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Michael Steele has become the first African-American chairman of the Republican Party, winning the post Friday, 91-77, on the sixth ballot over South Carolina GOP Chairman Katon Dawson.
How is it, asks Richard Dawkins, that despite science having exposed old religious myths, militant faith is back on the march? The mechanism for perpetuating beliefs that Dawkins describes as leading to murderous intolerance, is by imposing religion on children who are too inexperienced to judge it for themselves.
We wouldn’t categorise children according to their parents’ political stance, says Dawkins, since they are too young to make up their minds about such matters. But we segregate them in sectarian religious schools, where they are taught superstitions drawn from ancient scriptures of dubious origin, which promote a ‘contradictory and poisonous system of morals’.
From generation to generation
Dawkins compares this to a virus, which infects the young and is passed down the generations. Visiting an ultra-orthodox Jewish school, he describes the British-born headteacher Rabbi Gluck’s Yiddish accent as testament to the isolation of his community. Gluck says that it’s important for members of minorities to have the space to express their own beliefs and traditions. He describes science as one tradition, and Judaism as another. His students are taught about evolution and if only a minority end up believing in it, he says, this is not out of ignorance.
The number of faith schools is increasing. More than half the Government’s proposed City Academies will be run by religious organisations and there’s a growing number of private evangelical Christian schools. ACE ? Accelerated Christian Education ? has developed a curriculum which includes a mention of God or Jesus on every page of its science text book. The head of a school which uses this material argues that if there were no lawgiver, there would be no reason to see rape and murder as wrong.
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