Dawn Sherman, a 14 year old girl in Illinois, is suing her school due to a new law that requires a moment of silence prior to the start of class. The response is pretty much what you’d expect. Dawn has been found guilty of “forcing” her alleged beliefs on others and has somehow managed to deny them all the right to believe in God.
What caught my eye were the remarks about her being brainwashed by her dad. What led them to believe Dawn was being brainwashed?
She appears to be an atheist – just like her father – and is pretty insistence about her rights being respected – just like her father. I have no doubt that Dawn was and is being influenced by her father. She’s only lived with him for her entire life and he’s obviously not the shrinking “nice” kind of atheist, but brainwashed?
You’ve gotta be kidding me. Influencing someone to believe a particular thing through mere speech and example is not brainwashing. Now if Ron or his wife threatened to, let’s say, take her gifts away if she wasn’t an atheist, then we’d have something.
Of course, it’s not really about Dawn being brainwashed. It’s about atheist parents actually being unapologetically atheistic around their kids. We’re not supposed to let our kids know we don’t believe in invisible magic men in the sky “until they’re old enough”. Old enough for what?
As I more or less stated in an earlier post about Christian persecution in America, I’ve been accosted on the streets by god peddlers. My daughter is usually present. If she’s not “old enough” to be introduced to disbelief, isn’t she also not “old enough” to be introduced to belief?
If waiting until it’s appropriate is actually important, shouldn’t every believer in the country shut their fucking traps about their special friend every time they realize a young child is present? Of course not. Many even see the presence of a young child as a reason to start the god peddling.
I’ve been hit up for God more times since our daughter was born than in all the years prior to her birth. My own mother would specifically target new parents. She’d give them diapers and other baby items in a basket, complete with the “raise your kid in church or be prepared to post bail” pamphlets.
The fact of the matter is when we atheist parents behave atheistically around our children and, even better, do so in a manner that isn’t apologetic, our kids kind of figure out that it’s okay to not believe in an invisible magic man.
They might even conclude that it’s normal to think and express such thoughts. We can’t have that, can we? They might get a wild hair up their ass and their tell their friends that the parents are lying to them about Santa Claus and God.
