"People Are Born with Religious Belief Argues New Book" by Jesse Singal
Quotes:
"Barrett devotes a good chunk of Born Believers to debunking the indoctrination hypothesis, the idea, as he puts it in the book, that “children believe because their parents (and other trusted adults) act as if they believe, and talk as if they believe.” Dawkins is one of the staunchest purveyors of this view (or, rather, “evolved gullibility,” a close cousin of it), and he takes things a step further by arguing that it’s abusive to expose children to organized religion. As Barrett quotes from The God Delusion: “Even without physical abduction, isn’t it always a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought about?”
Barrett clearly doesn’t think Dawkins has done his homework, that he is extending his political agenda into a research area where he’s unfamiliar. “I think that he is relatively unaware of the relevant research, especially the development research,” he said. “I don’t get the impression that he is up on his psychology of religion.”
Another quote:
"If our brains evolved, as Barrett argues, to find religion much easier to grasp onto than nonreligion, then this isn’t simply a matter of education or culture. As popular as the atheist view that having kids read Carl Sagan and Sam Harris from an early age will lead to a profoundly secular society is, it isn’t backed up by science. Not when religious beliefs stem from such foundational parts of our cognitive architecture."
http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...-new-book.html
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