You know, my first teaching job was at a mission school in Singapore. (I didn't get to choose. Presumably they didn't either.)
My boss asked me to cross out my religion field marked "atheist" and fill in "free thinker" to avoid trouble. He also suggested, strongly, that I bow my head together with everyone else when prayer was going on.
I didn't have to, he said. I just probably should.
No, I never did bow my head.
Not once.
This... may have a lot to do with my subsequent alienation from management, come to think of it.
And normally I don't read Salon, but this caught my attention:
[Religion] perpetuates itself through dogma saying that asking questions about religion is sinful, and that trusting religion without evidence is virtuous. It perpetuates itself through dogma saying that joy and meaning and morality can only be found in religion, and that leaving religion will automatically result in a desperate, amoral, pointless life. It perpetuates itself through religious communities and support systems that make believing in religion — or pretending to believe in religion — a necessity to function and indeed survive. It perpetuates itself through parents and other authority figures teaching it to children, whose brains are hard-wired to believe what they’re told.
Religion relies on social consent to perpetuate itself. But the simple act of coming out as an atheist denies it this consent. Even if atheists never debate believers or try to persuade them out of their beliefs; even if all we ever do is say out loud, “Actually, I’m an atheist,” we’re still denying our consent. And that throws a monkey wrench into religion’s engine.
I have spent all my life being grit in someone else's dogma machine. Apparently I can't be anything else.
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