parents right to indoctrinate kids

my thesis is; that parents are the perpetuators of religions.

given a child, with a mind clean and unencumbered...they indoctrinate their children with whatever belief systems their parents induced in them.

the perpatuation of beliefs.
religion is a merely a specific belief system.

take this right away, making the passing on of such belief sytems a crime, and religions will die their natural death.

 

I'm about as passionately athiest as you can get.
and i think that's a dumb-ass bullshit idea.

the govenment has NO role in dictating what people choose to believe, or what they raise their children to believe.

 

I agree. It's been tried, by Communist countries (like the one Repro-bait is posting from), and to the limited extent it worked, it resulted in mindless autocratic secular bureaucrats doing the brainwashing and indoctrination to a standard ideology, instead of loving parents doing their best to teach their kids what they think they know is right. Repro-bait may like the Chinese model, but people outside China think totalitarianism has its problems. China's ruthless persecution and "thought reform" of the Falun Gong movement a few years ago should send chills down our spine when we read Repro-bate's post. Nothing arouses the fears of normal parents more than Dawkins' idea that religion is child abuse and that he knows better than they do what children should be taught to believe. He thinks that no child should be allowed to be raised Amish, but I think having Amish, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists,pagans, Jews, atheists, agnostics, etc., creates a rich,healthy pluralism and lively exchange of ideas instead of a mono-crop of "one size fits all" secularists. First they came for the Jews, then the Christans; when will it be the hippies' turn?

 

Yet only to be replaced by another system of thought meant for the same purpose. Religion is one of the many faces we create to escape ourselves. If we reject that we accept another, etc, and the conditioned minds breed on.

 

interesting........responses were only from males.

 

how would that destroy religion, considering the fact most people still believe in god after going through the whole teenage "fuck god and your religion mom" stage it shows they're still thinking on their own. Religions have come and gone, but the concept of god/s has remained

And above anything, there's nothing more sacred then a parent's right to raise their child

 

and do they also have the 'right' to indoctrinate a young mind with spurious beliefs?
come on........
no person or set of persons has an inalienable right to foster,induce or otherwise project their beliefs onto another.

as for the multifarious mishmash of religions giving a richness to the world...the opposite is the seen result of such belief systems....eternally recurring tensions, hatreds and wars...........this is religious belief in action.

 

Including the State?

That's a pretty simplistic idea. Religions seem to be able to coexist peaceably enough in Western Europe and the United States. A lot of those "tensions, hatreds, and wars" are over other issues, including territory, natural resources, race, ethnicity, etc.

 

personal belief, mine, is that parents have NO moral right to indoctrinate kids. "your children come through you, not from you". thus spake kalil gebran, in a work that made excellent sense to me.

what parents have a responsibility to do, is make known to their children that nothing is inconsiquential. that everything effects the probability of everything else and their own actions, policies, priorities and everything else, are none of them any exception.

and then to make available their own understanding of what as many as they themselves understand, those probabilities might be.

that we all have to live in the same world that we act upon and interact with, and thus can expect to experience some consiquences of our own choices and actions, again statisticly rather then linearly, but expect them none the less.

=^^=
.../\...

 

you could argue some children are athiests simply because their parents indoctrinated them religiously, and were just as incapable of making a decision

either way, we are brain washed, we are not capable of making choices early in life, and we don't, and some people choose never to

some people choose to be atheists simply because it is popular, ot rheir social group looks down on the religious, many MANY religious people are just religious because they want to belong

don't hold an opinion unless you know why you hold it, don't hold an opinion unless you know what it really is, and don't insult people intolerantly and then accuse them of intolerance, hypocrisy is NOT just a trait of those in churches.