“Language can help to shape the way we think about the world. Richard Dawkins welcomes an attempt to raise consciousness about atheism by co-opting a word with cheerful associations“:

My favourite consciousness-raising effort is one I have men tioned many times before (and I make no apology, for consciousness- raising is all about repetition). A phrase like ‘Catholic child’ or ‘Muslim child’ should clang furious bells of protest in the mind, just as we flinch when we hear ‘one man one vote’. Children are too young to know their religious opinions. Just as you can’t vote until you are 18, you should be free to choose your own cosmology and ethics without society’s impertinent presumption that you will automatically inherit your parents’. We’d be aghast to be told of a Leninist child or a neo-conservative child or a Hayekian monetarist child. So isn’t it a kind of child abuse to speak of a Catholic child or a Protestant child? Especially in Northern Ireland and Glasgow where such labels, handed down over generations, have divided neighbourhoods for centuries and can even amount to a death warrant? Guardian/UK