Since I am assuming that is a book saying “The Bible is false”, I unfortunately don’t have a counterbook.
All I am going on is an article (BIG article) I read that I don’t have on my person. Although as an analytical person (as non-believers and the purveyors of this conversation seem to be) I would recommend reading the other side of the coin to get the whole picture.
Because the believers never come up with any evidence that what they believe is true, or even CAN be true. They just assert the truth of something that has no more evidence for being true or possible than *The Lord of the Rings *does. Am I being unreasonable if I refuse to take seriously someone’s claim that LOTR is non-fiction ?
Look, the whole reason that logic and reason and skepticism - by your own admission - undercuts religion, is because it’s wrong. It’s fiction. Perhaps fiction you like, but just liking something doesn’t make it true. Perhaps you should consider that if logic and skepticism are so bad for religion, perhaps that should be considered an argument against the validity of religion, and not as a reason to deliberately try to raise children to be more gullible.
And again, we are at a point of just saying “This is where faith comes in”.
I fully agree with you that logic and skepticism are very bad for religion, which is why regardless of what religion you are, you will never really win an argument (such as this) against a non-believer. They simply can’t fathom the concept of pure unadulterated faith; probably because they were raised to look at religion from a purely logical standpoint. Which is of course the very first point I made. If you raise your kids this way, it is a guarantee that they will never believe.
Lastly, raising children to believe in a religion, to have faith in God (Allah, Buddha, pick whatever) is in no way raising them to be “more gullible”. You can take the most faithful person to their respective religion, and their gullibility as a person will in no way, shape, or form be changed because of it.
Well, it does say the Bible isn’t inerrant. The book is about which parts of Biblical history correspond to the archeological evidence, and which don’t. It was pretty controversial, since it said the evidence was against the Davidic empire, something which justified those who wanted to annex the West Bank.
I hope you are not the kind of person who refuses to read anything that goes against your preconceived notions. If not, it is worth a look.
When I went to Hebrew School, starting in the third grade, I just assumed everything they taught me was true. Since I wasn’t Orthodox, I never got taught that the entire Bible was true, in fact our “history” started with Abram and Genesis was taught as more poetry than fact.
When I was in high school I came across a Bible in our English book room which had an introduction talking about accepted theories of Biblical authorship. Applying the logic I learned in math and science, it was pretty clear that the Bible was not like I had learned, given by God to Moses. All the little problems soon became clear (how come the Torah is never mentioned in Prophets - only the Ark?) I was well on my way to not believing. When I read the Bible from cover to cover, its fate was sealed.
If you raise someone to use logic, and then tell them that logic does not apply to certain areas of their lives, the chance that they will get suckered by someone relying on faith increases. It never happened to me, but there are plenty of people who have told stories of how they asked their religious instructor about some doubtful point, and got into trouble.
If God exists and the Bible was true, why wouldn’t the evidence point that way? Why do you think God would lie to us with the evidence he put in the earth?
I can understand it just fine; I just see no value in it. There’s nothing profound or mysterious about faith.
And that’s an argument against the value of believing, not an argument against logic and skepticism.
If it requires a lack of logic and skepticism to buy into, that’s pretty much the definition of raising them to be more gullible.
Yes, but at least they start out knowing that it’s just a story and not real.
Nope. I’d be a pretty big hypocrite if I did, since I said something like that about the other side earlier. I just haven’t heard of that particular book. Sounds interesting though!
But asking their instructor about a doubtful point would be believing in something within the faith, and having it be wrong. The “not raising them to be gullible” that the rest seem to be talking about is gullibility in everyday life (You mean it’s a Rolex for FIVE DOLLARS?!?!)
The hesitation arises from the fact that I don’t know how best to relate the stories.
I was raised on them, taught to understand them as literally true. I do not believe them to be literally true any longer, and so I certainly can’t tell the stories as though they were.
But I don’t think the stories are worthless, so I have no intention of somehow intentionally steering my kids away from them. Moreover, I think that whatever value the stories can have, they can certainly also be dangerous if told by the wrong people in the wrong way to the wrong kid. A way to forestall this danger is to have the stories owned by the family beforehand, so the kid is “innoculated” against fundamentalist or froofy readings of the stories.
This wouldn’t be a worry except that because of my social connections–familial and in some cases non-familial) it’s likely my kids are going to hear these stories from people who are not me or his mom, in contexts tending toward the kid trusting the person telling the story to tell the truth, and these tellings are going to be either fundamentalist or froofy.
I’d rather not have to unteach this kind of thing.
(You don’t have kids, I think, so you may not have had personal experience of the extent to which little kids absorb this kind of stuff. I have been very surprised to see how much my kids pick up from their peers and from things overheard in adult conversations. And they take it on, and they believe it. It is enough to justify some paranoia.)
To avoid having to unteach harmful readings of the stories, it seems to me I’m just going to have to teach the stories myself sometime, exhibiting what I think is a good attitude for someone to take toward them. (You can see from the telling in the OP that I think a good attitude toward these stories involves taking them on their own terms, always as stories and not necessarily as history, and with a constantly critical eye, but with the attitude that there is something to be learned from them. This is an attitude I have about almost everything, not just religious texts.)
Why not just tell them the stories are on a par with stories about Santa Claus? For one thing, because I don’t believe that. For another, even if I am tempted to tell them this for simplicity’s sake, to be honest, I’m just not ready for the fallout that would surely ensue from various parents and other relatives and so on when the kids go blabbing about this during our next family visit.
I think your kids are probably old enough to be told not to go blabbing that the stories are phones, right? Just like not telling their friends about Santa?
What might happen is that if your relatives tell them the story they might respond that it is made up. Supporting your kids in that case might teach them a valuable lesson in standing up for what is true, which will help them to become independent and creative thinkers.
Questioning is questioning. It might be about something that they don’t know is wrong, but which seems illogical. The better religious instructors should be prepared to explain - if all they can answer is believe it or else, it might be time to find a new church. That writ large is happening in Iran - believe the election results or else! That’s where too much faith can take you.
I don’t think people can turn on and off their gullibility all that easily. if you don’t question religion, you might not question a dubious charity, or that supposed policeman calling for a donation. Not to mention all the religious charlatans out there.