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Who Cares What Jesus Would Do?
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The Devil Hypothesis
There is no such thing as a Muslim child or a Christian child. Not a single child is born believing in gods or spirits or any other kind of superstitious fear.
Why people make their children believe in God while they are really too young to understand the ideas involved is clear, children will believe anything. Making people take up a religion when they are adult is hard. Why should they listen? Why should they trust you? Adults have grown up to understand that the first story they are told is not necessarily the truest version, children haven't learnt that yet, they will accept the first story as authoritative simply because it is the first story they hear. This credulousness is built into children and the young of other species too. No doubt you have seen the cartoons of newly hatched chicks imprinting on the first thing they see (Tom and Jerry did this theme more than once). It isn't simply a fictional cliche, the young of most species will automatically identify with the first moving fuzzy floaty blob their eyes lock onto and treat it as mother and trust it implicitly.
This general rule is hard-wired into all of us: trust your parents, believe what they tell you unless you have got a very good reason not to trust them. Children will even go on trusting and loving a parent who beats them as long as they aren't beaten all the time. Anything your parents teach you in the early years you take in and accept. Only when you get to the age of about nine does the concept of parental fallibility even begin to occur to you. But that is usually several years after the parents have begun to instill religious ideas into children and led them into the clutches of priests, nuns, Sunday school teachers or Imams. For so many children by the time the capacity for free thought arises it is already too late and people have succeeded in instilling fear of Hell, fear of the wrath of God, guilt and the notion that faith is a virtue. Most children learn and believe that faith is a virtue before they are old enough to understand either concept: their minds grow up with manacles in place because they were there before there was much of a mind at all. I often imagine religion to be like a great big scary suffocating amnion sac, like Rover in The Prisoner, nearly impossible to break out of. The scary part is that the children of religious parents are born inside that bubble and it provides them with an illusion of protection, they grow to love it and ensure their children in turn are raised within it.
The rhythm of the year with its festivals ensures that the same messages are repeated time and time again, so the stories are familiar and accepted and tagged in the memory as long held beliefs full of warm fuzzies before they are understood. By the time the child is old enough to begin to grasp the meaning of the Christmas story they already know in their bones that they love Baby Jesus and his later death on the cross was a good thing. First comes the belief that the belief is good and worthy of faith which is in itself good, then comes the belief. Understanding what the belief means is a later optional extra and nobody ever tests believers on this unless they study theology. For the vast majority of believers knowing what to believe is all that matters, why they should believe it is irrelevant.
The crucial time is between the ages of 8 and 18. If a child can be kept away from any challenges to the thinking of the parents' religion in that time then there is an excellent chance that they will have a lifetime immunity to critical thinking and apostasy. Surely this fact makes it absolutely essential that religious people be thwarted in their attempts to keep their children swaddled in bullshit and taught by professional liars and indoctrinators. The existence of state funded religious schools is anathema to a proper liberal state. It is essential that all attitudes can be scrutinized and all citizens are allowed to question. If children are sent to compulsory education and are indoctrinated at the state's expense this is an abuse of the power of the state and of the parents. Children have a right to know how to think rather than just being told what to think. We must ensure that all children are given the message that they do have a choice, that being born to a Catholic or a Muslim does not make you a Catholic or a Muslim.
If your parents are Jews, or Muslims or Catholics then they are. What you are is your decision. Your choice is not between being a good Muslim or a bad Muslim. You can be whatever you decide to be. Throw off that parental label and those parental expectations. Good parents will allow you to grow up to be your own person not a reflection of their status and honour. You are your own person. Becoming what they forced you to be is a stain on your honour and your character.
What satisfaction is there watching your children do what you forced them to do? Think about those forced apologies children make, head-down mumbles, they don't make you feel good and they don't make the child feel good either. How can forced belief or forced conformity be satisfying either? Seeing a child follow your religion because you beat it into them and kept them away from any people who didn't share it is no victory for you or a positive reflection on your parental skills or the superiority of your religion and it is no gesture of solidarity from your child either. If you love somebody let them free. How can you love your children and yet beat, cajole, threaten and humiliate them into conformity? It is no demonstration of the superiority of your religion that it has to protect itself from the real world by hiding its children away in educational ghettoes immune from the influences of the real world out there.
Religions don't make many adult converts. Some people will go from one form of Christianity to another or go from apathy to interest but real genuine conversions are rare. A genuine conversion would take a happy and well-adjusted Jew and turn him into a happy and well-adjusted Christian. That doesn't happen anything like as often as the frustrated, the sad, the borderline mentally ill, the addicted, the despised, the lovesick/sex-starved and the prisoner embrace a different religion. The success rate is significantly higher in the breeding program than it is in the evangelism program. If you haven't got a special reason to want to convert then conversion is difficult. Religions are strange, alien and almost always comically pompous. Familiarity makes the incense, ringlets, silly hats, coordinated floor-butting, wailing, foreskin-slicing, fasting, fancy dress with men in dresses with their collars on backwards, antiquated language and so on seem normal, which of course they are not. They are laughable and we should laugh more often.
People do not regularly convert to a new religion en masse unless they have been culturally traumatized and even then the religion usually meets them half-way. The Catholic Church is notorious for the ways in which it has adapted itself to existing cultures in order to allow mass conversions to take place. Irish Catholicism looks very different from the Catholicism elsewhere in Europe because of the extent to which it bent over backwards to accommodate Celtic traditions and renamed mythic gods, kings, goddesses and princesses as saints. Something similar can be see in Mexico. Missionaries don't try to take the tribe to a cathedral and show them all the silly nonsense all at once they start with a few bullet points and add the flesh to the holy bones bit by bit. If you take any well-adjusted adult and take him or her to an unfamiliar religious ceremony they will not be impressed. To make a convert you have to wait until something traumatic has broken their spirit and left them dazed and wanting or get to them before they have learned to ask questions and expect answers.
As a society we should reject the label of “Muslim child” or “Catholic child” and even “Jewish child” and “Sikh child” there are only children and children lack the capacity to be truly religious or to understand what professing a religion actually means. Just because Islam is the only religion a child is exposed to and their parents want them to be Muslim that does not make them Muslim and we need to be clear about that and we need to tell the children that. All children.