RE: Indoctrinating Children in Religion
March 9, 2015 at 2:41 pm
(This post was last modified: March 9, 2015 at 2:47 pm by Thumpalumpacus.)
I didn't indoctrinate my son in my atheism, and I didn't permit his indoctrination into his mothers erstwhile faith. We taught him to think for himself, answered his questions honestly to the best of our abilities, and let him plug in data and retrieve results.
This is also great advice for atheist households. Programming one's child to accept atheism unquestioningly can actually make that child vulnerable to religious appeals to faith or fallacy.
Teaching your child to make his or her own reasonable judgments is the first and most important job of the parent. If you're not doing that, you're not preparing your child for a world that does not care for him or her.
(March 9, 2015 at 12:40 pm)Crossless1 Wrote: Teach your kids how to think, not what to think. Encourage questions. Provide them with good source material so they can learn to look up things themselves. And if you must bombard them with religious instruction at a young age, then respect them enough to expose them to a variety of religious and non-religious traditions and let them come to their own conclusions. Your children are people in their own right -- not your property and not clay you get to mold into your own misshapen image.
I know, I know . . . it's pie in the sky, at least as far as most religious households are concerned. The last thing they want is a real marketplace of ideas where their bullshit competes on an even footing with other points of view. But I can dream.
This is also great advice for atheist households. Programming one's child to accept atheism unquestioningly can actually make that child vulnerable to religious appeals to faith or fallacy.
Teaching your child to make his or her own reasonable judgments is the first and most important job of the parent. If you're not doing that, you're not preparing your child for a world that does not care for him or her.
