richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

T H |{ • (. O O D ' B O O K A N D T H E M O R A L Z E I 7 C E I S 7 261
minds on what they think about religion (I return to this abuse
of childhood in Chapter 9).
• Segregated schools. Children are educated, again often from a
very early age, with members of a religious in-group and
separately from children whose families adhere to other
religions. It is not an exaggeration to say that the troubles in
Northern Ireland would disappear in a generation if segregated
schooling were abolished.
• Taboos against 'marrying out'. This perpetuates hereditary
feuds and vendettas by preventing the mingling of feuding
groups. Intermarriage, if it were permitted, would naturally
tend to mollify enmities.
The village of Glenarm in Northern Ireland is the seat of the
Earls of Antrim. On one occasion within living memory, the then
Earl did the unthinkable: he married a Catholic. Immediately, in
houses throughout Glenarm, the blinds were drawn in mourning. A
horror of 'marrying out' is also widespread among religious Jews.
Several of the Israeli children quoted above mentioned the dire
perils of 'assimilation' at the forefront of their defence of Joshua's
Battle of Jericho. When people of different religions do marry, it is
described with foreboding on both sides as a 'mixed marriage' and
there are often prolonged battles over how the children are to be
brought up. When I was a child and still carried a guttering torch
for the Anglican Church, I remember being dumbfounded to be
told of a rule that when a Roman Catholic married an Anglican, the
children were always brought up Catholic. I could readily understand
why a priest of either denomination would try to insist on
this condition. What I couldn't understand (still can't) was
the asymmetry. Why didn't the Anglican priests retaliate with the
equivalent rule in reverse? Just less ruthless, I suppose. My old
chaplain and Betjeman's 'Our Padre' were simply too nice.
Sociologists have done statistical surveys of religious homogamy
(marrying somebody of the same religion) and heterogamy (marrying
somebody of a different religion). Norval D. Glenn, of the
University of Texas at Austin, gathered a number of such studies up
to 1978 and analysed them together. 102 He concluded that there is