People often talk about raising children with an open mind, letting them make their own decisions about belief and gods. I cannot accept that. I am an atheist, and I cannot see any purpose to letting my kid become a believer because "it's their choice". Religion is fear mongering and indoctrination, and it's practitioners use sophisticated manipulation to influence young minds.
To me, the question "would you let your kids be religious" is very similar to "would you let your kids be Nazis" or "would you let your kids decide if Meth was right for them".
I taught my children to think critically, to analyze claims, to apply both logic and the scientific method to the world around them, and I taught them what "mythology" was, and "superstition", and why those things have no place in a rational world.
I would love my children if they became religious anyway, but I would NEVER stop fighting to deconvert them.
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31 comments (26 - 31)
Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.I hope that I can teach my kids to figure out for themselves that religion is wrong. If I can teach them to recognize the problems in religion themselves then I will never have to worry about them, whether I am around to guide them or not.
UpsideDownAgain
Level 7
Sep 9, 2018
1
yep. I taught them the problems with every religious claim they came across, actively demonstrating how we can know these things to be false, or in the case of non-falsifiable claims how believing them to the exclusion of real world observation was both dangerous and silly.
Parents can't accurately predict how their children will turn out. Intelligent theists are not rare. People turn to religion for different reasons, somehow finding ways to rationalize and/or compartmentalize their faith and superstition in a world that we all experience empirically. For them, the benefits of belief and/or religion--emotional, psychological, or whatever they may be--most probably trump the alternative. If I had a child who decided to be religious, I would try to understand why she made that decision to see if there's anything that may be done to address whatever pain is being alleviated by faith.
Your children are probably safe, but I also wanted to provide a perspective--for those who prefer building bridges rather than erecting walls--to remind us to keep looking for our similarities with theists instead of our differences.
Whoa. Sorry about that. The weed's wearing off.
misternatureboy
Level 7
Oct 1, 2018
0
Raising kids is like building a clock. We try to put in the right gears with the hope that it will keep reasonable time. A some point, the clock starts keeping time on its own.
There is a certain level of powerlessness that parents experience over the choices made by their children and while no healthy parent wants their child to take a path that the parent believes to be harmful, we repeating the mistakes of other parents who objected to interracial marriage, gay, transgender, goth, cosplay, military, etc...).
All we can do is provide our children with the best of our wisdom and knowledge and hope they use it to make optimal choices for themselves.
DeeNorris
Level 2
Sep 10, 2018
0
I don't disagree with a lot of what you say, but I can't actively try and convince kids of religion or the lack thereof beyond teaching critical thinking skills.
I wish the opposite viewpoint would do the same, but alas that's not how it is and efforts to change that haven't gone far enough yet.
Umbral
Level 8
Sep 9, 2018
0
after teaching them critical analysis and observation based reasoning, you can then actively expose them to religious beliefs of varying types, compare the beliefs to known things, show how humanity has had several such superstitions throughout history, explore how and why those mythologies died out, discuss the rationale of belief used by superstitious people and get them to work through it with you guiding them and questioning them.
there's a lot more you can do than "teach the skills".
@HereticSin no. Then I cross into actively forcing my beliefs on them. Once i do that then I'm essentially no different from a parent indoctrinating a child into another religion. The religion of anti-religion. That's entirely up to them to decide. If they use critical thinking skills and the scientific method properly, the conclusions are inevitable in my opinion, so they will come to their own conclusions. Not just a varient of mine.
Critical thinking isn't only about disproving religious beliefs. It's way way more important than that.
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