How to keep children from becoming religious:
Make sure they never learn that many brilliant men and women throughout history and even today — scientists, philosophers, artists and others — were and are religious believers. Children must accept that religion is only something for dupes and fools, and that no intelligent person could ever believe in God.
Lie to them constantly about the way the world works. Teach them to think that science and its methods are the only valid ways of knowing anything. If it can’t be measured empirically, it cannot exist.
Make them loathe their own soul and its functions. Convince them to mistrust and despise any intimations they have about its existence. Teach them to believe that they are proud and strong and entirely self-sufficient, and that to intuit and wonder that there is some power or reality greater than themselves at work in the universe is an occasion of shame and disgrace that must be rejected, never explored or admitted into serious consideration.
Ensure that they resent and despise anyone who believes in God. Make such people out to be evil and vile and their religious belief the source of all the world’s ills. Teach children that religion poisons everything. Help them to see people like themselves as the enlightened people in society, and to look down on the religious majority as therefore dim.
Teach them to laugh at and dismiss out of hand any belief system but their own. Early —early mind you — make sure they are taught that there are no important differences between religions or within religious traditions. They must come to believe that apparent differences are only illusory, that in fact, all religions teach and practice nothing but superstitious deadly error. There is no real difference between Mother Teresa and Torquemada, between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jimmy Swaggart, between Averroes and Osama bin Laden, between Maimonides and Baruch Goldstein.
Instruct them with all severity and import to never question for themselves — to never think for themselves — to never live for themselves — but to seek answers only in one — just one — particular set of Industrial Age folk tales.
Above all — and this cannot be overemphasized — make sure they believe that to possess technical mastery of language, mathematics, and other symbolic systems is the same thing as possessing wisdom.
That should do the trick.
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