Is Teaching Religion To Children A Form Of Child Abuse?

People could be taught ethics outside of a religious framework. The point I was making is that the religious component of my own education was the way in which those kinds of ideas were introduced to me personally, and I don't really think it did me any harm.
We were also taught to be kind to animals, but that wasn't included under the heading of religion as such. I recall a teacher reading us 'Black Beauty' by Anna Sewell, and we had bird tables and stuff like that.

I think maybe some non-Christian religions are more focused on animal rights. Some kinds of Hinduism and Buddhism, maybe Pagans. Vegetarian types. And probably some Christians too in the bigger picture, even if they haven't got that direct from the religion. St. Francis of Assisi seems to buck the general Christian trend.

 

As usual, Hitchens is talking about the evils of biblical literalism or fundamentalism, which he equates with Christianity in general. I agree with his critiques of fundamentalism. Literalism misses the point. As for telling "lies" to children, a lie is an intentional falsehood. When parents tell children that Santa brings them presents, that's technically a lie. although some may rationalize it along the lines of Francis Church's editorial "Yes, Virginia. There is a Santa Claus". It's a white lie, legitimized by culture and tradition, and I don't know whether it would do more good than harm in not playing along with it. Teaching children about God, miracles, etc., is a bit different, in that the people doing the teaching actually believe in those things. And some of them are more intelligent than I am. I don't believe in them literally. I'm more a Francis Church type Christian, as are most of my Christian friends. But I do regard metaphorical truths as most important in conveying meaning (as opposed to mere factuality). I find it deeply disturbing that so many grown adults believe what I regard as superstition, especially when it gets in the way of science. The question is, what to do about it.

There's a category of questionable belief, which I'd classify as comforting, that I tend to let go. This comes up a lot at funerals where everybody affirms that poor Joe or Mildred is in a better place, and someday we'll meet him/her again for some rounds of golf or bridge in the Great Bye and Bye. Some folks I know would be devastated to think that isn't so, and that they'd just go six feet under to be "worm food"--which is the fate I accept for myself. (I actually draw some comfort from being worm food, cuz it would be doing something constructive for ecology). But I think it would be cruel to make an issue of this with people who draw comfort from belief in the .afterlife. And after all, I can't disprove that they haven't gone on to the great beyond. After I wrote this, I did my volunteer gig at a nursing home where I talked to a woman who is still trying to deal with the death of her husband about a year ago. She tells me of the wonderful life they had together before a car accident ended his life, and how much she;s looking forward to be reunited with him in heaven. When I visit her, she's always either reading the Bible or getting back from Bible study. There's another category--anti-science thinking--which needs to be strenuously opposed, for example in resisting efforts to prevent teaching of evolution. And then there is the category involving efforts to instate public prayer or put religious monuments here and there on public property in violation of the Establishment Clause and Matthew 6:5-6. I told my representative in the state legislature he should put a copy of the Ten Commandments in his office and check off each day the ones he keeps.

I also happen to agree with Hitchens that the doctrine of Hell, taken literally is abhorrent--something missing from the Hebrew bible, but borrowed from the Persians by the Essenes and Pharisees and featured in the New Testament. Hell is prominent in the fundamentalist churches but downplayed or metaphorized in mainline or progressive ones. I regard hell as a Dantesque or Hobbesian metaphor of war of all against all, from which there is no redemption because no one will accept personal responsibility for it, thus a way out. In Dante's Inferno, Satan himself is trapped in Hell in a block of ice (in the middle of hell, mind you) resulting from his huge wings desperately flapping to get away from God. In Buddhist terms, this is the utlimate dukkha resulting from illusory attachments.(and some forms of buddhism have hells ,too) Hell is a bad attitude, not a place that we go to after death but, like heaven, a condition we may find ourselves in. Some people I know seem to be essentially in hell while alive --prisoners of their own vices or negative thinking. Hitchens sometimes seemed to me to be on the brink, railing at God while ultimately falling victim to his own dissolute lifestyle. But I won't judge him. May he rest in peace. His debate with Dembski toward the end of his life was impressive.

Anyhow, all this is peripheral to the main problem of what to do about people who disagree with us in ways that seem to be dangerously ridiculous--e.g., thinking that Trump will make America great again or that Sara Palin would make a wonderful President. I really think the democratic process and our exercise of free speech, fallible as it may be, is the only workable process for addressing this.

 

I wouldn't argue with the idea that non-religious upbringing can also produce positive results, although it didn't seem to in the Smith and Farris study. I've seen it though with my own eyes. I dine regularly with atheists and agnostics, and pay close attention to how they interact with their children. Good family values!

As for science, I distinguish between science and scientism. Science is a process of gaining knowledge through rigorous testing of empirically refutable hypotheses. It is the gold standard in arriving at reliable truth. Scientism is an ideology that glorifies science as the only valid approach to knowledge, coupled with confidence science has or eventually will solve all problems worth solving.
http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/sciism-body.html
http://www.aaas.org/page/what-scientism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

Scientism incorporates the logical positivist assumption that if a proposition is incapable of being tested by the methods of science, it is nonsense. This approach would logically rule out belief in multiple universes, a universe from nothing, etc,, but advocates of scientism actually favors tend to favor them, because scientism also tends to embrace the prevailing scientific theories . Scientism refuses to recognize the limitations of science for some areas of inquiry. The scientific method, for example, is useful for screening out Type One statistical errors: false positives, i.e., propositions that are false, but less useful in dealing with Type Two errors, false negatives, i.e., rejection of propositions that are true. And there is the chronic go-around over "hard" versus "soft" sciences like the social sciences and borderline humanities like history. Yet some subjects simply don't lend themselves to the rigors of natural science methodolgy, so with them its a choice of less rigorous ones or nothing. I don't think science can ever give us real meaning, although devotees like Dawkins can find meaning in it. Science has given us, and I'm sure will continue to give us lots of benefits, but also some things which are not so good; nuclear weapons, coal-fired power plants, computer viruses, etc. Science per se is unlikely to solve these problems.

 

I don't understand how this quandary would lead one towards religion. What "real" meaning or solution can be derived in regards to nuclear weapons, coal-fired power plants, computer viruses from religious sources when they were written 1500-2000 years before these inventions?

 

I wasn't referring specifically to religion. Philosophy, history, and ethics could play a positive role. Religion offers the golden rule. Jesus' emphasis on love of God and neighbor, not to mention turn the other cheek, might be helpful. Buddhist ideas concerning attachments could help in eliminating sources of conflict. But the main point is that there is nothing about science per se that can tell us what to do about these problems, except to tell us what the consequences would be if we don't solve them effectively. Religion won't necessarily help either if Scripture is used as proof texts for holy war. Ultimately, it becomes a matter of sound judgment, informed by science, religion, philosophy and whatever else we have to go on. Fundamentalism of all sorts, including scientism, gets in the way.

 

I'm just referring to patterns of thought I've encountered from scientific atheist writers, including some who have posted on this forum. There is nothing at all wrong with, and everything right with, accepting scientific theories tentatively, as long as we recognize that they’re tentative. To accept them dogmatically is another matter. A good example of a retired physicist who does just that is Stenger's God: the Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. I like Stenger, but I think it's fair to say science doesn't show that and neither does he. A major difference between the scientific theory of evolution, though, and the theory of multiple universes is that the latter has no empirical foundation as yet, and consists of equations on a blackboard. Bruce Mazet, not a theist himself, notes in an article in Skeptic that “there is no evidence whatsoever that this infinite number of universes exists and ...no means by which to obtain any such evidence.” He concludes “if it is acceptable to postulate the existence of hypothetical universes, it is acceptable to postulate the existence of God". (Mazet, 1998, "A Case for God".

 

More accurately, science deals only with the empirically observable. If a person says he had a cosmic or religious revelation, maybe (s)he actually had one, although it might be veridical only to her or him. We'd have good reason to be skeptical, but to assume that just because we can't verify its existence it didn't happen would be unwarranted. Any time we decide not to accept belief in anything that can't be verified or refuted by rigorous methods, we run the risk of not believing in things that could be true: Bigfoot, extraterrestrials, the Loch Ness monster, etc. This becomes more of a practical problem in studying ancient history, where much of the evidence is sketchy and interpretations may rest on reasonable but debatable inference from somewhat ambiguous writings or artifacts. A diehard natural scientist might simply say "forget it."

 

You're correct that science per se isn't concerned with use, applications or cosmic significance, which was my point. I think of meaning as being concerned with "What's it all about, Alfie?" Science can't answer that question for us, although it might give us information to answer it for ourselves. Two general approaches taken by philosophers have been to see meaning as (1) a transcendent value given to us by some cosmic order or divine plan (the metaphysical approach); or (2) something we give to reality by our choices (the existentialist approach). I'm inclined toward the latter. Karen Armstrong makes a useful distinction between two kinds of knowledge: logos and mythos. "Logos is science or reason: something that helps us to function practically and effectively in the world, and it must therefore be closely in tune and reflect accurately the realities of the world around us." Mythos is concerned with questions for which there are no easy answers: why am I here? why am I living? what do I get? what am I giving? The answers given may be more subjective and non-rational than scientists would have patience for. Viktor Frankl, an existentialist Viennese psychiatrist who survived a Nazi concentration camp, sees the quest for meaning as the most basic human need. I submit that for most people, the answers science gives to these questions are rather shallow. Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson exemplifies this in his book The Meaning of Human Existence. In it, he explains how the human species evolved, and in particular, how it developed an inner conflict between self and society--all very useful in understanding our existential and ethical dilemmas. But what it all means to us in how to live our lives goes unanswered. Which is not intended as a criticism of Wilson or of science; simply a recognition that there are questions which we must find answers for elsewhere.

 

So if it's a moral evaluation, where, outside of science do we turn for a value system on which that can be based?

A purely secular ethics? But how is that to be constructed if we say science is the only valid method of getting knowledge, as some do?

 

The violent bible stories they read to us in Sunday school, scared the hell out of me. I mean, seriously, I couldn't sleep. I'm an atheist today.

 

Meagain's statement comes across to me like this: science per se is ammoral but useful. I'd agree. But what do we do for our morality and meaning? I actually think secular ethics rooted in humanism might work, but we need something, and it can value science but won't be science.

 

Yes, science shows neither the existence nor non-existence of a deity, No big surprise. I won't be redundant and explain once again why dealing with deities is outside the scope of science--also I would say mathematics. There's many a step from the blackboard to objective empirical reality. If your position is that that makes religion valueless or irrelevant, you've just illustrated scientism at work. Shall we celebrate the imminent arrival of the TOE?

 

I don't think you quite understand the point. I explained earlier that science is the gold standard of human knowledge, involving rigorous empirical testing of falsifiable propositions. The ideal form is the controlled repliable experiment,. But not all science lends itself to that. Paleontology, astronomy, geology, ecology, and meteorology are among the natural sciences that do not use controlled experiment as a primary method, not to mention the social sciences like political science, economics, and sociology. The latter disciplines hope that multivariate statistical methods will suffice. Alas, in the real world of science, not even replicability is always feasible.
http://www.sheldrake.org/about-rupert-sheldrake/blog/the-replicability-crisis-in-science
http://theconversation.com/science-is-in-a-reproducibility-crisis-how-do-we-resolve-it-16998
https://phys.org/news/2013-09-science-crisis.html
All this is somewhat beside the point-- which was that there are certain fields of inquiry that don't lend themselves readily to rigorous scientific methodology. And yes, they are less reliable as a result. Some things happen rarely or only once. If someone observes them tha tis evidence that they happened, the quality of the evidence varying with the credibility of the witness. If there are many observations and some are reliable reporters, we may have more confidence in the information. If the accounts are all second or third hand hearsay, as is unfortunately the case with most religious happenings, we use our own judgement. If we accept it we take greater risks and probably have strong "subjective" reasons for wanting to do so. But the mere fact it isn't science doesn't necessarily render it worthless. As you point out, the study of ancient history has major limilations. Should we give it up or do the best we can with the data and methods available?

 

Exactly.

But to clarify, I don't actually think there is a unified Christian ethic, and the same goes for other religious ethics. Some Christians for instance are very anti-abortion, some are pro. I'm not really aware of Christian attitudes to things like GM crops, but I suspect that there again, no consensus exists. But these are issues with which we have to deal.

I'm also a bit unsure about the ways in which a secular ethic can work. The danger I see is moral relativism, unless a secular ethic accepts moral absolutes, eg. 'torture is wrong and can never be justified'. A utilitarian approach, which I suspect would be the base of such a secular ethic, would not necessarily take that view. I also worry that those making the ethical choices for the rest of us will be representatives of the financial, technocratic and governmental elites, whose agenda may not reflect the common good.

Also it isn't pure science that I see as the problem, but the way it's discoveries get rolled out as new technologies etc. We're being told that soon robotization is going to transform the way we produce stuff. Millions of jobs will probably be lost.People may have to be given a basic income as right. Things like the protestant (or Catholic) work ethic are going to have to change. We will have to come to terms with a world where machines do most of the work, leaving us free, in the words of Oscar Wilde, 'to pursue cultivated leisure'.
I can't see how that will play out with the more conservative kinds of Christian.

I don't claim to have the answers to all this, but it's interesting to discuss and see where that takes us.