In my opinion, indoctrinating young, impressionable children to believe fairy tales and creation myths, and teaching them to deny facts, evidence, and not use critical thinking skills, and instead smile, nod, and blindly follow the ignorant is a from of child abuse.

Teaching your children that if they don’t make themselves willfully ignorant, and imposing blindness to reality on them, thus warping their minds and their ability to think critically should be criminal child psychological abuse.

Do you have any idea the amount of effort, and the HARM it does to a person’s psyche to always have to operate using doublethink, and to have to live in such deep levels of denial, and the psychological dissonance it causes (Which is why many creationists get violently angry when presented with the truth that their myths can’t hold up to scrutiny… because being presented with such truth and having to accept it could shatter their world view, and their view of themselves, irrevocably), whenever they’re presented with evidence and facts that contradict their silly stories about invisible sky-daddies that make things by magic presumably because they’re either incredibly bored or incredibly arrogant, and then, also decide to screw with their creations by supposedly putting dinosaur bones here on earth to ‘test faith’?

When you teach a child that their ‘God’ operates that way, they think it’s okay to screw with people and bend the truth, twist facts, and manipulate evidence, so long as it’s for some higher religious purpose. After all, God did that, just to ‘test people’s faith’.

Wanting the right to screw your children up for life – see shadowspring’s posts as a cautionary tale – is not a noble pursuit.

Have fun wasting your life trying to please an invisible sky-daddy that, in all likelihood, doesn’t even exist, and if there IS a divine being, then it’s a sociopath, to be able to see the suffering of starving children, war, disease, famine and drought, and to be able to help, and yet, do nothing about it… So I wouldn’t want to worship such a being anyway.

We do have a creationist movement here, although the shouting we hear is largely from the US.

To answer your original question, I don’t believe in Him (ironic capital) either, but I did grow up in a church (Anglican) that seemed to have no problem with science or evolution. I would say that the moderate voices in Canada are being drowned out by evangelical groups, so, as a society we’re much more polarized than we were. Having said that, I think we still have a smaller percentage of evangelical voters than the US does (although Evangelical Christians seem to be overrepresented in our current government).

We have Christian charter schools, and a home-school movement too, so there’s plenty of room for kids to avoid the fell influence of secular society.

First of all, from all that I’ve heard, God doesn’t actually want us to use our brains. Christianity is a monarchy, not a democracy, and kings notoriously got twitchy around scientists. After all, if you start questioning ‘why does this work and the other thing doesn’t?’ there’s no telling where the questions will lead.

Secondly, to use your landlord metaphor, why would He care if He’s just going to tear the house down anyway?

I think you’ve got my perspective wrong; I’m very much in favor of science and the environmentalist movement, but not so much in favor of God. I just keep an eye on his believers, partly for my own amusement, partly so I can organize rescue parties when the bonfires are lit.

“From my understanding, it’s one or the other.”

This doesn’t make any sense to me. I always thought science was a way of understanding God’s creation. I mean, God gave us this world, this universe, to explore and to understand, right? Surely God wouldn’t be against science, which is only a way of trying to get at the truth, or maybe even The Truth. Science is a way of organizing and uncovering facts that we might not be able to understand or see with just one pair of eyes. Is that wrong? Didn’t God give us a brain to understand the world?

And what about the environment? Didn’t God say, “I give you dominion over pretty much everything?” That’s kind of like saying, “Here, this is your house”. Are you trying tell me that God is an absentee landlord and you’re just a renter and it doesn’t matter if you make a mess in his house? Because that sounds kind of irresponsible.

Are you SURE that being an environmentalist is incompatible with being a Christian? Because what if he comes back and says, “Dude, you’re going to have to pay for the clogged sink and those holes in the drywall. Or else I’m keeping your damage deposit.” Then what?

I realize you’re Canadian, but how does that work? From my understanding, it’s one or the other. Kinda like being a Christian and an environmentalist- can’t really do both.