RE: Atheists who have never read common atheist literature
February 25, 2017 at 3:57 pm
(This post was last modified: February 25, 2017 at 3:58 pm by Jehanne.)
(February 25, 2017 at 3:47 pm)Stimbo Wrote: If I recall correctly, I think the context is that indoctrinating someone at such a young and impressionable age into magical thinking potentially harms their critical thinking skills. Something like that anyway. It would be helpful to have the text of what he wrote to hand.
It definitively harmed me, as I was raised in a fundamentalist evangelical Church; in fact, I was often told not to read certain books (such as "Cosmos", by Carl Sagan), as they would corrupt my faith. And, of course, creationism was a big thing back in the '80s and my church was actively involved, which included the local high school biology teacher, who openly denied Darwinian evolution. In one of my English classes, four of my fellow students wrote term papers against evolutionary theory. I remember well one such argument against the Earth's age, to the effect that the Earth could not be 4.5 billion years old because erosion would have made the surface of the Earth completely flat and there would be no mountains! Tragically, when my fundamentalist friend presented this argument to me I was completely at a loss for words.
