Agnostic.com

8 2

What would happen if all the parents of this world raised their children godlessly? Would these children make up their own god at some point? Or would these children only orientate themselves on science? My answer: The children would definitely develop something like primitive magical thinking. as well as primitive ideas of an "afterlife" and of invisible actors, such as Granny no longer being "there" physically, but still somehow present. These things or their dispositions are innate, they are a natural consequence of our mental mechanisms. Religion is therefore more "natural" than science, because science must be learned from scratch, such as arithmetic or writing. Therefore, all known cultures have religion in some form, but very few have developed science.

Matias 8 May 28
Share

Enjoy being online again!

Welcome to the community of good people who base their values on evidence and appreciate civil discourse - the social network you will enjoy.

Create your free account

8 comments

Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.

0

I agree that some children who were raised godlessly in a godless world would invent imaginary friends as many children do until they are 6 years old, then they put those things away with their security blanket. Granted the mentally deficient children and the retarded kids might keep up their delusion into adulthood but normal people would have no religion that spontaneously generated in their brains.
As Joe Rogan points out, even the retarded kids would have issues with Noah's Ark.

0

I agree. But aren't our children already do magical thinking through video and on-line gaming (a lot of adults too). I think current religion is dying -- that's why there are so many splinter groups and more developing all the time. We are still gibbering ape like creatures, looking at the sky and believing what any authoritative person says.

0

that's impossible to answer

0

i think it depends on each individual as they grow up what are they looking out of life

Rosh Level 7 May 28, 2018
0

I'm an agnostic and I raised my son without any religious beliefs and for quite some time, he referred to himself as an atheist and had a negative view of those who followed a religion. But he's almost 40 now, and has told me that he feels he lacked a sense of spirituality and community as a child and has now become somewhat spiritual and embraces an acceptance of religion in general, but not one specifically. I support whatever he chooses, but was kind of surprised at the outcome.

1

Everyone asks questions and to a large degree it will depend on who is there to answer them. In my case I had conflicting answers from different people and I chose reality. I did the religious rituals but never took it as meaning it was real, it was the culture and I knew that all peoples had different cultures. I’ve always been religios teflon. It has never been more to me than a cultural leftover, architecture, art and a silly thing to believe. Perhaps I had just the right amount of Rock n’ Roll🙂 ... I was also sent to church by parents that didn’t go, do as I say not as I do didn’t make me religious.

3

I have always been contrarian about the notion that children are "born atheist". Sure they are a blank slate and will have a strong tendency to adopt the beliefs and non-beliefs of their parents. But they have their own agency too, and they have their own brain which is bestowed by natural selection with the same tendencies to confirmation bias and agency inference as anyone else. And so, like anyone else, as they try to make sense of their environment and experiences, they will have the same exact tendencies to magical thinking as everyone else -- especially as children, who, before the age of about 10, have trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality as it is.

So unless they are actively taught critical thinking and skepticism by their parents they will tend to fall into the same errors as everyone else. The difference, if we could magically make religion and the memory thereof go away, is that they would not have a ready-made support system for religious faith and would be taught about reality instead of fantasy and so only a minority of them would develop elaborate notions of the supernatural.

But I've always said that humanity generally would reinvent religion in some form in that scenario just as they would develop tribalism and discrimination and wars and so forth ... these are all human things to do unless you are carefully taught to systematically work against these tendencies in yourself and others.

1

Sorry, disagree totally. Religion is filling knowledge gaps. Where did we come from, why are we here? What happens when we die? Why does it rain?
If children are raised with the answers to these questions, there would be no need to make up answers.
Science is just knowledge, all human societies had science. Maybe very primitive, but science non the less.

If children were raised with answers to these questions they'd be far less likely to make up answers but they would still be able to make up answers when the actual answers were not to their liking, and they'd find company from others who would do the same.

Write Comment
You can include a link to this post in your posts and comments by including the text q:92518
Agnostic does not evaluate or guarantee the accuracy of any content. Read full disclaimer.