If Dawkins really wants readers like myself to check into the atheist equivalent of the Priory for what he calls ‘recovery’, he must first of all understand the condition which he seeks to relieve. He doesn’t. One of the things which sends him into paroxysms of fury, for example, is the idea that children should be brought up in a particular faith. He thinks that this turns them into ‘demented parrots’ and may make them suicide bombers. It is wrong to speak of a ‘Catholic child’, he says, or a ‘Muslim child’, because such a child can give no real consent. One should speak only of ‘a child of Catholic parents’.
The reason that Dawkins is so angry about this is that he conceives religion simply as a set of opinions: opinions, to be of value, must be genuinely, personally held, and children are not ready for this. (Actually, I don’t agree even with this: children can and must develop their opinions, and can and should be guided, though not coerced, in them by parents, and I bet Dawkins in practice thinks the same.) But religion is not, at root, a question of opinions. It is the collective (and personal) attempt to live life according to a belief about everything. The whole of each human life, from conception, is therefore part of it. Most, though not all, Christians hold that God’s grace is channelled through the sacraments, and that the sacrament of baptism makes a child a Christian — i.e. a member of Christ’s family, not a person with a set of views. It is the spiritual equivalent both of the polio vaccine and the birth certificate, and it would therefore be unnecessarily risky to withhold it. Dawkins would think this all rubbish, of course, but he ought to acknowledge that ‘brainwashing’ need not be involved. Most churches have a later rite (confirmation) which depends on the free assent to beliefs given by people judged old enough for that assent to be real.
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