Atheism as Militant Activism in Schools

While atheists complain that via an Intelligent Design conspiracy Creationists are attempting to smuggle religion in though the back doors of public classroom atheism is kicking in the front door. I have chronicled this in posts such as, Protecting the Science Classroom and The Wedgie Document.

Now, coming to a UK school near you, the militant activist atheists are targeting their favorite captive and easy to propagandize audience; the naturally rebellious youth. Yes, the atheist "child abusers" (employing Richard Dawkins' term) are at it again manipulating little children like so many marionettes as the puppet masters make them dance to the tune of atheism as anti-Christianity.

The National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies (AHS) plans to launch a recruitment drive this summer.

Backed by professors Richard Dawkins and AC Grayling, the initiative aims to establish a network of atheist societies in schools to counter the role of Christianity.

It will coincide with the first atheist summer camp for children that will teach that religious belief and doctrines can prevent ethical and moral behaviour.

The federation aims to encourage students to lobby their schools and local authorities over what is taught in RE [religious education] lessons and to call for daily acts of collective worship to be scrapped. It wants the societies to hold talks and educational events to persuade students not to believe in God.

Chloe Clifford-Frith, AHS co-founder, said that the societies would act as a direct challenge to the Christian message being taught in schools.

She expressed concern that Christian Unions could influence vulnerable teenagers looking for a club to belong to with fundamentalist doctrine…

"We want to point out how silly some of these beliefs are and hope that these groups will help to do that," she said.
The federation's bid to improve co-ordination among atheists in schools follows a successful campaign at universities…

Simon Calvert of the Christian Institute said: "Atheists are becoming increasingly militant in their desperate attempts to stamp out faith. It is deeply worrying that they now want to use children to attack the Christian ethos of their schools.

"Many parents will also be anxious at the thought of militant atheists targeting their children."1

This new push to push atheism right into the schools (already done in textbooks) is not new as Richard Dawkins has long sought to get children to do his bidding.

As one of the most successful New Atheist televangelist and proselytizing missionaries Richard Dawkins you to reach deep into your pockets and help him shove atheism right down children's throats (again, or still, or more so) while they are away from you in their classrooms. For years now, Richard Dawkins has been campaigning in his self-appointed role as Professor of the Public Understanding of Atheism. His crusade seeks public-charitable funding to push his own particular, and peculiar, Dawkinsian weltanschauung into the classroom.

He seeks to divert money from religious charities who provide life's little luxuries such as oh, you know: homeless shelters, soup kitchens, disaster relief organizations, hospitals, adoption agencies, foster homes, addiction clinics, etc., etc., etc. and into the coffers of his propaganda machine. Richard Dawkins' propagandist press will "maintain a database of charities free of 'church contamination.'"

As Vox Day puts it, with regards to Richard Dawkins' conversion crusades,

It's like the Campus Crusade for Cthulhu, only sillier.2

The Sunday Times - Britain report by Steven Swinford:

RICHARD DAWKINS, the Oxford University professor and campaigning atheist, is planning to take his fight against God into the classroom by flooding schools with anti-religious literature. He is setting up a charity that will subsidise books, pamphlets and DVDs attacking the 'educational scandal' of theories such as creationism while promoting rational and scientific thought. The foundation will also attempt to divert donations from the hands of 'missionaries' and church-based charities.

Richard Dawkins "describes the theory [of intelligent design] as a 'bronze-age myth' and plans to send his own material to schools to counter the 'subversion of science.'" What he wants to see in the classroom instead of Bronze-Age myths is quaint Steam-Era myths, "'The enlightenment is under threat,' Dawkins said…We even have to go out on the attack ourselves, for the sake of reason and sanity."As Chris Lehmann put it in his article, Among the Non-Believers - The tedium of dogmatic atheism:

…village atheists are as numerous, and as shrill, as they've ever been, for the simple reason that the successive revolutions in thought that have furthered their cause-the Enlightenment and Darwinism-have been popular busts. As the secular mind loses mass allegiance, it becomes skittish and reclusive, succumbing to the seductive fancy that its special brand of wisdom is too nuanced, too unblinkingly harsh for the weak-minded Christer, ultraorthodox scold, or wooly pagan.

And yet,

Dawkins's approach has also offended fellow scientists. Steven Rose, emeritus professor of biology at the Open University, said: "I worry that Richard's view about belief is too simplistic, and so hostile that as a committed secularist myself I am uneasy about it. We need to recognise that our own science also depends on certain assumptions about the way the world is - assumptions that he and I of course share."

It is any wonder that Richard Lewontin, Harvard University Professor of zoology and biology, made the following points, "As to assertions without adequate evidence, the literature of science is filled with them, especially the literature of popular science writing." He then states that Richard Dawkins is among the contemporary science-popularizers who "put unsubstantiated assertions or counterfactual claims at the very center of the stories they have retailed in the market" he particularly mentions "Dawkins's vulgarizations of Darwinism" (see here and here).

It would be one thing for Richard Dawkins to look through a microscope or telescope and merely report what he sees. Yet, it is quite another thing for his admitted atheistic proselytizing worldview-theories to enter the classroom in the guise of science. As Richard Dawkins himself admits he did not become acquainted with the Darwinian theory of evolution because he read The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life but "it was because I was taught"3.

I, for one, will certainly not accept Richard Dawkins' worldview not only because as H. Allen Orr, the Shirley Cox Kearns Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester, wrote "most scientists do not accept Dawkins's theory of memes"4 but because if I did so I would be merely contracting his pestiferous memes. Yet, our children must be made immune to the militant activist atheist memes perhaps via inoculation-merely present atheist ideas to them and they will readily discern their folly.

1. 1. Jonathan Wynne-Jones, "Atheists target UK schools - Atheists are targeting schools in a campaign designed to challenge Christian societies, collective worship and religious education," UK Telegraph, April 25, 2009
2. 2. Vox Day, The Irrational Atheist, p. 10 - downloadable
3. 3. The Atheism Tapes, Part 4: Richard Dawkins and Jonathan Miller
4. 4. H. Allen Orr; Shirley Cox Kearns Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester, "A Mission to Convert," New York Times, Vol. 54, No. 1, Jan. 11, 2007. A review of Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion