M y family has always aired on the side of pragmatism.
My younger sister went to a Christian preschool because it was across the street from my elementary school.
Although I was growing up in a reformed Jewish household, as a seven-year-old, I really wasn’t phased by the idea.
My toe-headed, four-year-old sister climbed in the car seat across from me in the backseat after school and would proceed to sing Bible songs she had learned at school that day with all the gusto her 4-foot self had.
The next year, when my sister entered kindergarten and started going to Sunday school at our local Santa Barbara temple, she was probably more well-versed in religious teachings than many adults.
My religion, when I was younger, introduced me to a group of people I went trick-or-treating with on Halloween and ate s’mores with on camping trips.
Religion had always played a role in my life, but it played more of a cultural presence—a supportive community that was only one puzzle piece to the life my family had built around me.
I don’t think I ever truly connected to religious teaching in a traditional sense, and, so for me, there is a whole world of faith I don’t understand.
In  2001, the US Supreme Court ruled in the Good News Club v. Milford Central School case that Good News Clubs can meet in public schools.
The self-acclaimed purpose of Good News Clubs is to “evangelize boys and girls with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and establish them in the word of God and in a local church for Christian living.”
There are Good News Clubs at seven local elementary schools, one of which I teach an after school hip-hop class at.  It is not difficult to understand why the ministry of clubs’ target age group is three to 14. The organization’s vow is to reclaim elementary schools in an effort to  indoctrinate students with Christian ideology.
Here are these small, future global citizens who take every utterance of their teachers for gospel of truth.
The girls in my hip-hop class often echo what I say, and it turns my stomach to think about adults persuading them with candy to have their parents sign a permission slip.
At Laguna Blanca’s Global Studies Day, I was  reminded of the atrocities that continue to come of age-old religious conflicts. In that frame of mind, I understood why a new wave of Atheism  has taken center stage in western societies.
Evangelism is entirely alien to me, and I feel comfortable with keeping it at a safe distance.
Ethologist, biological evolutionist, and author  Richard Dawkins said in his best selling book The God Dillusion that God is, “arguably the most unpleasant character in fiction.”
Dawkins encourages his readers to imagine a world without religion—a world without no “suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, noSerb/Croat/Muslim massacres…”  While only 1 to 2 percent of Americans describe themselves Atheists, according to recent national polls, 15 percent of Americans say that they are not affiliated with any religion.
This lack of affiliation has been increasingly described as the fastest-growing ‘religious group’ in America today.
But the in-your-face brand of Atheism that Dawkins seems to be proselytizing, and the dogma that this new-age anti-religion is  preaching, embodies everything that puts me off about the Good News Clubs.
The tone of the New Atheist contingent that Dawkins exhorts seems to be taking up an intolerance that  is far too familiar to those who study world conflict, international security, and  atrocity crimes. While the movement stands for a rejection of  fundamentalism, it  is just as traditionally derisive as the religions that it speaks out against.
I hold an admiration for religion as a strong  ethical foundation and as being incredibly uniting , bringing people together for  powerful healing. I strongly believe that Dawkin’s form of Atheism is overlooking the morality and resolution that religion has proved to foster over and over again throughout history.
Organized religion, while it has been at the core of world conflict and countless crimes against humanity, it has also been at the root of healing after devastation and has proven a benefit to developing societies.
Rebecca Tinsley spoke to the Laguna community about how genocide, while widely thought to be inhumane,  is inherently human.
So is religion. Dawkins’ preaching has taken on the same evangelical character that the Good News Clubs represent.
The Laguna Blanca community participated in Global Studies Day because the school recognizes the value in educating global citizens.
Religion will  undoubtably continue to be at the root of both atrocity and justice, but rather than preaching the morals of Jesus to elementary school students, modern American democracy should be encouraging young people to critically analyze movements like the one Dawkins is leading.