The War On Faith - HQ - Richard Dawkins

I am delighted that one of the leading Roman Catholic seminaries for the training of young
priests in Ireland is closing down because it can't get any recruits. When I read that in the
newspaper, it left me smiling for the rest of the day. However, if the Catholic Church does die
in Ireland - and I devoutly hope it will - I hope that it will not be replaced by some other
idiotic superstition like New Age-ism or some other kind of religion.

The Roman Catholic Church is one of the forces for evil in the world, mainly because of the
powerful influence it has over the minds of children. The Catholic Church has developed, over
the centuries, brilliant techniques in brainwashing children; even intelligent people who have
had a proper, full cradle-Catholic upbringing find it hard to shake it off when they reach
adulthood. Obviously many of them do - and congratulations to them for it - but even some
really quite intelligent people fail to shake it off, powerful evidence of the skill in brainwashing
that the Catholic Church exercises.

It's far more skilled than, for instance, the Anglican Church, mere amateurs in the game. The
Catholic Church also has an extraordinarily retrogressive stance on everything to do with
reproduction. Any sort of new technology which makes life easier for women without causing
any suffering is likely to be opposed by the Catholic Church. Regarding the accusations of
sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are,
they are not so harmful to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up the child
Catholic in the first place.

I had a letter from a woman in America in her forties, who said that when she was a child of
about seven, brought up a Catholic, two things happened to her: one was that she was sexually
abused by her parish priest. The second thing was that a great friend of hers at school died,
and she had nightmares because she thought her friend was going to hell because she wasn't
Catholic. For her there was no question that the greatest child abuse of those two was the
abuse of being taught about hell. Being fondled by the priest was negligible in comparison.
And I think that's a fairly common experience. I can't speak about the really grave sexual
abuse that obviously happens sometimes, which actually causes violent physical pain to the
altar boy or whoever it is, but I suspect that most of the sexual abuse priests are accused of is
comparatively mild - a little bit of fondling perhaps, and a young child might scarcely notice
that.

The damage, if there is damage, is going to be mental damage anyway, not physical damage.
Being taught about hell - being taught that if you sin you will go to everlasting damnation,
and really believing that - is going to be a harder piece of child abuse than the comparatively
mild sexual abuse. The word atheism sounds negative; let me call it rationalism. It [Atheism] is
a rational view of the world where you stand up proudly, in your humanity, you look life
straight in the face, you look the universe straight in the face, you do your level best to
understand it, to understand why you exist, what the universe is about, you recognise that
when you die that's it, and therefore life is very, very precious and you devote your life to
making the world a better place, to leading a good life so when you die you can say to yourself
I have led a good life.

Now, that seems to me to be a worthwhile goal to put in place of the medieval superstition
which is religion. Belief in God doesn't have to be a bad thing, but I think it's a very demeaning
thing to the human mind to believe in a falsehood, especially as the truth about the universe is
so immensely exciting. At the beginning of the 21st century, we humans have a real
opportunity to learn about and understand the universe, the world, humanity, life, in a way
that none of our predecessors have ever come close to. That is a huge privilege, and belief in
God simply gets in the way of that. Religion is an irrelevance, it's a distraction, it's a rather
boring, parochial falsehood that stands in the way of the glories of true understanding.