Germany mad over god delusion for kids
The German Ministry for Family, Seniors, Women and Youth is upset about a atheistic book for kids, charging that the book ridicules the religions of Yahweh (like any of them need help in that department).
Of course, there’s no record of the slightest bit of outrage over the thousands of pro-Yahweh books, movies and toys aimed at children.
I’ve yet to come across a list of ‘books your kid shouldn’t read’ that contains the insanely violent books we call the Bible despite it’s description of a gang rape that killed the woman and whose body was butchered and shipped around the holy kingdom. But a book in which a hedgehog says “I think that God doesn’t even exist.” should be on such a list?
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A part of giving religion “special treatment” is not trashing it like any other idea. How can you be against “special treatment” and call anything that does treat it like various other subject matters “a boatload of disingenuous unreasonably slanderous socially unreproductive garbage”?
And the part about the book being like what the religious parents do with Stalin and atheism - the reason the Stalin-atheism story is bad is because it’s a demonstrable lie. Stalin did not kill people “in the name of atheism”. He killed people in the name of communism, which does not require it’s supporters to be atheists.
Stating that Stalin killed in the name of atheism is just plain wrong.
On the other hand, there are many instances where people have killed “in the name of theism”. In fact, some of the most secular killing sprees can be traced to theist beliefs. The prime example is the Holocaust. Do I need to tell you what Christians, who were a majority in Nazi Germany, thought about Jews back during that time and the preceding centuries?
So if the book does blame theism for the killing done in it’s name or because of the ideas certain theisms contain, then it is not wrong to do so. What would be wrong is pretending that people just misunderstood “thou shalt not suffer the witch to live”. That’s wrong and it’s wrong because it’s a fucking lie.
Theism has killed, is killing and will continue killing until we stop it. Playing nice with it has never gotten us anywhere.
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KC: Hi. I’m an atheist against giving religion special treatment, but I also do not like what I have seen in this book. I think it’s an embarrassing representative of the movement. It appears to be disingenuous, unreasonably slanderous, and misrepresentation-filled bigotted propaganda. Furthermore, the author is hypocritical. He says the book is needed in part because children are defenseless to the religious children’s books out there. Well, they’d be similarly defenseless against his caricature of jews, muslims and christians. What he did was basically what fundamentalist religious parents do if/when they try to link atheism with stalin and satan.
I go into this in more detail here: http://theframeproblem.wordpress.com/2008/02/04/michael-schmidt-salomons-new-anti-religion-childrens-book-a-true-embarrassment/
I’m all for a child’s book that promotes rationalism and good living without religion, but not when it also includes socially divisive misguiding propaganda.