Religious indoctrination kills a child's curiosity.

I wrote this on February 18, 2011, 7 years ago. Here it is again.

Curiosity. That's an extremely important word. Everyone is born with curiosity. Christianity, Islam, and the other death cults suck people's natural curiosity out of them. They lose their desire to learn all they can about the natural world. They are unable to solve scientific problems. They can't understand scientific concepts. They don't wonder why. They don't wonder how. They don't wonder, period. No curiosity. All questions have been answered so why bother to think. That's how religion kills a person, makes him or her a zombie, just existing, waiting to drop dead as uneducated as when they were born. Nothing to live for except an imaginary second life. Meanwhile the one life they do have is completely wasted. They never find out what they are and how they got here. They never find out what they've been missing. All this so they can suck up to a dishonest Jeebus who if he was real, was just a worthless preacher man, too lazy to get a real job.

What Jerry Coyne wrote March 7, 2010:

The home-schoolers have responded, leading to the longest thread in the brief history of this website.

I realize, of course, that not all parents who home-school their kids are doing so for religious reasons. I have had some contact, for instance, with Susan Mule, who, as Dylan Lovan noted in his piece, is simply trying to teach her precocious daughter the best science on offer. And I’ve dealt with other parents who are looking for good material on evolution to give to their children. Sadly, there’s not much that is useful if you don’t want to force creationism down your kid’s throat.

But, as Lovan noted in his piece, “83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children ‘religious or moral instruction.'”

I weep for those children. For many of them are simply being brainwashed by their parents. Yes, that’s what it is—brainwashing. For a parent to ignore 150 years of solid science, feeding their children lies based on theology, is to deprive those children of the wonder of the universe—a wonder based on truth rather than medieval superstition. It kills off the part of a child that most needs nurturing: her sense of wonder, and all the possibilities of life that are opened up by that wonder. How many budding biologists have been stifled by their parents’ willful ignorance of science, and on their insistence that the Bible is the real source of biological information? Generation after generation of ignorance and religious dogmatism, all perpetuated by religously based home-schooling.

Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, reportedly said, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.” That’s brainwashing.
-- Jerry Coyne

"It has been the human curiosity and ingenuity exemplified by Darwin that has promoted new scientific discoveries that have helped humanity solve many problems and improve living conditions." -- Congressman Pete Stark