RE: Religious indoctrination of children
March 14, 2012 at 11:16 pm
(This post was last modified: March 14, 2012 at 11:19 pm by Cyberman.)
(March 14, 2012 at 5:18 pm)One King Wrote: The Bible says that children need discipline and training. Our finest and most intellectual men on the planet are always men of God.
Yeah, well the bible says a lot of things, much of which even devout believers find uncomfortable. Not to mention incompatible with modern life, as Col Ingersoll reminds us: "If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane." Ingersoll, by the way, was one of those intellectual men of whom you spoke.
(March 14, 2012 at 5:18 pm)One King Wrote: It's not indoctrination when you're teaching the love of the almighty Creator.
Which almighty Creator would this be, I wonder? There are plenty to choose from, not all interchangeable. The Hopi creator god Taiowa, perhaps, or the Indian Brahma? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you're referring to the creator god of the Old Testament, Yahweh or whatever your favourite designation may be for the character. Assuming this to be the case, I suppose you would be comfortable with teaching children the love of Allah - it is, after all, the same character in a different cultural setting. Or would you have a problem with that?
Basically, programming impressionable minds with falsehoods and mythology intended to impinge on all other teachings and reasoning processes is just about the very definition of indoctrination.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
