More harm from religion

Okay, so the article I'm about to quote was at HuffPo. But hey, it's got links to real articles so I think we can trust it.

Young children who are exposed to religion have a hard time differentiating between fact and fiction, according to a new study published in the July issue of Cognitive Science.

Gee, what a surprise.

Refuting previous hypotheses claiming that children are “born believers,” the authors suggest that “religious teaching, especially exposure to miracle stories, leads children to a more generic receptivity toward the impossible, that is, a more wide-ranging acceptance that the impossible can happen in defiance of ordinary causal relations.”

Put simply, religious thinking poisons the mind. Personally, the thing I hate most is seeing a story about religious parents who kill their kids to send them to "a better place". Ahem, that would be the grave. A poisoned mind is capable of terrible things.

I often say that religion is the reason why Americans can't think clearly. They've had no practice in logic because their brains were poisoned at an early age by religious nonsense.

There is no heaven, there is no hell, there is no god or devil. And that's why we should try our best to be kind to everyone we meet (including those kids at the border). Since there's no afterlife for those who suffer here on Earth, what say we try to avoid the suffering in the first place? Works for me.

Wingnut Christian textbooks

Mother Jones did a scathing report about the idiocy peddled in Christian textbooks -- books that kids actually use in their studies. After telling students that dragons were real, hippies were Satanists, and humans and dinosaurs lived side-by-side on the Earth, they turn their attention to literature. These were my favorites:

Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson were a couple of hacks: "[Mark] Twain's outlook was both self-centered and ultimately hopeless…Twain's skepticism was clearly not the honest questioning of a seeker of truth but the deliberate defiance of a confessed rebel."—Elements of Literature for Christian Schools, Bob Jones University, 2001

"Several of [Emily Dickinson's] poems show a presumptuous attitude concerning her eternal destiny and a veiled disrespect for authority in general. Throughout her life she viewed salvation as a gamble, not a certainty. Although she did view the Bible as a source of poetic inspiration, she never accepted it as an inerrant guide to life."—Elements of Literature for Christian Schools, Bob Jones University, 2001

And then people wonder why Americans don't believe in evolution or global warming. Religion is poisonous.