Supernormal Phenomena - Letter from Professor Richard Dawkins to Stan Ford (January 22, 1992)

Professor Richard Dawkins puts the Record Straight - E-mail from Michael Roll to Professor Richard Dawkins (December 1, 2013)

Children must choose their own beliefs - Richard Dawkins - an open letter to the Secretary of State for Education, Estelle Morris, published in The Observer, London, Sunday December 30, 2001.
Extract:

But now we come to religion, and an extremely odd thing happens. Where we might have said, 'knowing his father, I expect young Cowdrey will take up cricket,' we emphatically do not say, 'With her devout Catholic parents, I expect young Bernadette will take up Catholicism.' Instead we say, without a moment's hesitation or a qualm of misgiving, 'Bernadette is a Catholic'. We state it as simple fact even when she is far too young to have developed a theological opinion of her own. In all other spheres, a good school will encourage her to develop her own tastes and opinions, her own skills, penchants and values. But when it comes to religion, society meekly makes a clanging exception. We inexplicably accept that, the day she is born, Bernadette has a label tied around her neck. This is a Catholic baby.

That is a protestant baby. This is a Hindu baby. That is a Muslim baby. This baby thinks there are many gods. That baby is adamant that there is only one. But it is preposterous that we do this to children. They are too young to know what they think. To slap a label on a child at birth - to announce, in advance, as a matter of hereditary presumption if not determinate certainty, an infant's opinions on the cosmos and creation, on life and afterlives, on sexual ethics, abortion and euthanasia - is a form of mental child abuse.

East-West Schism

The medieval division of Chalcedonian Christianity into the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church