This chapter is to a large extent anecdote-driven. There are some real horror stories about what has been done to children in the name of religion. And of course these are not isolated incidents.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, this is to a large extent a series of anecdotes, and there is always a risk attached to that. Anecdotes are highly effective as rhetorical tool, irrespective of whether there’s much truth to the claims they are being used to illustrate. People tend to respond best to narrative – to a story. The Daily Mail<\/span>, for example, is chock full of anecdotes about foreigners, edicts from Brussels, crime, and so on, and that can, and does, often give a highly misleading impression of what the situation is really like.<\/p>\n In response, Dawkins’s opponents will simply trot out endless anecdotes about the benefits of raising children in a religious belief system (take a look at e.g. the work of Melanie Phillips – Mail<\/span> columnist and author of such anecdote-driven rhetoric as the dreadful All Must Have Prizes <\/span>). You can’t really establish what’s true just by looking at the anecdotes being offered by either side.<\/p>\n Still, Dawkins admits he is “consciousness raising”, and if that is your aim then piling up the anecdotes is a very effective tool. I call it APPRA – the Awesome Persuasive Power of Ramified Anecdote.<\/span><\/p>\n So, I approach this chapter cautiously because of its heavy reliance on APPRA. Having said that, it’s masterfully done, and it’s not as if there isn’t, in fact, a good case being built for not indoctrinating children with religion. There is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This chapter is to a large extent anecdote-driven. There are some real horror stories about what has been done to children in the name of religion. And of course these are not isolated incidents. Nevertheless, this is to a large extent a series of anecdotes, and there is always a risk attached to that. Anecdotes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-club-the-god-delusion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}