{"id":1426,"date":"2010-09-27T13:44:23","date_gmt":"2010-09-27T20:44:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=1426"},"modified":"2010-09-27T13:44:23","modified_gmt":"2010-09-27T20:44:23","slug":"giberson-on-religion-cramming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2010\/09\/27\/giberson-on-religion-cramming\/","title":{"rendered":"Giberson on Religion Cramming"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/biologos.org\/blog\/are-we-cramming-religion-down-our-childrens-throats\/\">Karl Giberson writes in the Huffington Post and on BioLogos<\/a> in response to the claim often made by new atheist leaders that religious people &#8220;cram their beliefs down their children&#8217;s throats&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>This language evokes the harshest of images. What is a secular reader,  unfamiliar with how religious children are actually raised, to think?  They have never seen a Christmas pageant where dozens of happy children  sing cute choruses under the direction of dedicated volunteer staff;  they have not seen teenagers gathered in prayerful support around one of  their friends whose little brother was just killed in a terrible  accident; they have not seen older teens holding bake sales so they can  raise enough money to spend two weeks in Haiti helping people in need.  Instead, they must picture stern-faced parents dragging kids against  their will to indoctrination sessions where they sit on hard wooden  chairs until they affirm a set of beliefs in settings reminiscent of <em>A Clockwork Orange<\/em>.  After years of such training, the once-open-minded children mature into  narrow-minded adults who carry out the narrow-minded agendas of their  parents &#8212; oppose healthcare, gay marriage, stem-cell research, Muslims,  and anything else they can think of &#8212; and begin the process of having  their own kids, with a new generation of throats down which more toxic  ideas will be crammed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Karl Giberson writes in the Huffington Post and on BioLogos in response to the claim often made by new atheist leaders that religious people &#8220;cram their beliefs down their children&#8217;s throats&#8221;: This language evokes the harshest of images. What is a secular reader, unfamiliar with how religious children are actually raised, to think? They have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirituality"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-n0","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1426\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}