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.