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They (Atheists) Understand the Value of Education

John Dewey

I believe that ... [public] education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform ... this conception has due regard for ... socialistic ideals." and "There is no God and there is no soul. ... There is no room for fixed ... or moral absolutes." (My Pedagogic Creed Article 5. The School and Social Progress)

Dewey signed the Humanist Manifesto.*

John J. Dunphy

I am convinced that the battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being. These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of the educational level—preschool, daycare, or large state university. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new—the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism, resplendent with its promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of “love thy neighbor” will finally be achieved. (“A Religion for a New Age”. The Humanist. January-February, 1983)

Dunphy also said, “ I steadfastly maintain that only with the complete, irrevocable rejection of God and the supernatural will humankind truly begin to live…Only the atheist is truly free” and “ If the previous paragraphs [of 'A Religion For A New Age'] prove anything, it is that the Bible is not merely another book, an outmoded and archaic book, or even an extremely influential book; it has been and remains an incredibly dangerous book.” (http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quotes_by/john+j.+dunphy)

H. L. Mencken

“The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its am everywhere else." (The American Mercury, April 1924)

H. L. Mencken, famous for his scathing attacks on creationists during the Scopes Trial, also said, “ What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world? Answer: he gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell.” (Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebook)

The act of worship, as carried on by Christians, seems to me to be debasing rather than ennobling. It involves groveling before a being who, if he really exists, deserves to be denounced instead of respected. (Quoted in Will Durant, On the Meaning of Life)

John Stuart Mill

"A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation, in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body." (On Liberty)

John Stuart Mill also said, “ The ne plus ultra of wickedness is embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as he creed of Christianity.” (Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, Chapter II, 1873)

Chester Pierce

"Every child in American entering schools at the age of 5 is insane because he comes to schools with certain allegiances toward our Founding Fathers, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It's up to you, teachers, to make all of these sick children well by creating the international child of the future." (1972 keynote address to the Association for Childhood Education International)

Charles F. Potter

"Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every American school is a school of humanism. What can a theistic Sunday school's meeting for an hour once a week and teaching only a fraction of the children do to stem the tide of the five-day program of humanistic teaching?" (Humanism: A New Religion. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1930, p. 128)

Charles Potter signed the Humanist Manifesto* and wrote Humanism: A New Religion. He was a Unitarian minister that erected a statue in his church showing at human being coming out of the skin of an ape. (Evolution Encyclopedia, Vol. III, Chapt. 30, “The Scopes Trial”)

Bertrand Russell

“It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.”

“Where all children go to school, and all schools are controlled by the government, the authorities can close the minds of the young to everything contrary to official orthodoxy .”

“Fichte laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished.

“The nations which at present increase [their populations] rapidly should be encouraged to adopt the methods by which, in the West, the increase of population has been checked. Educational propaganda, with government help, could achieve this result in a generation.”

The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity... It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark grey. Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.” ( The Impact of Science on Society - 1952 . Quotes are not chronological.)

Bertrand Russell is perhaps best known for his essay “Why I am not a Christian”.

Joseph Stalin

Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed. (Interview with H. G. Wells. September, 1937)

Stalin also said, “You know, they are fooling us, there is no God.” (Soviet-published Landmarks in the Life of Stalin, 1940)

THE BOTTOM LINE

(After touring the Creation Museum a secularist blogged: “For me, the most frightening part was the children’s section. It was at this moment that I learned the deepest lesson of my visit to the Museum: It is in the minds and hearts of our children that the battle will be fought.”
(http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/au/children-are-the-key)

Evolutionism is the main weapon used to attack our children. Unfortunately, Answers in Genesis, and most major evangelical ministries still think we can make children into miniature apologists and send them into the war zones of government schools to fight people like that blogger. That is simply sending the children on suicide missions.

*Humanism

Humanism holds that the universe exists for no purpose…Obviously, if no moral absolutes exist, you can't demonstrate that anything is wrong or evil…Humanism is fostered by the teaching of evolutionary science, materialism and moral relativism in our popular media and public school system…We are nothing more than bugs struggling with survival until we die. (http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/Humanism.htm)