Friday, March 20, 2009

Absurdities in Genesis:





This is a comic that is listed under "kids" at Answers in Genesis. This site is already infamous among pretty much everyone who does not believe in a literal biblical creation story, and even more in Atheist circles.

This is obviously a particularly flammable straw man representation of any atheist. No atheist who knows his subject would ever argue like this for various reasons I will only go into on this entry if asked. What I really wanted to note was the placement of bigotry in a section marked "kids."

Christians complain all the time that atheists mock their beliefs, misrepresent their arguments etc. This complaint is commonly mirrored from the atheist side, and for good reason both sides are often right here. This kind of misrepresentation though, is exactly why people like Richard Dawkins consider youth religious indoctrination to be child abuse. They are teaching through comics not only a bad argument, but by teaching this bad argument are encouraging the children who read it that Atheists are in fact stupid.

Now, I know we have our comics, and groups, and blogs targeting Christianity, and they almost invariably say we don't understand real Christianity, regardless of the fact that many of us do. The same goes in reverse again, but when you're advertising to children your preconceived bigotries there is a problem. How different is that from a comic saying, say, Christians eat babies, which was then given away in pamphlets to children at a muslim sponsored event? People would be outraged. It would be a scandal. Is it any wonder there is so much bad blood when we train our children from a young age to misrepresent another's position or think of some views as stupid for absurd reasons?

It is one thing for an adult to an audience of adults to reason out why their faith is right or wrong rationally (admittedly i have yet to find any rational explanation for theism), and another entirely to warp their minds in the formative stages. And this goes to both Theists and Atheists.

Let's let our children learn to reason and experience, and then decide for themselves. I have no delusion that this will change anyone's mind, but still, had to say it.

2 comments:

  1. What I can't figure out is how the argument even works. God creates horror and disaster for the same reason architects design buildings?

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  2. Its pretty bad. They have a whole collection of these over there, and none of them are really funny, or anything other than shortsighted dogmas.

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