Agressive?

[Anymouse]

My boys are 6 and 4, far too young to make decisions about what they believe or not. I have and do explain that people have different beliefs about the big questions, but I also explain that no one knows if they are correct in their beliefs because no one has any evidence. I've never told them that religious people are crazy. I've taught them to be respectful of people's beliefs, but that asking questions does not equate to being disrespectful. Curiosity is a wonderful thing, and I whole-heartedly encourage it. Judging from my oldest's response to the Passover story, ("That's just weird.") I don't think they'll blindly follow what anyone says.

I taught my son (now twenty-five) to respect people, unless they show themselves unworthy of respect; not to respect ideas, unless they are shown to be true.

And faith is not a virtue, unless it is based on evidence. (For example, I have faith in my wife, because my wife has shown herself long ago to be worthy of my faith and trust. No religious belief has ever shown such evidence.)

On the other hand, accepting something on faith which is patently false (the world has four corners, or is six thousand years old, or was engulfed by a world-spanning flood) is delusion. Delusion does not require respect (though the person still does). In any other venue, such delusion would be worthy of treatment by a psychiatrist; religion gets a pass.

And if you are to respect religion, should you respect all of the many mutually-exclusive religions in the world? They can't all be right: they can all be wrong.

In the matter of religious belief, none of it can be shown to be true. And in the instant it is shown to be true, with evidence, reason, observation, or experimentation, it becomes science. Thus faith is not required.

Reason does not work on faith. Science does not work on faith. One does not read a scientific paper with such a line (ripping of Richard Dawkins here) that starts "it was privately revealed to the president of the Royal Society that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs."

I do not use the term "crazy," which my mother (a psychologist) says is a technical term for use by professionals only.