To the future mind of our dear Calista

Every couple of months, I write an email to an account in Calista's name, which will be given to her at some point near adulthood. It usually contains the joys and milestones of her infanthood, but I wrote one on a subject I believe important to the cultivation of her mind.

Dear Calista

You are being raised by atheists. By the time you read this, I’m sure it will be old news. Perhaps you will share our conclusions, perhaps not. At any rate, we hope to have imparted the methods we used to sort through our beliefs: critical thinking, reason and evidence. These are the most important and reliable tools humans have to discover the truth, and I dearly hope we are able to encourage that attitude and cultivate those skills in your thinking and interaction with the world.

Like most atheists of our time, we were raised religious. We were both earnestly religious as well; not people who merely attended church out of a feeling of obligation. Your mother started in the German Church of God (Gemeinde Gottes) and spent 10 years of her childhood in a conservative, fundamentalist cult—the Church of God Restoration—which broke off from that church. Her earnestness and inquiring mind drove her to make sense of her beliefs, which led to questioning it when it didn’t make sense. The luck of being expelled from the cult allowed her to journey further in her examination.

I grew up in an evangelical church, which was somewhat fundamentalist in its religious and social belief system. My mother was fond of reading, thinking and arguing, and she encouraged the same in me. Your mother and I met at a bible college, and partly due to the high quality of education there, later continued questioning our beliefs together. When we married, we were liberal Christians, basing our wedding ceremony on the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. About a year later, we considered ourselves a part of the Emerging Church phenomenon, a movement denounces most of the standard religious dogmas. A little over a year later, we knew we were atheists.

The way that society is moving now, a larger portion of the population will be nonreligious or even atheist by the time you’re an adult. You will be a part of a new generation who have grown up without religion. The primary reason religion exists in a modern scientific society is indoctrination of children, so this means that the prevalence and influence of religion in Canada will decrease. In some cases that means many people will not understand religious belief and its stranglehold on a person’s mind. Many of our nonreligious friends don’t understand how we could have held the beliefs we did years ago. You will likely not have a firsthand understanding either, but we hope to give you an idea. Why? Stories like ours are becoming more common, but the vast majority of people simply accept the worldview they’re given and never make anything more than minor changes. You will come across many people who hold inconceivable and hurtful beliefs and attitudes, and while ridiculing them or brushing them off may be amusing or even sometimes fitting, your best bet for changing their mind is to understand how they think.

Most people take it for granted that their worldview and beliefs are the right ones, and cling to those beliefs for a variety of emotional and social reasons. They naturally indoctrinate their children into the same worldview, expecting that “good” children will not question or move away from their parents’ beliefs. I say indoctrinate instead of teach because they (often purposefully) exclude and degrade other viewpoints. We hope to do the opposite. You’ll learn our worldview of course, but it’s important that you learn what other people believe. Most importantly, we hope to give you the necessary tools to parse among the million competing viewpoints, to build one that reflects reality as closely as possible on as many subjects as possible.

You may ask why it is necessary at all to convince others of their false beliefs—after all, why not live and let live? If all those who held delusions or distorted ideas of reality were content to let others live, then it would not be a problem. But when you believe that yours is the only right view of reality, that others are at risk of eternal torture, and you have been commanded by the creator of the universe to make your beliefs the law of the land, you won’t keep it to yourself. That kind of religion is immediately and unmistakably political because it seeks to force others to live by its rules. That is incompatible with a secular democracy like Canada. The current government is part of a party—and led by a leader—which tries and fails to hide its strong conservative religious roots, which is almost always correlated with ignorance and suspicion of the scientific establishment. Under this government, science budgets and the freedom of tax-payer-funded scientists to communicate their results has been severely decreased. Many of the scientific findings are inconvenient for the economic projects the Conservative Party favours, and scientifically-illiterate and ignorant politicians have been put in charge of the country’s science portfolio, so there is no wonder it has suffered. This is but one example of thousands, but the point is that people—particularly conservative religious ones—often are determined to bind others by their ignorance and prejudice.

Such strong examples are easier to point at, though difficult to combat. Many more people impede progress not out of an explicit will to make the world in their image, but because their bias is invisible to them. Such people may slow progress by contributing to the taboo of criticising religious beliefs, continuing the double standard of criticising ideas in every other realm but that labelled “religion.” Others hamstring the work of activists with their silence, hoping not to “rock the boat.”

Perhaps this all sounds rather dire, but I hope you take this as emphasis of how important rational discourse and decision-making are to human flourishing. The time from which I write is by no means byzantine—marriage equality is widely supported, science makes dozens of important discoveries by the day, and the world is healthier and life less uncertain for humans than at any other time in our existence. Most of these things will not have changed significantly in the next decades, but by any reasonable estimate, Canada will have moved several steps in the right direction by the time you are an adult. Do not forget that it has taken care, effort, and a great deal of controversy to fight back the prejudices and willed ignorance of humanity’s gestation. We hope that we can make the world just a little bit better by our living, and hope to raise you to accomplish the same.