rides-you-wont-find-at-the-ark-encounter-amusement-park/
I am spreading the word on my new blog Bible Funmentionables, a skeptical look at all of the wildest Bible verses that always get left behind. I’d love it if you are able to check it out and feel free to repost or spread the word in any other way. Thanks so much.
To help end this abuse, maybe we should promote some kind of a world miracle day and call out all gods and their holy men to perform a live, faith-affirming act.
They could then show their faith like abraham and isaac and demonstrate the effectiveness of their higher powers ability to intervene and save them. One faith against another – to the last man – starting with the pope.
I’m always skeptical of evolutionary psychology used as an explanation. I find it likely that through coercive treatment of infants in their first year or two of life, the predisposition to follow adult commands could be socialized quite easily (we already know that it’s pretty easy to socialize obedience in adults on both a small scale, as with an abusive romantic relationship, and a large scale, as with authoritarian government/legal structures) and may have absolutely no genetic basis. One would require comparative studies of cultures that socialize children to be obedient and disobedient (do any exist?) to even suggest an evolutionary basis, while proof would require experimental studies in which the social environment of children was controlled from birth, with only one variable changed between the two. As these would be incredibly unethical by contemporary standards, proof of the point is likely impossible.
I posit socialization as the null hypothesis due to the fact that we know that obedience can be socialized in humans under various conditions and a predisposition to obedience is not universal in children (search YouTube for “toddler tantrum” for evidence of the non-universality), while (as far as I’m aware) the only evidence that obedience can be evolved comes from experiments like the domesticated fox breeding studies done by the USSR (and even then, it’s difficult to separate evolved from socialized behavioral responses, since the foxes had to be taught commands in order to obey, which is a process of socialization, so the evolutionary difference could be a greater propensity for learning/training generally – one would have to compare groups that are trained to be obedient vs. disobedient to see if one behavior was easier to achieve, also begging the questions of how to train disobedience and how to distinguish it from ignorance of the desire of the person giving the command). These are not performed on humans and have the additional confounding factors mentioned, so they’re merely suggestive of a potential, not directly evidentiary (and certainly not conclusive).
Okay, on to read the rest of it.
Take a trip to SE Asia my friend and speak to some of the ex VC “child soldiers” who are now adults in Vietnam. Or maybe take a jaunt through the madhouse of N Korea.
Or, if you want a real horrorshow experence, do the same (as I have) in Cambodia with ex child KR “troops” like the ones who worked at Tuol Sleng/S21 and Chouong Ek (The Killing Fields). When you can program a child to kill its own parents with a pick axe handle you can do anything.
The programming that is blatant and apparent in the documentary Jesus Camp is horrific to someone like me who has studied the applications of psychological programming and indoctrination. I’ve seen its effects first hand here in SE Asia, and in a former career learned how it is very easily done.
And if you dont think it works….watch that documentary and tell me that, or take a step back and watch Faux Nooz from outside the goldfish bowl.
The US seems particularly vulnerable to such programming. From the J E Hoover and McCarthyite reds under the bed scares to the modern day rampant Islamophobia and “Id rather elect a Rapist than an Atheist” madness…it works a treat on the US public.
Go figure….me I put it down to the US’s contnued dallance with faith and religiosity. As I posted on Al’s Guest Blog…as Voltaire said…“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”.
You are warned!
To the last comment… a trip to WalMart can show you that some children ARE in fact taught (trained) to be disobedient… by parents that reward misbehavior constantly with sugar and gifts of useless plastic.
Not to mention, the behavior of mimicking adults can be seen throughout the animal kingdom… I see no reason to assume there ISN’T a genetic component to the behavior of doing what you’re told.
Now to the point of the post… I think that we should all do whatever we can… raise awareness, money, etc… for organizations like the Secular Student Alliance. They have started chartering groups in high schools around the country, in addition to numerous university groups.
Given the pernicious effect that these “child-evangelists” are already having, our support is needed now, more than ever!!
“The entirety of the Contemporary Christian Music genre is designed to mirror modern and post-modern secular music.”
Hmmmm…..lets see…..STRYPER or RAMMSTEIN?
all together now….Riese Riese Seeman Riese….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wBH6HXidO4
Seriously tho folks….see that video of brainwashing kids? Try that in the UK and you would be in prison for child abuse faster than spit.