At what age should a child be introduced to religion?

[Belacqua]

I think it's still a nice ideal that people be mindful enough to preface their statements with 'I believe', especially when they know their beliefs are contentious or part of a multitude of views on a subject.

Yes, you're certainly right that raising kids rationally will include acknowledging this kind of thing. Ideally parents would be willing to say "Well, in our tradition we hold that X, though you'll find that others don't agree" or something like that. 

I guess it's part of a larger rule, that all of us should be willing to look in the mirror and say "of course, I may be wrong." 

I apologize if I seem overly tough or snide about this. I suppose it's because it's one of those things that comes up periodically, and some people seem to me unreasonable about it. Non-religious people may see religion as something to carve out from a kid's education. Since we don't think it's supportable, we want other adults to refrain from teaching it, or wait until the kids are old enough to be smart and skeptical, like us. But if it's part of someone's life, then they're just going to raise their kids that way, and asking them to keep their kids innocent of it isn't practical or fair. 

I've been trying to remember all those years ago, how I learned as a kid about religious ideas. My family was completely without religion, we never talked about it at home, and I never attended a church service. (I never have in my life.) And I'm so old that I grew up before religion became weaponized politically, to get voters angry. When I was a kid, religion and politics were still things you didn't talk about socially. (And my dad was mayor for decades, but couldn't be in the current climate, since he was a left-wing atheist in a tiny midwest town.) Yet I obviously heard about it, and knew what the churches were for, and knew that my best friend in the school was different because he was the only Jewish kid in town. His parents raised him very much as a believing Jew, but it wouldn't occur to me to think of him as "indoctrinated." It was all very matter of factly "his family is that way, our family is this way."