Just want to put something out there, that just came to me.

That is, I find it is often the case with people like our Andrew, here, that they've indeed read a lot. Done their research, combed through the relevant material for the current topic. However, the filter, the god-filter, they have with which they interpret the information, will lead them to then try to prop their religious worldview, their faith-position up; ultimately rendering all their absorbed data nearly useless, their understanding of it to be skewered by their personal bias instilled in them by their religious beliefs/traditions/culture/upbringing. I would say, that they are prone to arrive at the wrong conclusion because of their bias, but as it is the case with the religious, they already have their own conclusion, and they can twist, bob and weave through proper science to eventually carve out a path of logic that will lead them to their desired philosophical views. It doesn't matter what the actual data is, their religious faith will always stand above it, as the ultimate answer. All paths leading to what is to others nothing but self-reassuring fantasy, institutionalized and given credence largely because it is tradition and, only by those who are either desperate, ill-informed, vulnerable, naive or servile, or any combination of those and more.

Agrippina wrote:Someone should get one of those aging software things to show what Elvis would look like now, if he'd lived. (A little like Cliff Richard who's had so many facelifts he's got a funny bow tie) Sorry Off topic.

Back to Andrew's musings.
Matt you're so right. No matter what information you give them, or even if you show them physical evidence, they'll just not hear it.

Well, in a lot of cases, it's not like they don't hear it, but they filter it so that it could prop up their preconceived, or I should say instilled notions about the world. Notions that weren't their own, but were spoon-fed to them from early childhood. It is why, I think, it is hard to divorce one's self from these beliefs one was brought up on, as they're also tradition, sacred. And even if one wasn't brought up in a religious household, or in fact was brought up in an atheistic one, they will still hear of these beliefs, philosophies eventually, and inevitably.

In some cases, the person will be persuaded, placated by those views, and they appeal to them for their simplicity and big or small comfort. In other cases, the person will reject those notion however comforting they may seem, for they accept that those are merely positions of faith, therefore ultimately baseless, and either needlessly elaborate, but stop short of giving an actual comprehensive and corroborative, non-contradictory answer, or they're tellingly vague. Well, they're telling, either way, really. Especially when they're in book-form. Scriptures betray their true author-ship easily enough, and it is no different, and no more difficult to discern the true value and validity of other faith-positions, especially ones as vague as deism or just saying they believe in some higher power, some creating force, but they can't/couldn't know anything else about it, they just take it on faith because they're not satisfied with scientific answers that are every changing, updating...etc.

Sadly, even people, like the sort above, who can reject such notions, will still have them in their head, they were born in society, of culture, long ago. They became tradition, shaped culture, and in some places, they're the law still, institutionalized. And they will never completely disappear, ever.

A sort of theist, a person who was either brought up in some religious tradition, or found religious faith to be something worth to hold, at some point in their life, cannot immediately disassociate from it, when pondering or discussing matters of science, origin, purpose...etc. An atheist who wasn't brought up in a religious environment, or one who's gradually lost their religious faith, can understand that side, but have learned to disassociate theistic views from facts and reality, no matter how discomforting and difficult it proved to be (at first, anyway).

The entire species would benefit immensely, if its members would value integrity, intellectually honesty and intellectual bravery more. The majority still haven't learned to do so, quite apparently. The species, in all of its advancements, is where it is today, because there always came to exist, in every generation, a relatively small fraction of its members, those who valued the above mentioned qualities, that eventually got us from worshiping the Moon and prostrating before it, to walking on its surface.

Religion was a show-stopper, a wall, a hindrance even for the brilliant minds that eventually came to contribute to science. Their religiosity might have fueled their curiosity some, but as examples show, it stopped them, as well, whereas those who never had religious faith, in a creator, never had to stop their quest for knowledge, in defeat (thinking they'll never figure out such an apparently perfect system, that could only have been done by a creator...etc.). Religion can lead the most brilliant of minds to a dead-end, dampening their intellectual bravery, the courage of their questions.

Agrippina wrote:Matt you're so right. No matter what information you give them, or even if you show them physical evidence, they'll just not hear it.

It's almost as if their senses and perception are clouded in some way — unreliable and not to be trusted as a window to reality.

Agrippina wrote:@Matt, I hold out eternal hope that without religious education in schools, they'll eventually see through the nonsense.

Well, it depends on what kind of RE it is, really. A curriculum that is akin to going to mass is hardly beneficial. Comparative religion, on the other hand, can be quite a useful tool for the students to learn early on about other faiths/cultures/traditions/truth claims/philosophies. But it should be relegated to the appropriate time and place, philosophy class, and literature, and not taught as fact.

Cito di Pense wrote:

MattHunX wrote:Comparative religion, on the other hand, can be quite a useful tool for the students to learn early on about other faiths/cultures/traditions/truth claims/philosophies. But it should relegated to the appropriate time and place, philosophy class, and literature, and not taught as fact.

RE can flatter students who have had liberal parenting at ages 3 and 4, and reinforce their attitudes about and awareness of their own and others' ethnocentrisms, and I suspect is not much use to people indoctrinated by their parents at those ages to hew to a particularly rigid world view.

I imagine children in more fundamentalist households don't get a proper, religion-free, fact-based education, but the opposite, either by being home-schooled or being sent to a strictly religious school, where there is a good chance comparative religion won't do much good or is not a part of the curriculum since the school is exclusively for children of one given faith (of course, there are those parents who are forced to send their kid to such schools, because it is the most decent education they can find near to them, but who aren't religious themselves).

Cito di Pense wrote:

MattHunX wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

MattHunX wrote:Comparative religion, on the other hand, can be quite a useful tool for the students to learn early on about other faiths/cultures/traditions/truth claims/philosophies. But it should relegated to the appropriate time and place, philosophy class, and literature, and not taught as fact.

RE can flatter students who have had liberal parenting at ages 3 and 4, and reinforce their attitudes about and awareness of their own and others' ethnocentrisms, and I suspect is not much use to people indoctrinated by their parents at those ages to hew to a particularly rigid world view.

I imagine children in more fundamentalist households don't get a proper, religion-free, fact-based education, but the opposite, either by being home-schooled or being sent to a strictly religious school, where there is a good chance comparative religion won't do much good or is not a part of the curriculum since the school is exclusively for children of one given faith (of course, there are those parents who are forced to send their kid to such schools, because it is the most decent education they can find near to them, but who aren't religious themselves).

I took you to be defending the worth of RE classes or lectures on comparative religion. You can get on with that any time. The salutary effect of taking such children out of madrassas and their equivalents and putting them in liberal RE classes should be demonstrable. But it won't be, since it involves the techniques of social research survey design.

I would never propose educating our children communally from ages 2 or 3 to prevent their fundamentalist parents from abusing them with indoctrination before what we glibly call their ego boundaries have developed.

Well, I wasn't suggesting sending them to school at THAT early an age, but then, indoctrination by parents and church-going, for some, will come inevitably before they even set foot in just kinder-garden. I simply meant to say, that a proper comparative religious education should be beneficial for children from around the age of 7. I say that, because that's the system I'm used to. Here, we start elementary school at age 7. So, there should immediately be some RE class with proper (fact-based teachings, from non-biased, preferably non-religious teachers, who would provide) information on the relevant subject without any of it being taught as fact, or the one true faith...etc. It would serve as an early...counter-education for the indoctrination that happened earlier in their lives, before elementary school. I think it would serve as means to mitigate the effects of very early childhood indoctrination, and would perhaps prevent children from getting too firmly rooted in their specific faith, making them more open-minded and easier to approach, later on, with information contradictory to their faith.

Cito di Pense wrote:

MattHunX wrote:I simply meant to say, that a proper comparative religious education should be beneficial for children from around the age of 7. I say that, because that's the system I'm used to.

Cheers and thanks for the anecdotes about what you are 'used to'. Let me know when you have some social research to back up the notion that it 'should be beneficial'. Personally, I'm of the opinion that people work as RE tutors because they are not competent to teach anything else: "Religion X does x and Religion Y does y. You can read about it here." I think it's all well and good to document the different ways people have of being idiotic. You can tell I'm not a multiculturalist, in the academic sense. Anyone delivering lectures on such amorphous material is in the business of indoctrination; in this case it's about 'multiculturalism' and teaching tolerance without teaching deconstruction. Kids in public school may not be ready to deconstruct until they reach their mid-teens. By that time, hormones are raging and deconstruction seems pretty dull.

For people who think religion is idiotic, deconstruction is like pouring petrol on a fire.

To clarify, when I said it's "what I'm used to", I didn't mean RE classes and those things. We don't even have that in most schools, some catholic schools here and there, as far as I know, or it's in the afternoon in some elementary schools, some folks being allowed to have an hour or two in a room with a few kids in need of some afternoon activity. I was only referring to elementary school starting at age 7, here.

And RE tutors not being competent is just the problem. As I've read from articles on their situation in e.g.: Australia, and heard from members who are from there, a lot of RE teachers are indeed incompetent and don't even have the necessary qualifications to be proper teachers, in a proper school, and the government stuffs them in schools, regardless, just so they can keep religion in schools and keep children's minds god-addled.

That's why I've said that children would benefit from being taught about their religion(s) by teachers who are actually qualified and competent, and not just on paper, either. And they should do their best to avoid any strictly religious subjects being taught as unquestionable facts. And the kids, at that age, shouldn't even be required to then deconstruct religions and essentially their traditional upbringing, that can come later, if it happens at all. They just need to be prevented from being mired so deeply in their religion that they'd snap at anyone who tries to tell them contradictory information, or snap at/discriminate someone for simply being non-religious.

This isn't strictly about tolerance towards other cultures, and multiculturalism. This is simply battling religion in the classroom and not letting it be taught as fact, belief or hellfire, and excluding people of other faiths or non. But yeah, such an approach in schools could eventually lead to people being more open to and accepting of multiculturalism. At least it should follow from such an education, in my view.

lol!

campermon wrote:lol!

I'll see your lol and raise you a rofl!