Apparently you are seeing how successful that exclusionary policy was in France.

I did not say "religious point of view". I said "two opinions inside religion". What is unclear in my words? There is a fundamental change going on in our societies how partnerships and families are to be defined. This is happening inside the churches too, of course. What is surprising in that? In urban centres this development has progressed farther, in rural areas the development is slower. Does that really surprise you?

And what do you think is the position of the majority in our societies? The more liberal or the more repressive one?

And that's the time where several of you agreed to abolish the human rights of Muslim women, because you are no Muslim women and you are so very sure that your rights will survive.

ThatBritGuy:

Now, for extra credit, tell us which religious point of view is more common - the repressive one, or the liberal one?

The Swedish church (formerly state-church, now formally independent but very much dominant) has at least the last ten years been slightly less liberal on social issues then the state and a fair bit more socialistic on economic isues. The new top dog is even female, which the state has not for almost 300 years.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

Probably no more delighted than you would be if one of your kids told you to stop pestering with that religion stuff because they wanted to become atheists.

Actually I'd wonder which adult had been evangelising in their general direction. If it turned out it was a free choice based on spontaneous interest from books/reading/TV and not on unsolicited pressure from an adult, I'd be perplexed but supportive - which is not, I suspect, what you would be.

In practice the difference is that most churches baptise children before they can have any possible idea what the symbolism of baptism means, and also before they have any possible way of expressing dissent.

Obviously it's nonsensical to claim that's an expression of free choice for the kids, for reasons that are surely obvious.

May God preserve the sense of superiority of all atheists!

Enough with the weasel words, insinuations, and victim plays already.

Your 'freedom of religion' clearly extends only as far as the 'rights' of the religious to evangelise their beliefs.

When confronted with the possibility of actual freedom of belief you're dead set against it.

what is raising children without religion? Not telling them that they should be without religion, and making them practice none, and hindering them if they want to opt out or would like to practice some alternative?

Katrin, this is hilarious. You are trying to equate the enforcement of a specific dogmatic system with the lack of enforcement of a whole class of dogmatic systems. Even an atheist parent actively railing against religions to her six-year-old child is not a parallel to religious indoctrination (it would be a parallel to a religious parent railing against all atheists, or all polytheists). But "raising people without religion" is just that: raising them with things not including any religion. You can't "make them practice none" if they don't have one and don't first know the practices of any one. The parent doesn't even have to make any reference to religions, though the child may force her to say something if asked. (BTW this is pretty much my case; I knew religion as something from history but knew almost nothing about contemporary religion until my parents forced me to pretend to be a good Catholic boy in front of my grandparents.)

And I insist: raising children in a religion (or any other coherent system of dogmas) means pre-empting them in making up their own minds and denying them choices, and that based on a coherent set of dogmas held by a wider community rather than one of several individuals influencing the child's education.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

The above was on literalism. Anti-contraception Catholics are different, because they start with a norm, that sex is only permitted with a wish to procreate, and conclude with a ban on contraceptives. Logically they can't do anything else as long as they don't abolish the norm. Nothing to do with belief clashing with facts, though. It's about enforcing norms.

Now speaking as someone with a science education.

• In science, the closest thing to common-sense "facts" are proofs within an axiomatic system, of which 2+2 = 4 would be an example. Even there, you can run into problems, for example conflict between axioms which may or may not be resolved by modifying the axioms.
  
• In science, things get more vague if you include reality, that is, observations. What you do is creating hypotheses to create hypotheses describing past observations and predicting the outcome of future observations, and then decide which hypotheses are useful and which among the useful is best based on those future observations. Such a hypothesis is an axiomatic system itself, but you don't just judge it for internal consistency but also its relation to reality and to rival hypotheses. The adoption of a hypothesis that survived some tests may be considered akin to "fact", but one with inherent uncertainty. Due to that uncertainty, it could also be considered to be akin to "belief" (except a superseded scientific theory can still be useful: see Newton vs. Einstein), though the intuition of a researcher that this or that hypothesis is worth to be pursued is closer to common notions of "belief".

This is a weaker distinction of "fact" and "belief" than in common sense, but I find it even more difficult to do the opposite and apply the above two to religion. Very little prediction and verification and little competition is involved in the establishment of religious belief. Meanwhile, while theological debates are pretty much constrained to dogma and/or scripture and thus an axiomatic system, religious dogma and especially scripture is very elaborate as axiomatic systems come, and interpretation has a lot of room: is a certain passage allegory or history? Is a particular group of evil people denounced for apostasy, rape or homosexuality? What to make of slavery in the Bible? And so on. The relationship to reality is usually in the form of behaviour prescriptions derived from the axiomatic system, rather than the feedback of observations.

Now what you seem to be thinking of is collisions between scientific "facts" and religious belief. Like creationists seeing the Flood where geologists see processes like erosion over hundreds of millions of years, most other Christians believing that their God played an active role in the emergence of both life and humans while science is looking into hypotheses of abiogenesis and sees man as just one of the apes, Muslim literalists believing that children originate from their father's seed only with the mother only modifying the foetus while science says that the mother's ovum and the father's sperm fuse (with the former bringing in more genetic info), Hindu fundies saying that all species exist forever while science says that they evolve and branch out and go extinct all the time.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Right. Agree completely. And if I am not free from your a-religion, then I am not free to practice my religion. Do you agree?

That depends whether you believe 'practice' automatically includes the right to force your religion on your kids in ways that will cripple their ability to make free adult choices about spirituality later in life.

Look - this isn't hard. The Jesuits know how this works. Francis Xavier said 'Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.'

Considering how tolerant the Jesuits were, it's unlikely he meant '...Because my tender care is the best way to promote free spiritual choice for adults.'

I don't see the position of parents towards their children as a position of power in the first place.

Then you are using an extremely non-standard version of the English language.

It is complicated in what ways parents exercise power

No, that's actually quite straightforward. If somebody decides where your bed is, what you eat, when you sleep, how much money you have to spend, what you can spend it on, where you spend the majority of your waking hours, and even to some extent who you am allowed to socialize with in your free time, then they wield power over you.

Power is not a bad thing per se, but it does come with certain responsibilities, which is why it is extremely worrisome when people who hold power over others pretend that they do not.

The school system is neutral for reasons of separation of church and state,

No, the school and penal systems should be neutral because they wield power over its inmates. The fact that they are state institutions (in most of the first world) is neither here nor there - the fixation on protecting citizens from the state, rather than from abuse of asymmetric power relationships in general - is a pernicious Libertarian obsession.

Work relations? I wonder where that would arise: probably only in the most exploitative work places (where it wouldn't be the most urgent problem by comparison) anyway, because elsewhere people aren't quite defenceless.

That is not true for sexual or racial harassment. Why should we expect it to be for religious?

That leaves of your examples the doctor. Yes, I remember a particularly nasty and painful treatment during which the doctor started talking extremely reactionary politics. I resented that a lot of course, and I find that behaviour highly unethical, but I fail to see how efficient proselytising in such a position of power can take place.

Orac put it best:

Does Dr. Schroder really believe he's being non-coercive? I mean, seriously. Think about it. Let's say you're an atheist. You're about to go under the knife for, let's say, a cholecystectomy. Your surgeon, after explaining once again the risks and benefits of surgery, asks you if you want to pray with him? Do you refuse? Or are you intimidated because you don't want to piss off the man who is about to cut into your body in order to forcibly rearrange your anatomy for therapeutic effect?

[...]

It's one thing if the patient asks the surgeon if he wants to pray with him, completely unprompted. In that case, I don't see a problem. In fact, even I would probably join in (after trying to beg off once perhaps), because in the end to me it's all about the patient and I'm not about to do anything that makes the patient feel uncomfortable or lose confidence in me, my heathen tendencies notwithstanding. But that's not what Dr. Schroder is talking about.

And in answer to the obvious objection: No, people generally do internalize beliefs they are coerced to outwardly ape.

Where would you draw the line anyway? Would you ban parents from practising a religion? Or only from explaining what they are doing?

In terms of legality, I draw the line at physical harm or the use of social control techniques (enforced isolation, pervasive and arbitrary invasions of privacy, extreme in-group/out-group identification, infantilizaton, etc.).

In terms of propriety, I draw the line at actively initiating. As with the doctor-patient relationship, it is one thing for the party in power to answer honestly (or even to answer what they believe the other party needs to hear). It is quite another to start pushing answers in search of questions.

And are you really saying that the Jacobin stance on religion is less controversial than the right of parents to determine their children's religion?

No, I am saying that reasonable people can disagree with the level of parental prerogative implied by a right to induct your children into a religion.

I assume that you believe there is no God. You can't know though. You are free to believe that, and to teach it to your children. That's what I mean when I want the presence of religion treated in the same way as the absence of religion.

I would find that inappropriate. I would want to teach any children of mine about the wide variety of things people believe, and that belief in any or all of these things is completely optional, and let them work things out on their own, at their own pace.

But then, I never had a problem with "nobody really knows the answer to that question." And, when they get a bit older, "nobody really knows if there is an answer to that question."

And if I am not free from your a-religion, then I am not free to practice my religion. Do you agree?

In principle. In practice, I am having some difficulty coming up with a realistic example of not-belief imposing on believers.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

For indoctrination of children, you need (1) a coherent system of doctrines, (2) a strong group identity of those holding the doctrines, and (3) customs or doctrines about the infusion of these from the youngest ages. The only significant non-religious belief systems I can think of which fit the bill are nationalisms and Marxist-Leninist communism – and indeed people do or did speak about 12-year-old, six-year-old or even newborn Germans and Americans or Communists, and indeed I resent both. Now, the first of the above is not incompatible with religion while the second is practically dead. In the 21st century so far, salad-bar-type theists get ever more numerous in the West but are still a small minority world-wide, while lack of ideological organisation is typical for the non-religious. Both may change in the future, but as things stand, you won't find many equivalents of Sunday schools, prayers, crucifixes on the wall, symbolic cloth items or the fear of the devil among six-year-old children of non-religious parents. A further issue you don't seem to be taking into account is that a lot of personal views expressed here aren't inspired by the viewpoint of an atheist teacher but the viewpoint of a one-time child who suffered through the 'teaching' of theist parents or school teachers.

Now, what is your opinion about the political parallel? Would you approve of Free Democrat schools, Sunday instruction of six-year-olds in the basic tenets of Social Democracy at the local party headquarters, and the same children wearing party insignia to school? Should voting age be eliminated? Why should parties be more constrained than religion?

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

ThatBritGuy:

You used the word 'sectarian'. You also used words like 'privilege' and 'Stalinist.' It's in the archives.

Yes, but I did not use them for saying what you say I said.

ThatBritGuy:

With gay marriage - huh? Are you saying people believe gay marriage will undermine free healthcare or their pension plan?

I am saying that family gets a significance that it had already lost. People will depend more on family than they used to. Ask all those young people in Greece and Spain why they are still living with their parents. My generation will get a very low pension, much lower than what my parents had. Right wing ideologies emphasising family relations do make sense when the social net is cut. Successful ideological strategies always connect somehow with real fears or interests.

ThatBritGuy:

Generally members are more liberal than leaders, which is interesting in itself.

That contradicts your claim that "the majority of religious people" was obsessed against gays, doesn't it?

ThatBritGuy:

I have no idea what European-wide attitudes are. I doubt it's possible to generalise when - for example - Poland is staunchly Catholic, while Finland very much isn't.

Good. Then it would be very helpful if you no longer claimed to know the attitudes of "the majority of religious people".

ThatBritGuy:

I look forward to further responses that tell me I'm disgusting and full of shit, by the way. Have you considered that perhaps name-calling is not the most persuasive of tactics in this context?

I have considered a lot, and perhaps you noticed that for a few days I didn't answer any of your posts at all. There is not much I can do with a person who twists everything I say. I have run out of persuasive tactics in this case: the written language of our posts is the only means of communication we have here. If that is twisted, what can one do? By the way, before you develop the next variant of twisting of posts: I did not call you disgusting or full of shit. I called your posts that.

You entered this discussion (on the previous thread) shrugging off the human rights violations Muslims face in Europe with "try and open a pub in Saudi Arabia", which I find atrocious enough (if it really needs pointing out why: you are entitled to human rights no matter if your government violates them.) And you went on by twisting the meaning of every post of mine. No I have never demanded any privileges for the religious or religious organisations. I demand that we aren't disadvantaged though. You have made clear that religious freedom does not exist for you.

Your behaviour is not that of "everyone" here. I have quarrelled with Jake and Eurogreen, and there was unfairness on both sides. I am sorry about that, but I don't know any way how I could have avoided it except by not raising the topic, and I no longer wanted that. Your behaviour, claiming over and over again that I say what in reality I never said, is different and it is offensive. No, I don't think I am treating you unfairly. I understand that you had some very unwholesome experience and generalise, but it is really nothing I am responsible for.

LOL. Can we have a ban on pleated skirts too?

Seriously though: whatever real problems there are with immigrants who might import sorts of illiberalism that the natives do not already hold, they won't be solved in a climate of disrespect and humiliation.

eurogreen:

I would prefer to say : "even if we don't agree on the human rights angle".

That's perfectly okay with me.

I understand your argument about school as a sanctuary, as enabler of choices. It just happens to hinge on seeing all girls with headscarves as victims of parental force/pressure/sinister influence. Your argument denies the girls agency. Girls who wish to wear a headscarf simply don't exist in your argument.

You solely focus on girls who are made to wear it against their will. Okay to throw you a bone, let's focus on them. Probably this group of girls exists. The parents who do so have a range of motives, from certain views on the role of women to an emphasis on cultural roots in their country of origin, and perhaps even what seems to drive you: a fundamental enmity to the French state. Okay, to throw you more bones, let's assume that the nexus between headscarf and enmity of the state exists. You want to fight what exactly? A headscarf, not enmity to the state. You really must explain that.

Now let's focus not on the parents, but on the girls: Even for the group of girls who are made to wear a headscarf I don't see any advantage in a confrontation on one piece of clothing between school and parents. It disregards the psychological needs of children, even those who really are abused. If you can't respect the parents, the children can't develop self-respect. Children will almost always choose to side with their parents if you choose confrontation.

And could you explain why girls forced to wear headscarves are entitled to more sanctuary than girls forced to wear pleated skirts? I'd really like an answer to that. If your aim is supporting girls against oppressive parents, why only Muslim girls (who in their majority are immigrants)?