is it abuse to teach religion?

I often try to practice the dictum: turn the coin over.

If one side is right, why can't there be something "right" on the
other?

http://robtshepherd.tripod.com/jefferson.html

A song from the sixties went, "Nobody's right if everybody's wrong ..."
(Buffalo Springfield)

robin wrote:
I often try to practice the dictum: turn the coin over.

If one side is right, why can't there be something "right" on the
other?

http://robtshepherd.tripod.com/jefferson.html

A song from the sixties went, "Nobody's right if everybody's wrong ..."
(Buffalo Springfield)

No it is not abuse to teach religion. It is abuse to lie about it.

Lying about it has the following characteristics.

1 - Mine is the one true religion. Others are imitations and in fact
blasphemy.

2 - You are going to die and not have a happy afterlife if you don't
join my religion.

3 - You can pray for anything and get it.

In fact, just about anything I hear the religious trying to sell, if
taught to an impressionable child, would be abuse, since it warps known
reality.

There are, for instance, no such thing as spirits. That's a left over
from childhood fairly tales we've never grown out of.

When "religion" is actually taught, not trained for indoctrination, as
a human phenomena of belief, not fact, they it's not abusive.

That religion played a role in the establishment of the United States
is a given. Problem is it imposed it's United States upon those that
may not have wanted them, and they too had their own religions.

We didn't win over the natives because gawd willed it and we had some
mission from heaven. We won because we had the numbers, the firepower,
and the knowledge to resort to cheap trickery and vile disregard of
human life not looking like us.

We still suffer from many of these same problems, and while I won't
blame religion for the origination of the abomination of racist
bigotry, I do blame it for going hand in hand to push it for centuries.


And I'm not talking about one religion or one region of the planet, nor
one ethnic group.

Religion has served us poorly.....for our souls.

And I don't even believe in them.

Teach religion like history, for that is really what it is, or assume
that it's an attempt to sell it as superior to other ways of seeing the
universe. ...which of course, would make it abusive of the developing
minds of children. You have no right to indoctrinate children. YOu
have to obligation to make them critical thinkers and pick their own
beliefs.

Answer your question?

Of course it goes against many's religion to NOT indoctrinate the
young, but that is a confusion of culture with religion. One is not the
other, despite thousands of years trying to make it so.

Your Frangible and Faithful Santa,

Q{ } ho ho ho ho

Its' abuse if you go overboard.
Let the person you are teaching
make up their mind to believe, don't
push them into the belief.


chas

wrote:
Its' abuse if you go overboard.

Prosetelyzing sects do go overboard.
Evangelicals abound.

Let the person you are teaching
make up their mind to believe, don't
push them into the belief.

If I tell my child that rattlesnakes are bad and Bluejays good, I have
just pushed them into a belief.

The fact is that rattlesnakes fit a very important ecological niche.
They are constant rodent hunters and help control that population.

Bluejays are a huge pain to farmers of certain crops.

chas

The problem, chas, is that without a fulsome education one is NOT
restraining the pushing of a belief.

If I am going to teach about which animals are "good" or "bad" I must
define my terms, and I must teach about more than just two animals.

The same is true for religion.

As long as there is "my church" "your mistaken beliefs" along with guns
and propaganda we aren't really teaching our children "religion." We
are teaching them our culture. The two are not mutually interchangable.
Not as flawed as we are.

I think comparative religious studies should be put off until a child
is at least near the end of their teens, a time they are especially
vulnerable to snakeoil salesman because of their growing social
conscience, and consciousness.

Q{ } ho ho ho

There is an apocryphal story told of a retiring school district
superintendent asked to explain the longevity of his tenure. The
purported reply was that he never allowed politics, religion, or sex to
be discussed in the classroom.

Schools seem to do poorly in discussing any of the seminal topics of
life. Sex education is a prime example. First there was a round of
teenage pregnancies. Even now, about 1/5 of middle school students in
one school district admit having sex. Then there was a bout of
sexually transmitted diseases. More recently, there have been a
surprising number of episodes involving sex in the classroom.

Feminist-dominated educators fear traditional religion because of its
patriarchal focus. It contains admonitions and commandments that would
present problems if feminists tried to answer them with their usual pat
answers. Of course, there are those troubling verses in Proverbs that
liberals try to explain away. Then, there is the fact that women are
largely ignored or play secondary roles. That really does not what the
feminist crowd wants to hear.

robin wrote:
I often try to practice the dictum: turn the coin over.

If one side is right, why can't there be something "right" on the
other?

http://robtshepherd.tripod.com/jefferson.html

A song from the sixties went, "Nobody's right if everybody's wrong ..."
(Buffalo Springfield)