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Having polished off God, has Richard Dawkins decided to go after a much tougher opponent?

Finally! Dawkins and conservative Christians, who have long campaigned against the evils of Harry Potter, with no noticeable effect, I might add, may have a common cause.

On a more serious note, I find this highly problematic:

But is teaching children that there is nothing but an existential void, even if true, any less terrifying? After all, on an evolutionary account of religion, the very reason a belief in an afterlife arose was the result of the survival instinct and the intrinsic fear we have of our own extinction. Would exposing children to that terror, before they have the intellectual and emotional equipment to even have a chance to deal with it, be any less abusive?

Worse, from my perspective as a lawyer, is the devaluation of the term "child abuse." Child abuse is a crime, for which the state has the right to punish parents, and others in loco parentis, most severely and for which the state can, and should, remove children from parental custody.

If, in fact, teaching children about a concept of hell (while also teaching them there is a way to escape such a fate) is "worse than physical child abuse," then where is the campaign to remove children from such an environment and punish the parents? If Dawkins is not willing to start such a campaign, then the use of the term is mere rhetoric.

But it is rhetoric with potentially tragic results.

The vast majority of Americans are religious. Even in the more secular states of Europe, I think it likely that the majority of the populace would find the notion that teaching children about hell, at least unaccompanied by actual attempts to terrify, is the moral and legal equivalent of physical abuse to be, at the very least, an overstatement.

The danger is, if the secular community becomes perceived as having a hysterical view that religion equals child abuse, local prosecutors, who are political animals, could be more reluctant to investigate and prosecute true cases of abuse that fly under the banner of religious belief. Of course, it can be objected that prosecutors tend not to do that now. But the danger resides in the marginal difference. If one child dies because one prosecutor, somewhere, is reluctant to become identified with an anti-religious viewpoint and fails to investigate what looks, at the time, like a borderline case, is that worth the satisfaction of delivering some rhetorical flourish?

Dawkins is certainly articulate and can make his case against religion clearly and forcefully without co-opting this legal terminology. I think he should.
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