Religion and The age of Consent

The following article comes from a secular writer in the UK

In The Times on 18th Jan 2008 the Rev Peter Mullen claimed that not teaching children the Catholic Faith was a form of child abuse. I am finding it hard to find sufficient words to show the contempt that I have for this man and this idea.

Instead I post an article that I actually wrote before the deluded Rev Mullen published his and I ask: If children are not mature enough to drive a car before they are 17 years old, then why does the church claim they are mature enough to select a religion before that? After all, driving a car is no where near as important as God…

Religion and the Age of Consent.

The age at which we can legally do all manner of exciting sounding things is a constant annoyance when we are too young; a source of great bragging when you are just over that age and your friends are not; a much too low a limit as soon as you become a parent!

At 16 a person can get married with their parents’ permission. A person can have sex and actually create a baby without parental permission. (I consider that parental guidance might be a little more useful in the decision to make a baby)

At 17 years old we allow a child to drive. In the UK we have no restrictions on what type of car, or what power that car has and in reality the only constraints are that the average 17 year old cannot afford to insure a powerful car: buying a half rusty 1970 super car is actually cheap however. But nevertheless we parents still allow our hugely inexperienced offspring to borrow our cars and hope they are responsible enough to drive safely.

At 18 we allow the ingestion of potentially fatal poisons for pleasure: tobacco and alcohol. We also allow this newly qualified adult to fight and die in the armed forces. Most importantly, from a democratic point of view at 18 years of age the right to Vote and decide the fate of your neighbours is activated. This is often considered the most important of the age related limits as a vote directly impacts everyone in the country.

The experience of society has set these age limits based on when society considers the average youngster has reached a sufficient level of responsibility to be trusted with the choices that are now permitted.

The most important thing about these limits is that no parent has the right to over-rule the law. The protection of the child and as a direct consequence of that, the protection of others is the first priority.

Where am I going with this?

Leaders of the various religions tell us everyday that the most important thing in a life (any human life) is their relationship with God. Those religions are of course in opposition to each other, but in modern times their doctrine has been subdued, to an extent, to prevent a repeat of the crusades. However they all believe they are right at the expense of all the others.

The legal ages of consent, or to put it another way, the age at which we expect a certain level of responsibility, as detailed above are ‘earthly,’ or for the purposes of this article, non-spiritual.

The church (I use that as a generic term for all religions) would probably support an increase in the age of consent for sexual relations. It is also likely that they would support a significant increase in the age of consent for homosexual relations and state that a 16 year old is not sufficiently responsible to make such a decision. More to the point many religions would still support a ban, effectively claiming that no person is able to make such a decision for themselves: the proper standard of heterosexual behaviour having been set by God.

So if a person under 18 years old cannot be trusted to vote responsibly, and a person under 16 cannot be trusted to make responsible decisions about sex, and by the very teachings of religion these are trivial when compared to the relationship with God, why on earth do we allow children to make a decision about their eternal soul?

When a person selects a God, or a Religion, or even a sect of a religion are they not simply voting?

Following the reasoning above the age of consent to select a religion should be about 36 if the relationship with God is twice as important as being able to vote! Or is it 3 times more important? Or is it infinitely more important? Of course religion must claim that to be true otherwise at some point a theist would have to admit that the ability to vote legally in an earthly election would be more important than God, when obviously nothing is more important than God.

Continue this article at the following Livejournal page:

http://reasonaboveall.livejournal.com/#reasonaboveall777