On Minority Rights and on Beliefs | 546 comments (546 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: On Minority Rights and on Beliefs (4.00 / 2)

I don't think either it is coincidence. Likely it is education. Children see the religion their parents practise and learn first behaviour and then the content of their religion. Unless you think that learning things you don't approve of is the same as indoctrination, I don't think you have made your point.

Preschoolers are in no position to decide what they theologically approve of, and that's when the "education" starts. Consequently, I think I have made my point.

In your parts you observe an increase of discrimination by religious people. In other regions it is decreasing. Setting out to prove that generally it is increasing (or decreasing) is next to impossible, I should think. And statements that you have no evidence beyond the anecdotal for should be marked as conjecture.

I think there is far more than anecdotal evidence. It's everywhere here in the US. The Russian Orthodox Church had no small hand in Putin's new legislation. And the arch-conservative African Anglican bishops are leading the charge in the Anglican Communion against the ECUSA for its efforts promoting gay rights. More on that later.

What you need, on your side of the pond, is a human rights court where you can sue your country if it does not protect you from discrimination.

Well, the regime just isn't set up for that. In fact it's the other way around: The government isn't obligated to protect you from discrimination, but it is obligated not to discriminate against you, and you can sue it if it does.

I note though that reactionaries like Odone take for granted that religious people should be homophobes (that's the unsurprising part), and that the majority on ET agrees with her.

Then I must be in a minority. We have two traditions in this family, Unitarian-Universalist and Episcopalian, both of which are staunch advocates of human rights, so I know that religious people can be human rights advocates. In fact most civil rights movements in my lifetime have had religious people heavily involved. Unfortunately, most movements against civil rights in my lifetime have also had religious people heavily involved, recent examples being the LDS Church's sponsorship of Proposition 8 against gay rights in California and the Anglican Communion's civil war against the ECUSA over its gay rights work.

by rifek on Sun Feb 9th, 2014 at 07:38:46 PM EST
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Re: On Minority Rights and on Beliefs (none / 0)

rifek:

Preschoolers are in no position to decide what they theologically approve of, and that's when the "education" starts.

Wait, you say they can theologically approve of the absence of religion, but not of the presence of it? Teaching them your beliefs is education, teaching them my beliefs is indoctrination?

by Katrin on Mon Feb 10th, 2014 at 09:03:45 AM EST
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Re: On Minority Rights and on Beliefs (none / 0)

You referred to "learning things you don't approve of," hence my comment. I hold certain political and social philosophies that my children frequently disagree with, and when they do, I don't threaten them with eternal damnation.

by rifek on Mon Feb 10th, 2014 at 10:32:59 AM EST
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Re: On Minority Rights and on Beliefs (none / 0)

And how do you get the idea I would threaten my children with eternal damnation? Are you now saying that your children rejected your political and social philosophies when in pre-school age?

My children ask me questions, and they have started that when very young. What happens when we are dead, where do we come from, how came beauty into existence? What children want to know. Am I to tell them what I believe in or must I tell them what I hold to be false? In other words, must I lie? By the way, I wouldn't find it fair if I told them "I know" when in reality "I believe", for the same reason: I don't lie. With what right do you want to make me either lie or else refuse an answer? Because how else can I refrain from what you call indoctrination?

by Katrin on Mon Feb 10th, 2014 at 10:56:13 AM EST
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Re: On Minority Rights and on Beliefs (none / 1)

I don't think I was laying any of that behavior at your doorstep. You've chosen to misinterpret it that way. Given that we've never met, I'd never presume to make any assertion on how you have raised your children. I, like you, don't claim to know things I don't.

by rifek on Tue Feb 11th, 2014 at 01:09:17 AM EST
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Re: On Minority Rights and on Beliefs (none / 0)

Well, it WAS you who brought up "threaten with eternal damnation". If I misinterpreted that, could you perhaps point me how I should have interpreted it?

by Katrin on Tue Feb 11th, 2014 at 06:39:55 AM EST
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Re: On Minority Rights and on Beliefs (4.00 / 2)

This discussion started with an observation about the overwhelming majority of all religious people, not about you personally. Even if you personally don't indoctrinate your children in your own religion, and even if there are millions like you, that's pretty much what the parents (and more distant relatives and teachers etc.) of the majority of religious people around the world did, and threatening with eternal damnation is just one popular tool in the hands of the indoctrinators.

I always compare this to party allegiance. There is a correlation between people's party allegiance and that of their parents, too, but no one speaks about 12-year-old, 6-year-old or even newborn Social Democrats or Tories, the way people routinely talk about such Christians or Muslims. And there is a reason there is such a thing as voting age, but for whatever reason, there is no similar thing for religion.

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Wed Feb 12th, 2014 at 07:01:01 AM EST
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Re: On Minority Rights and on Beliefs (none / 0)

DoDo:

I always compare this to party allegiance. There is a correlation between people's party allegiance and that of their parents, too, but no one speaks about 12-year-old, 6-year-old or even newborn Social Democrats or Tories, the way people routinely talk about such Christians or Muslims.

I am still waiting that someone compares it to the teachings of atheists, Dodo. We have discussed religionists who in their majority indoctrinate their children (but you know some exceptions who do not), Muslims who oppress girls (even though perhaps some do not), and there is always the unspoken reverse: non-religious do not indoctrinate their children, non-Muslims are model feminists. And the utmost level of rightousness, that is ET. And now I am throwing with spanners. I was aware that it wouldn't go unpunished to disturb processes of externalisation, but I didn't expect it would hurt so much.

by Katrin on Wed Feb 12th, 2014 at 08:58:14 AM EST
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Re: On Minority Rights and on Beliefs (4.00 / 3)

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.}

by DoDo on Thu Feb 13th, 2014 at 03:45:01 AM EST
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Re: On Minority Rights and on Beliefs (none / 1)

The only significant non-religious belief systems I can think of which fit the bill are nationalisms and Marxist-Leninist communism

I'd add mock-heroic free-market capitalism to that. I suspect a lot of the hatred of 'socialism' you see in the US is exactly from an equivalent level of indoctrination.

In fact free-market capitalism is the state ideology of the west, and increasingly also other parts of the world. Instead of a catechism, you have advertising and state propaganda. Instead of priests, you have talking heads and dumb headlines.

Even so - it's all-pervasive, and it's almost impossible to shield a child from it. (I suspect in the UK it actually is impossible, and parents who try will have their children removed by our Social Services.)

The older religions are largely misdirections which keep people distracted an unaware of the extent of official indoctrination.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Thu Feb 13th, 2014 at 07:03:40 AM EST
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Re: On Minority Rights and on Beliefs (none / 1)

ThatBritGuy:

In fact free-market capitalism is the state ideology of the west, and increasingly also other parts of the world. Instead of a catechism, you have advertising and state propaganda. Instead of priests, you have talking heads and dumb headlines.

this is the real state religion, in its way more destructive than any monotheistic killing spree.

as regards parents'belief systems and how they interface with growing childrens' credulity, there are good values and bad ones, and both can be taught/modeled with or without religion.

being raised by religious assholes would be the worst!

it'd be interesting to know how many atheists were raised in a faith, by non-assholes, to then reject it.

likewise religious people raised by non-assholes who were atheists...

personally i think this is the nub of the discussion, and headscarves are just a somewhat distractive step on the way to that realisation.

2c

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Thu Feb 13th, 2014 at 09:27:20 AM EST
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Re: On Minority Rights and on Beliefs (4.00 / 2)

Kids always model unconscious attitudes more than conscious platitudes.

That's why any kind of authoritarianism is dangerous - it's not the specific beliefs, it's the process, and the fact that it sets the emotional template for relationships in later life.

One of the biggest issues in the west is that after three hundred years of secularism the political power of the churches has been substantially diminished.

But aside from the partial efforts of Marx, who was basically a frustrated industrialist, there has been no equivalent on-the-nail critique of industrial capitalism.

It's not that one isn't possible (probably), it's that it's so easy to distract progressives into minor side oppressions, and lose focus on the bigger picture.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Thu Feb 13th, 2014 at 10:48:02 AM EST
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Re: On Minority Rights and on Beliefs (none / 0)

ThatBritGuy:

One of the biggest issues in the west is that after three hundred years of secularism the political power of the churches has been substantially diminished.

but much of the social good churches do still goes on, re feeding the poor, rallying after tragedies etc.

good that their political power is in decline, as long as their value is acknowledged as much as any other form of do-goodership.

religion encapsulates our first fumbling attempts to comprehend our cosmos, and for some it still serves that purpose, not the medieval trivia of angels on pins but how to conceptualise eternity, infinity, the void and such, the inneffable, the unmeasureable.

while doing so it untapped great poetry, painting, sculpture and music, as it (however errantly) does look beyond the veils, both inside and outside ourselves.

to the rational materialist that might seem like time and energy wasted, (better spent seeking cancer cures or perpetual motion) but to the seeker this the opposite, seeking meaning in the often crushing banality of modern existence is the only thing that makes life bearable!

religion becomes problematic when it conflates with politics.

.... but state atheism has a equally ruthless track record.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Thu Feb 13th, 2014 at 12:03:45 PM EST
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Re: On Minority Rights and on Beliefs (4.00 / 2)

not the medieval trivia of angels on pins

Sorry, but you seem to have fallen for an Enlightenment slander (like the belief that educated people used to believe in a flat earth). I once wondered what were the numbers that they suggested, but they seem only to have discussed whether they had corporeal bodies (and hence the number would have been finite), or whether not (in which case the number could be infinite).

Rather disappointingly, they seemed to think that the number being infinite settled it, where I was hoping they would try to work out the cardinality: for example, if they could argue (no idea how, but presumably from Scripture) that the angels all had names, taken from a finite alphabet, then the number would be recursively enumerable, but they didn't even go that far.

Physicists have come up with a different answer:

According to Thomas Aquinas, it is impossible for two distinct causes to each be the immediate cause of one and the same thing. An angel is a good example of such a cause. Thus two angels cannot occupy the same space. This can be seen as an early statement of the Pauli exclusion principle. (The Pauli exclusion principle is a pillar of modern physics. It was first stated in the twentieth century, by Pauli.)
[...]
We have derived quantum gravity bounds on the number of angels that can dance on the tip of a needle as a function of the mass of the angels. The maximal number of angels -- 8.6766*10exp49 -- is achieved near the critical mass mcrit>1/kD �3.8807*10-34 kg, corresponding to the transition from the information-limited to the mass-limited regime. It is interesting to note that this is of the same order of magnitude as the Schewe bound.

by gk (gk (gk quattro due due sette @gmail.com)) on Thu Feb 13th, 2014 at 12:44:24 PM EST
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Re: On Minority Rights and on Beliefs (none / 0)

It is interesting to note that this is of the same order of magnitude as the Schewe bound.

Proof of the existence of God!!!

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue
- Queen Elizabeth II}

by eurogreen on Thu Feb 13th, 2014 at 01:41:54 PM EST
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Re: On Minority Rights and on Beliefs (none / 0)

DoDo:

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.

"Inspired" is beautifully put. How am I to deal with views expressed on religion that in reality are views on abuse? Is it really asked too much of the authors to make clear what statement is inspired by what? I reject the notion that religion, not persons enforcing dogma or exploiting positions of trust, is abusive. And I reject the notion that embracing religion is the same (or related to) child abuse, forcing children, and what other insiuations have been made.

DoDo:

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?

I think beliefs can be sorted by how close they are to the core of one's personality. Some political beliefs are overarching mere party politics, for instance the importance human rights have (or property rights). We all probably radiate our deeply held political beliefs anyway. I would recommend a bit of restraint in the case of party politics, but I don't think it is vital or should be enforced. Can you really object if some members of a party meet in order to organise something and take their little children? Probably not, but where is (realistically!) the difference between that and "Sunday instruction of six-year-olds in the basic tenets of Social Democracy at the local party headquarters"? By the way, I used to wear a SPD jacket (gift of my mother) to school, although there was (and is) a ban on party insignia in school. They couldn't very well undress me, so they rang up my parents who promised to remind me not to wear the thing to school. Which they did, and I ignored. The more hysterical the reactions became, the more I enjoyed it. And the sky did not fall down. I would even have joined the SPD if they had allowed under 16 year olds. By the time I was sixteen I had acquired enough political wisdom and no longer wanted to, so perhaps having such a minimum age makes sense (but not much).

When Merkel wanted to get out of the exit from nuclear power (before Fukushima), I took part in many protests. My daughter, then 10, asked me to explain what I did and why and then declared she wanted to accompany me. What would you have told her?

by Katrin on Thu Feb 13th, 2014 at 10:51:52 AM EST
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Re: On Minority Rights and on Beliefs (none / 1)

As an aside, the Swedish Greens does not have an age limit. This was recently questioned - by other members that lost a vote or some such - after a party meeting where they youngest voting member was eight (I think).

Thinking about it, I don't know if any of the Pirate parties has age limits, but I have met an outspoken and convinced thirteen year old activist. If anyone is worrying about parental indoctrination, rest assured that the parents rarely agrees with their kids pirate views.

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

by A swedish kind of death on Fri Feb 14th, 2014 at 10:18:38 AM EST
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Re: On Minority Rights and on Beliefs (none / 1)

teaching them your beliefs is not identical to teaching them to adopt your beliefs uncritically.

modeling is not indoctrination, attachment to them emulating your religious beliefs may be a good definition of it though.

not too many kids hold a grudge about their parents 'lying' to them about santa.

i imagine a child who chooses to move on from parents' belief-systems would be similarly untraumatised unless the modeling became indoctrination along the line. the world has many in the latter category, filling countless websites with the traumas they endure...

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Mon Feb 10th, 2014 at 11:34:29 AM EST
[ Parent ]

On Minority Rights and on Beliefs | 546 comments (546 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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