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Babies are born atheists. The only theistic difference between a baby atheist and an adult atheist is that the adult knows religion exists. Babies have blank slates, and when one is born, two questions are immediately considered: who will write on the slate, and what will be written?

It is a valuable slate: the first things written on it tend to stay there for good. Since the start of recorded history, men and women have been lining up, chalk at the ready, to write their own words on it. Often, these men and women write so much nonsense on it that no room is left for the baby's own words. Naturally, children grow, year by year, into adults with the power to make their own choices, but sometimes, having no room for their own words steals that power away.

Many a child is instructed not two write her own words on her slate - if she does, she might be banished to hell, and if she shows her slate to anyone else, she might be rejected from her community. She's taught to feel guilty for erasing other people's words from her slate. She lives, in fear of hell's torture and of god's rejection, writing other people's words on her slate, because no one bothered to permit her to think for herself. In lacking this ability, she might spend the rest of her life struggling to find genuine meaning, happiness, and truth.

It is the very nature of truth that it is there, waiting for discovery. If it wasn't in any way apparent and discoverable, it wouldn't be the truth. Without thinking for oneself - exploring religious texts from East to West, and knowing what it means to be a skeptic, too - one is not likely to find much truth, or to know his own mind. The less one knows about his own mind, the harder it will be for him to find happiness and fulfillment.

Children are their own people from the moment they're born. While parents and school officials are compelled to act as stewards, children are not "owned" by anyone, even when they're very young. "My child" is "the child with half my genes, who I care for," not "the child that belongs to me," nor "the child that belongs to [my] god." There is no such thing as a religious child, as children lack the maturity and knowledge to make their own informed choices about religion and its philosophy.

Children are not yet equipped to think for themselves. That much must be taught, and taught properly, by showing children how to reason, rather than to have "faith" or to blindly believe whatever they're told. Children do not exist to serve as repositories

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