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I wonder of course why you bring it up since it is generally accepted that parents have no right to misinform their children.
I reject the notion that atheists are free to teach their beliefs and believers are not.
And good luck squaring that circle. Because by a remarkable quirk of psychology, no believer in anything ever believes they're misinforming anyone.
This fact seems oddly detached from the content of the beliefs.
So who gets to decide whether or not parents are misleading their kids?
Of course if by believers you really mean 'Katrin and religious people with the same value system as Katrin' and not 'those people over there whose weird superstitions I have no time for because they're obviously nonsense and dangerous to boot' then - wait, what was your point again?
You really don't see the obvious contradiction in this, do you?
I'd appreciate it if you answered specific points in future without name calling.
If you tell your children that 2+2=3, you are MISINFORMING them. If you tell them that you do or don't believe in God, you are talking about belief, which can't be true or false, only present or absent.
And now I wonder how you will distort this post.
For example, the doctrinal Catholic attitude to sex?
- Jake Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.
Whereas belief is descriptive? What? A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman
I'm curious how you propose to square that circle, because suppressing factual misinformation will in this case quite clearly also suppress a particular religious doctrine as collateral damage. Or collateral advantage, for those who, like I, find it a loathsome doctrine which does not have any place in civilized society.
(Assuming, that is, that the Catholic Church prefers not-lying over lying when possible. Which is, of course, a claim one might challenge.)
...this is written in the book of rules. That is all.
"Rules", exactly.
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.
A parent might answer to the best of their capabilities, and hopefully not troll to much, but in the end the answers are bound to reflect both their knowledge of facts and their spiritual beliefs. While god-in-the-holes (of knowledge) is a weak (and shrinking) argument for the existence of god, that is different form the existence of holes and these are filled up by extrapolation/belief. Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se
A parent might answer to the best of their capabilities, and hopefully not troll to much, but in the end the answers are bound to reflect both their knowledge of facts and their spiritual beliefs.
Or they can just say 'I don't know.'
I'd much rather tell the kids "I don't know, let's go find out" or "I don't know, and neither does anyone else" than make some stuff up. I'll go along with Santa, but the moral I'll use it to teach later on is not one I suspect you're going to like ...
What is disputed is the propriety of presenting only your belief on the matter. What is wrong with saying. "Nobody knows. Some people believe such-and-such. Some people believe so-and-so." With or without appending "I believe this-and-that."
You would apparently wish that when I speak about my beliefs I mention the fact that other people have other beliefs. I am not averse to that, in fact that is what my children always used to ask in a certain age. And then I answered that. They used to ask about certain persons and soon detected patterns of orthodoxy and unorthodoxy.
Why is it important that I add the information unasked?
The issue is the average religious parent [and if you think that's the same thing, you haven't been around].
If the authoritarian parent delivers the official religious viewpoint about a particular question, you may be sure that she will not offer alternative views, or encourage the child to think about them. And that is a problem, as I'm sure you will agree.
And I'm also sure you will answer "but the problem is not religion, it's authoritarianism". Which is true. It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
And I'm also sure you will answer "but the problem is not religion, it's authoritarianism". Which is true
But it is so much more fun to harp on "The issue is the average religious parent" instead of "The issue is the average authoritarian parent" I assume. For, why else should you do so, if you already know that the problem is not religion, it's authoritarianism.
By the way, I have never said I had an issue with atheism. The problem is not atheism, it is intolerance.
As long as authoritarians can use religious rhetoric to rally people who really ought to know better into defending their abuses, then sorry, but religion really is a problem.
And as long as religious rhetoric is inseparably laced with a number of malicious social engineering tricks, it will always be under suspicion by people who don't like to be brain-hacked.
A non-religious authoritarian group ordains that all its members must wear a distinctive hat at all times in order to symbolize their obeissance to their Great Leader.
Parents belonging to this group insist that their children should wear these hats at all times. The children are not allowed to take their hats off at any other time (except in the bath or in bed).
Should schools allow the hats to be worn?
(I'm guessing that you're going to find this upsetting and insulting?) It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II
(I'm guessing that you're going to find this upsetting and insulting?)
No, but I find it so unrealistc that it is boringly easy to answer. And is it really so unclear what I find upsetting and insulting in this debate, and why? (That's a question. If I get a "yes" for an answer, I can clarify)
You are back at reducing the headscarf (which lurks behind your ominous hat) to a symbol of obeisance to authoritarianism, and the act wearing them as unvoluntary and enforced, and all the the girls who do as victims without agency. We have been here before. First of all, Islam (and religion in general) is not authoritarian. Some practices are. In those cases where compulsion plays a role, the ban on headscarves doesn't solve the problem. In the better case of compulsion you haven't altered the situation, in the worse case you harden positions of parents and girls. Some girls consent to wearing headscarves in order to achieve more freedom in other fields, and a ban on this strategy increases their problems. In many other cases there is no compulsion, and you are banning girls from wearing a piece of clothing that is important or even essential for practising their religion (if you want to harp on your non-religious group: for a social network they attach importance to), or that is important for them for other reasons. One motivation for wearing a headscarf which you consistently ignore or ridicule is setting a counterpoint to the compulsion to objectifying clothing, by the way.
So much for your thought experiment. You can't claim it was realistical, can you? If you have a phobia against hats, do something about it. If you can't see that there are many reasons to wear a headscarf or a hat, you are blind to reality. And if you want to do something against authoritarianism, fight authoritarianism.
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