(May 15, 2025 at 8:15 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:

(May 15, 2025 at 12:09 am)Paleophyte Wrote: Then what good are they? These words that you wrote that are apparently useless? Why do you write them at all? Sheer reflexive instinct?

What are words good for? Social coordination. Does that include persuasion? Yes, but not the cartoonish version of it that you think exists.

Let me see if I can summarize the fight so far. The vituperative tone here makes it all a bit obscure.

So, if I'm reading you right, here is the version which you call cartoonish: 

Parents tell their children what is true, and the children believe it. Then, if they're lucky, at a certain age the children begin to think for themselves and may reject the "indoctrination" given them by their parents. 

Is that about it? It seems to reflect the experiences of many people on line, whose parents took them to church, but who rejected the whole thing later on. Though I suppose the same pattern would apply if a child was raised atheist, but then began to think for himself at age 14 and became a Christian.

On the other hand, I think you are saying that children are much less passive than this. That they are works-in-progress all along, and not as likely to be little carbon copies as others suggest. 

In this view, children will get diverse influences -- more than just parents -- especially now with all the different media available. And since even anodyne-seeming media content does contain loaded language (what a literature guy would call subtext) a child is likely to pick up on way more than just what he or she hears at home. 

There's a kind of image we may hold to -- that the parents sit the child down one day and tell him "X, Y, and Z are true, and that's what our family believes" and then the child believes that until one day he doesn't. But in fact the child picks up all kinds of ideas in less obvious ways, and these remain dynamic. 

(Or I suppose they remain dynamic until, as an adult, a person's identity and self-definition become bound up in one tribe or the other, and the child's open-mindedness is switched off.) 

Is that roughly what you've been arguing for? 

If you can point me to some not-too-technical books or papers I would be interested to catch up with the subject.

Maybe you two (John and Belacqua) should go back to trying to debunk biological evolution because you seemed to be better at that than this.

As a parent of three grown children I can say that there's a lot more that feeds into a child's thoughts and beliefs than simply the parents/family. If it were possible, I would say that I have three polar opposites.

It is far too simplistic to suggest that kids are going to mirror their parents though they may follow along with religious beliefs and politic stances that they have grown up with and around.

There is also the fact that kids raised by the same parents are also raised by different parents. I'll try to explain. As the oldest of three, I was raised by young, poor parents. One was a minimum wage worker and the other a college student. Very different from the parents who raised my brother after dad had an established business and our socio-economic status was completely different from what I experienced. My sister got a little of both but due to the age gap she was raised more like my brother.

(May 15, 2025 at 9:05 am)Belacqua Wrote: On the other hand, I think you are saying that children are much less passive than this. That they are works-in-progress all along, and not as likely to be little carbon copies as others suggest. In this view, children will get diverse influences -- more than just parents -- especially now with all the different media available. And since even anodyne-seeming media content does contain loaded language (what a literature guy would call subtext) a child is likely to pick up on way more than just what he or she hears at home. 

...

Is that roughly what you've been arguing for? 

If you can point me to some not-too-technical books or papers I would be interested to catch up with the subject.

Yes, exactly. The best non-technical book that I've read on this particular topic of parenting is the Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris. Blueprint by Robert Plomin is not about parenting but highlights how all behavioral traits are heritable, and how even culture can be the product of genetic influence. Language vs. Reality by N.J. Enfield is my current favorite book on language, and it highlights how it is a system for social coordination.

This video clip, from 23:00-35:00 might be too technical, but it forwards a great explanation for why we become more exploratory in adolescence. I'd be interested to see if you can pick up the overall thesis, because I think it's fascinating.

Just as advertisers wouldn't use their techniques unless they worked a certain percentage of the time, neither would religious people (all else being equal).

That's not to say religious people can't lose ground over time because of such factors as child-abusing Catholic priests, money-grubbing protestant ministers, terrorist Muslims, and, I am glad to say, the proliferation of atheistic arguments online and elsewhere.

(May 15, 2025 at 9:10 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: Maybe you two (John and Belacqua) should go back to trying to debunk biological evolution because you seemed to be better at that than this.

John X Bels ship is the best thing that has come of this thread, don't you ruin it.

(April 29, 2025 at 3:13 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:

(April 29, 2025 at 8:31 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: Why do you think Christians focus on eternal life, if not a fear of death?

The focus of Christians, as the name implies, is on Christ himself. His character, his story, that is what appeals to the Christian. Jesus is what makes heaven appealing to the Christian.

You'll never meet a Christian that says they're a Christian because they fear death, that is a caricature found within atheist circles.

Lots of christians are christians absolutely because they fear death. Their only focus is appeasing their god so that he allows them into heaven because of their absolute fear of hell.

You should really get to know some christians, not listen to the surface level propoganda of their preachers.

(May 12, 2025 at 9:29 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:

(May 12, 2025 at 10:34 am)Angrboda Wrote: ...far beyond any attribution to personal choice unfettered by coercive factors.

This last part is problematic for your theory, because autonomy is one of the strongest predictors in motivational psychology. People value control so much they’ll pay more just to keep it. The difference between influence and coercion is exactly how much autonomy is preserved. I wouldn’t be surprised if individuals raised in coercive religious environments were more likely to reject religion altogether.

Social environments do have an influence, but your autonomy, free of coercion, is a far better predictor of what beliefs and behaviors you'll adopt.

None of that applies when you start indoctrination at a young age. Human children are wired to absorb information from the people in their life like sponges. By the time they're of an age when rebellion starts to become common, they've typically interalized most of the beliefs and attitudes their parents have taught them. I think that a large part of more people turning away from the religion they were brought up in, in modern times, is the difficulty of isolating children and teens from the knowledge that most people don't believe the same things they do.

A faith that is hard and brittle, like biblical fundamentalism where you're taught that the whole Bible is 100% literally true, is more likely to break whether it's imposed coercively or gently, IMHO. You only have to be convinced one part is incorrect to weaken the whole belief structure. It's hard to imagine the one provable fact an Episcopalian might encounter that could prompt them to think 'If this is true, Episcopalianism is a lie!'.

@John 6IX Breezy

It was a relatively simple question. Bear in mind that I’m not asking for metaphysical certitude, just your personal opinion. Surely you have one…

Boru

(May 13, 2025 at 11:42 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:

(May 13, 2025 at 5:52 am)Alan V Wrote: What about misinformation and disinformation, or even the lack of information?  If you spread propaganda and suppress more accurate information, people may not even be aware that you are coercing them.  They may not even realize what their choices are if you have loaded the language with which they think.

I don't know if you can do that successfully and the person not be aware of the coercion. You would need to isolate a person from the world to such a degree that you become their only source of information, and that's just not likely unless we're talking about obvious abuse. People normally exist within several social spheres of influence, from parents to peers to institutions, and it is very difficult to have them all be in complete agreement.

Most information bubbles are of our own making. We seek out echo chambers and like-minded individuals. And we do a better job of that than any propaganda machine could.

It wasn't so hard to isolate people when most of them never traveled more than 50 miles from where they were born, which was all of history minus a recent comparatively paper-thin slice in recent times. Most people more than a couple of hundred years ago could live their whole lives without having a 20 minute converstion with someone of a different religion or no religion. Knowledge of other religions was often limited to caricatures and stereotypes their own religion taught them. And now that that is no longer the case, we see more peole switching denominations, religions, or turning away from religion altogether than ever before. But about half of teens still follow the same religion their parents did or one that's very similar, in the USA.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/202...and-teens/