Mode of the Debate: Targeting Children

My first exposure to dinosaurs was in the Alley Oop comic strip and, later on, The Flintstones. We didn't have many books on dinosaurs back then (and they were of the brontosaurus-had-two-brains variety) but somehow I learned that humans and dinosaurs never coexisted.I don't remeber that revelation producing any particular trauma. I never had trouble separating fact from fiction.Years later, as a teenager, I was exposed to anti-scientific creationism. I remember my favorite pastor saying that dinosaurs never existed at all, they were a hoax. I almost expected to see a cuckoo come out of his forehead on a spring.My brother and I used to tease our fundier cousins, telling them that there must have been dinosaurs on the ark. They vehemently argued against it. Decades later, when I found out that that's now standard creo nonsense, I nearly fell out of my chair laughing./jaunt down memory laneAnyway, I have some confidence in the resiliency of the human mind. Targeting children with lies is vile and insidious, but I'm not convinced it's effective.

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I don't think children are much different from adults in that. How often do we hear adults say they'd "rather" be a child of God than related to an ape? They never did though. I figured out for myself that talking, porridge-eating, chair-sitting bears weren't real. If anything, that fiction helped me to understand that talking snakes are fiction too.(I suspect that a lot of creationist adults have to unlearn the discernment that they had as children.) And even if we had no chance of winning in the end, the fight would still be worthwhile.

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