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Richard Dawkins Quotes about Children

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Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

Richard Dawkins
Education, Atheist, Children
Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.300, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether they are ‘valid,’ let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so.

Richard Dawkins
Children, Mind, Different

If children understand that beliefs should be substantiated with evidence, as opposed to tradition, authority, revelation or faith, they will automatically work out for themselves that they are atheists.

Richard Dawkins
Atheist, Children, Work Out
"Richard Dawkins's backwards logic over atheist schooling" by Andrew Brown, www.theguardian.com. June 29, 2010.

Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.

Richard Dawkins
Children, Mind, Vulnerable

There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents.

Richard Dawkins
Christian, Children, Parent
Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.18, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

What are all of us but self-reproducing robots? We have been put together by our genes and what we do is roam the world looking for a way to sustain ourselves and ultimately produce another robot child.

Richard Dawkins
Life, Children, Self

I'd like everybody to be secular. I suppose I have to say politically I would like religion to become gentler and nicer and to stop interfering with other people's lives, stop repressing women, stop indoctrinating children, all that sort of thing. But I really, really would like to see religion go away altogether.

Richard Dawkins
Children, People, Going Away
"Interview: Richard Dawkins Keeps Making New Enemies". Interview with Isaac Chotiner, newrepublic.com. October 29, 2013.

No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch.

Richard Dawkins
Children, Mean, Scratches
Richard Dawkins (2016). “The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary edition”, p.45, Oxford University Press

However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or complain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn't this be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who will never even be offered life in the first place?

Richard Dawkins
Children, Complaining, Dull

I am persuaded that 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like...eternal hell.

Richard Dawkins
Teacher, Children, Believe

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.

Richard Dawkins
Children, Catholic, Abuse

Some sort of belief in all-powerful supernatural beings is common, if not universal. A tendency to obey authority, perhaps especially in children, a tendency to believe what you're told, a tendency to fear your own death, a tendency to wish to see your loved ones who have died, to wish to see them again, a wish to understand where you came from, where the world came from, all these psychological predispositions, under the right cultural conditions, tend to lead to people believing in things for which there is no evidence.

Richard Dawkins
Children, Powerful, Believe
Source: www.abc.net.au

Christianity, just as much as Islam, teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue. You don't have to make the case for what you believe. If somebody announces that it is part of his faith, the rest of society, whether of the same faith, or another, or of none, is obliged, by ingrained custom, to "respect" it without question; respect it until the day it manifests itself in a horrible massacre like the destruction of the World Trade Center, or the London or Madrid bombings.

Richard Dawkins
Children, Believe, Islam

I personally would go further and say that, if your morality is based, as mine is, on a desire to increase the sum of happiness and reduce suffering, the decision to deliberately give birth to a Down baby, when you have the choice to abort it early in the pregnancy, might actually be immoral from the point of view of the child’s own welfare.

Richard Dawkins
Baby, Children, Pregnancy

The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.

Richard Dawkins
Children, Purpose, Assignments
Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.210, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

THE MAJORITY of children born into the world tend to inherit the beliefs of their parents, and that to me is one of the most regrettable facts of them all

Richard Dawkins
Children, Parent, Religion

The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the raising of Lazarus, even the Old Testament miracles, all are freely used for religious propaganda, and they are very effective with an audience of unsophisticates and children

Richard Dawkins
Religious, Children, Miracle

It can be consoling to think your children are in heaven. You have got to understand that that doesn't make it true. Many people cannot understand that distinction.

Richard Dawkins
Children, Thinking, People
Source: newrepublic.com

A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.

Richard Dawkins
Christian, Children, Parent

It is immoral to brand children with religion. 'This is a Catholic child.' 'That is a Muslim child.' I want everyone to flinch when they hear such a phrase, just as they would if they heard, 'That is a Marxist child.'

Richard Dawkins
Children, Catholic, Phrases

...it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions.

Richard Dawkins
Death, Children, Parent
Richard Dawkins (2004). “A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love”, p.136, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

It's very important to try to inculcate into children moral rules, such as "do as you would be done by."

Richard Dawkins
Children, Important, Trying
PBS Interview, www.pbs.org.

No educated person believes the Adam and Eve myth nowadays, but it's surprising how many parents think that it's somehow fun to pass on this falsehood to their children...I would want to argue that the truth of evolution is more interesting and more poetic

Richard Dawkins
Children, Fun, Believe

People who believe in something for which there is not a shred of evidence act on that belief and, above all, impose their beliefs on others, they make me cross, and they make me especially cross when they impose their beliefs on defenceless children.

Richard Dawkins
Children, Believe, People
"Richard Dawkins at the Sydney Writers' Festival". Interview with Robyn Williams, www.abc.net.au. September 8, 2007.

If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers.

Richard Dawkins
Suicide, Children, Thinking