Ahh. The lonely cry of the person who hates all societies or any society or even the notion of Society.
All societies are maintained through Myth and a society that was created to live without Myth would either collapse or begin to invent new myths, immediately. And once myths exist, they are naturally and inevitably transmitted through child rearing. That you happen to dislike religion has led you to ignore all the other mythology of Society and to make your absurd claim.
Children are born without beliefs of any kind, eschereal. Not only have they no belief in God; they have no belief in equality, no belief in fairness, no belief in human dignity, no belief that our perception of the universe corresponds to any material reality, no belief in any of the other axioms that underpin the scientific method, no belief in truth, justice or the American way.
Beliefs dealing with these and many other subjects are transmitted to them, initially by their parents and immediate family, and later by wider circles. Even if it were desirable to raise children with no beliefs and allow them to select their own when capable of doing so, it would not be possible. The transmission of beliefs is partly intentional, as when we deliberately teach our children not to bite one another and to share their toys, and partly unintentional, as when children acquire our beliefs and values by observing and absorbing our behaviour, and internalising the underlying values and beliefs. When beliefs are intentionally inculcated by instruction, example and shared practice we can call this “indoctrination”, but we usually only do so when we disagree with the particular belief that is being indoctrinated.
There is no evidence at all that raising children in an atheist manner leaves them with greater freedom to choose their own position on religious questions. It’s a trite observation that the single biggest influence on our religious position is our parents’ religious position, but this is more true for the children of atheists than it is for the children of almost any other group. The children of atheists have a strong propensity to conform to their parents atheism; this is the opposite of what we would expect if your assumptions were true.
Why? Doesn’t that assume that all things are equal?
Neither theist nor atheist religious beliefs are empirically demonstrable or investigable; they are matter of faith and values. If children make choices about faith and values free from parental influence (or “indoctrination”) we would not expect them to mirror their parents choices. In fact they do tend to mirror their parents choices; the obvious (and I think widely accepted) explanation for this is that their parents have influenced their parents are influencing their choices. And when we find that children raised by atheist parents have a stronger-than-average propensity to mirror their parents’ choices, that does cast doubt on the claim that those children are more free than others to choose their own religious positions - unless you assume a priori that atheist positions are correct, obvious, instinctive, or something of the kind.
Well, I don’t assume that they are the same as religious belief, since they don’t actually require any evidence or argument to support and are just a default state, exactly like the lack of belief that black cats are bad luck is a default state, or the lack of beliefs that frogs in the house are evil (to borrow from a current dope thread).
Also, if kids were raised without any theological indoctrination, they’d be meat on the hoof for the first ideologue they meet when they’re released from the isolated crèche and find themselves in the real world. There would be a mob of evangelizers (including some atheists) out to recruit them.
It’s bad enough registering to vote for the first time…
Apparently not, if kids raised as atheists tend to remain atheist. Unless your position is that any feeling about religion has to translate into “indoctrination.”
It’s a bit more complex than that. We observe that most societies/cultures develop and retain theistic beliefs, which is hard to reconcile with the presumption that atheism is the “default”. And societies that have high levels of atheism - e.g. China - tend to develop alternative beliefs, in e.g “luck”, which fulfil the same function of explaining the evolution of events and suggesting that there is some pattern to existence, or some force or impulse at work.
In other words, we are pre-programmed to look for patterns, meanings, explanations, purposes, order. The lack of a belief in anything of the kind doesn’t seem to be the default; it seems to be rather the exception. (The same pre-programming, incidentally, predisposes us to accept some of the axioms which underpin the scientific method.)
So if, hypothetically, you not only didn’t teach your kids that there was a god, but shielded them from any knowledge that such an idea exists (I know, that’s not what atheist parents do, but bear with me for the sake of the thought experiment) your kids would still be driven to look for answers to the questions which other people answer with “god”. And they would still be predisposed to believe that there are answers, rather than that the questions are meaningless. And they would develop, or find, answers that they found satisfactory. And they would almost certainly be heavily influenced by the example and instruction of their parents in the answers they would arrive at. (Why would we expect it to be otherwise?)
Right. In something slightly closer to the real world, atheist parents do not hide from their children that some people offer theistic answers to these questions. But they also do not hide (to put it no higher) the fact that they themselves have not adopted these theistic answers. And they will, to some degree, inculcate in their children the beliefs and values which have led them to reject theistic answers. For example, if the parents are philosophical materialists, they will intentionally or inevitably tend to transmit philosophical materialism to their children.
I can’t think of any reason why we would expect the children not to be influenced by this, or why we would imagine that this is not going to affect the children’s evaluation of the theistic beliefs that the parents have rejected for themselves. On the contrary, it seems to me highly likely that the children’s approach to questions of religion will be heavily influenced by this. And the observed evidence, that the children of atheist parents have a stronger-than-average propensity to mirror their parents’ religious position, is entirely consistent.
In short, I don’t see any reason to expect that children raised by atheist parents would approach religious questions with an unbiased “blank slate”, and I don’t see any evidence that they do.
In the terms of this discussion, yes, any “education” about religion would be counted as “indoctrination.”
If a kid shouldn’t be raised to be Catholic, or Jewish, or Hindu…then he also shouldn’t be raised to be atheist. Why give favorable treatment to any one specific viewpoint?
(Besides, you can get the same effect by teaching critical thinking skills, and the habit of questioning authority. A kid who is raised with a skeptical outlook is going to have a head-start figuring his way to atheism, all on his own.)
I was only saying that if kids are raised in an environment of absolute neutrality, they will be prey for people who seek to persuade them, one way or another.
(These days, kids should be taught scams, spams, phishing, and other dangers, all in grade school. “Nigerian Finance Minister” schemes should be as familiar to kids as other popular cartoon villains.)
ETA: UDS Excellent post! Total agreement! I was trying to say something fairly similar, but your post was more eloquent by far.
The inculcation of any viewpoint about religion can be labelled as “indoctrination” - if it’s a viewpoint you don’t like.
Because atheism isn’t really a viewpoint. You can raise a kid to be atheist without ever mentioning gods.
It’s not remotely hard. For any given belief, the default is that any one person doesn’t have it. I agree that superstitions about luck are in the same category as gods, but that just shows that atheism is simply a fancy name for a lack of a particular type of superstition. We don’t have a word for “lack of belief that if you spill salt you have to throw a pinch over your left shoulder or have bad luck.” I lack that belief as well as a belief in gods, but you wouldn’t say that if my children also lacked that belief that it shows they have been indoctrinated.
I wouldn’t say that they had been indoctrinated in either case; I don’t like the term, or find it useful.
What I would say is that their lack of belief in gods is just as likely to be an inheritance from you as their lack of belief in the necessity of tossing spilled salt over their shoulders. The fact that you didn’t teach them to believe in gods doesn’t mean, or even suggest, that their position of unbelief was arrived at independently of any influence from you, and for the reasons I have already outlined I think it’s highly unlikely that it was.
But again, any specific belief isn’t arrived at in a vacuum, and saying “Oh, your children didn’t end up with this specific belief but others have therefore we can’t say lack of this belief is the default” is nuts to me.
Don’t try to tell that to Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and who-knows-how-many-other crazies out there in Tea-topia.
The default here is not the answer; it’s the question. Your children will ask questions about meaning, about signficance, about purpose, about order, because that’s what it is to be human.
I don’t think there is a default answer. If there is, it is not the new atheist, philosophically materialist position that the questions are fundamentally meaningless, that existence has no purpose and might just as well not be. We are wired to seek purpose and signficance, and answers which deny the possiblity are not inherently satisfactory to us. We may eventually reason our way towards it and persuade ourselve of it, but it is not our default position. It takes a bit of work to get there.
My belief it that it’s wildly unlikely that anybody answers these questions free of profound influence by family and wider society, unless raised by wolves in the forest. And I don’t see a shred of evidence that my belief is wrong. In particular I see no reason to think that those who arrive at conventional “new atheist” answer to these questions have done so that is free from parental and other influences, both deliberate and inadvertant, and claims that this is so look to me like rationalisations constructed in the teeth of common sense, common experience and the available evidence.
To give a specific example that I used upthread. If you had a religious belief in your culture that said thunder came from angels bowling (again, I don’t think this has ever been a true belief of anyone) and you failed to tell your children that thunder is from angels bowling, it’s not likely to be an explanation they stumble across on their own. And because we have an explanation for what thunder actually is, a kid doesn’t need to try to figure out what caused it. So then the angels aren’t bowling, but not because he’s been taught something about angels bowling, but because he doesn’t have a gap that requires a god (for some people).
You’re making that up! Who? C’mon, gimme just one name! Who here does that?
But, while my parents may never have mentioned that some people believe that thunder is caused by angels bowling, if that belief is current in my society and culture then at some point I’m going to be exposed to it. And, when that day comes, my parents either will already have mentioned, or will mention when I first express an interest in the subject, the more conventional explanations for thunder; that it is caused by the movement of large masses of air when lightning bolts collapse, or that it is caused by the rapid thermal expansion of plasma in a lightning bolt, or that it’s caused “by lightning hitting the ground”. (Wrong, but an account not uncommonly offered to children.)
I can’t appraise the “angels bowling” belief without an awareness that accepting it involves rejecting an alternative belief, the foundation of which is the authority of my parents. Plus, the intellectual equipment with which I appraise the alternative beliefs, assuming I get to that point, is itself something inculcated in me by my parents. If my parents have always preferred naturalistic explanations over supernaturalistic ones, and have raised me to do the same, that’s obviously going to frame the way in which I approach the alternative explanations offered to me on this occasion.
In short, the notion that I’m making a free choice between alternative beliefs here, uninfluenced by parental views or example, is plainly false.
That would certainly be possible… I can’t imagine such a child ever being described as “educated” however. Without knowing about gods and religion, how could one possibly have any understanding of history?
But, this is unimportant, I guess, because the notion is being pretty roundly rejected here! Even the atheists don’t admire this degree of extremism!