Religious indoctrination is child abuse.
Sending your kids to places of worship or a religious school, or telling them “this is our religion”, is child abuse.
This includes christofascists and oppressed minorities.
I’m on the fence as to whether telling your child they are a girl or a boy is similarly harmful.
If we made it illegal to expose children to religion until they reached the age of adulthood - and made enforcement viable and effective - religion would become extinct within two to three generations.
There is a reason why every religion out there places so much emphasis on proselytizing to children - because evolution has primed children to trust adults implicitly. They are the perfect brainwashing subjects because over the last few million years those who listened to adults and obeyed them without question were the ones most likely to make it to adulthood themselves.
I’m on the fence as to whether telling your child they are a girl or a boy is similarly harmful.
Telling them that they are developing physically as one or the other isn’t the problem.
The real problem is forcing cultural baggage onto them that pigeonholes their development. Or worse - that tells them that any discrepancy between their outward appearance and internal being means their internal being is the problem.
Being in tune with who and what you are has never been the problem. Learning about differences and realizing that your physical phenotype puts you in a particular group is also not a problem. Children will always be curious, and feeding their curiosity is always a net benefit.
The problem occurs when the outside world forces you to think and behave in ways that don’t align with your real self. That is the true evil.
Yes it is, and parents have a duty to prepare their children for the world, evil as it is. It’s very difficult to navigate. For example, there’s some credibility to the argument that raising a machiavellian child is in their own best interests and therefore moral. A more trivial example is purposefully infecting your child with chickenpox for future immune protection. Somewhere between those two (probably) lies the moral ideal, if such a thing exists.
purposefully infecting your child with chickenpox for future immune protection
Vaccines are infinitely safer than doing that. Your premise a bad example to give, as it’s the riskiest possible path to immunity, and an example of exceptionally harmful parental care given the vaccination options.
Don’t be ridiculous, it’s a hypothetical. Chicken pox parties were the only path to immunity before vaccines were introduced and it’s simply a good example of parents exposing their children to a little evil for their own protection. Clearly the example was chosen because of its applicability to a cogent point, and not because of its specifics.
However, instead of focusing on the salient argument, you’ve decided to engage in pedantry for what, the sake of argument? Would you have preferred it if I added the qualifier “in the 60’s”?
Or is this just a ridiculous attempt to frame this as an anti-vaccine argument? You’ll get no mileage there, because, again, it was just a fitting example.
This is similar to how I feel. I have no problem with people believing in a religion as long as they keep it to themselves and don’t try and force it on anyone. That includes their offspring. I’d say all children should be banned from religious buildings like churches and mosques until they are either a teen or legal adult. Then they can make the decision on if they want to join an organized religion.
I’ve found my people! Maybe this isn’t so controversial on lemmy but in the whole of global society, I think it is. No way I’m saying something like this over a family dinner or an office coffee.
On the religious points, that’s not even slightly controversial, you’re just a Reddit atheist.
Intentionally and blatantly overly reductive on a complex issue, and overly focused on Organised Religion, ignoring the more freeform ones and the ones that verge on just being philosophy. (Some of the none-western faiths)
I did make up my mind on this before Reddit was invented, so a swing and a miss there.
It’s reductive because nobody wants to read a 600-page treatise in a comments section, which is why I forgive your equally reductive hand-waving about unspecified other faiths. The word “indoctrination” is key here. Teaching your child philosophy is not indoctrination. The abuse is choosing for them before they are sufficiently complex consciousnesses to choose for themselves. This occurs most commonly, and is most socially acceptable when it comes to gender and religion.
Reddit atheist is older than Reddit too, the term just became given that name by it being so prevalent on Reddit. (In the same way that atheism existed before the word “atheism”)
It’s been around almost as long as secularism in society
Religious indoctrination is child abuse.
Sending your kids to places of worship or a religious school, or telling them “this is our religion”, is child abuse.
This includes christofascists and oppressed minorities.
I’m on the fence as to whether telling your child they are a girl or a boy is similarly harmful.
Teaching kids to believe in things with no evidence or against evidence is bad.
Yeah, that’s why I am sure to never teach them about the tea tray between here and the edge of the universe
If we made it illegal to expose children to religion until they reached the age of adulthood - and made enforcement viable and effective - religion would become extinct within two to three generations.
There is a reason why every religion out there places so much emphasis on proselytizing to children - because evolution has primed children to trust adults implicitly. They are the perfect brainwashing subjects because over the last few million years those who listened to adults and obeyed them without question were the ones most likely to make it to adulthood themselves.
Telling them that they are developing physically as one or the other isn’t the problem.
The real problem is forcing cultural baggage onto them that pigeonholes their development. Or worse - that tells them that any discrepancy between their outward appearance and internal being means their internal being is the problem.
Being in tune with who and what you are has never been the problem. Learning about differences and realizing that your physical phenotype puts you in a particular group is also not a problem. Children will always be curious, and feeding their curiosity is always a net benefit.
The problem occurs when the outside world forces you to think and behave in ways that don’t align with your real self. That is the true evil.
Yes it is, and parents have a duty to prepare their children for the world, evil as it is. It’s very difficult to navigate. For example, there’s some credibility to the argument that raising a machiavellian child is in their own best interests and therefore moral. A more trivial example is purposefully infecting your child with chickenpox for future immune protection. Somewhere between those two (probably) lies the moral ideal, if such a thing exists.
Vaccines are infinitely safer than doing that. Your premise a bad example to give, as it’s the riskiest possible path to immunity, and an example of exceptionally harmful parental care given the vaccination options.
Don’t be ridiculous, it’s a hypothetical. Chicken pox parties were the only path to immunity before vaccines were introduced and it’s simply a good example of parents exposing their children to a little evil for their own protection. Clearly the example was chosen because of its applicability to a cogent point, and not because of its specifics. However, instead of focusing on the salient argument, you’ve decided to engage in pedantry for what, the sake of argument? Would you have preferred it if I added the qualifier “in the 60’s”?
Or is this just a ridiculous attempt to frame this as an anti-vaccine argument? You’ll get no mileage there, because, again, it was just a fitting example.
This is similar to how I feel. I have no problem with people believing in a religion as long as they keep it to themselves and don’t try and force it on anyone. That includes their offspring. I’d say all children should be banned from religious buildings like churches and mosques until they are either a teen or legal adult. Then they can make the decision on if they want to join an organized religion.
I’ve found my people! Maybe this isn’t so controversial on lemmy but in the whole of global society, I think it is. No way I’m saying something like this over a family dinner or an office coffee.
On the religious points, that’s not even slightly controversial, you’re just a Reddit atheist.
Intentionally and blatantly overly reductive on a complex issue, and overly focused on Organised Religion, ignoring the more freeform ones and the ones that verge on just being philosophy. (Some of the none-western faiths)
I fully agree on your latter point though.
I did make up my mind on this before Reddit was invented, so a swing and a miss there.
It’s reductive because nobody wants to read a 600-page treatise in a comments section, which is why I forgive your equally reductive hand-waving about unspecified other faiths. The word “indoctrination” is key here. Teaching your child philosophy is not indoctrination. The abuse is choosing for them before they are sufficiently complex consciousnesses to choose for themselves. This occurs most commonly, and is most socially acceptable when it comes to gender and religion.
Reddit atheist is older than Reddit too, the term just became given that name by it being so prevalent on Reddit. (In the same way that atheism existed before the word “atheism”)
It’s been around almost as long as secularism in society