For many religious people, raising their children in their faith is an important part of their religious practice. They might see getting their kids into heaven as one of the most important things they can do as parent. And certainly, adults should have the right to practice their religion freely, but children are impressionable and unlikely to realize that they are being indoctrinated into one religion out of the thousands that humans practice.
And many faith traditions have beliefs that are at odds with science or support bigoted worldviews. For example, a queer person being raised in the Catholic Church would be taught that they are inherently disordered and would likely be discouraged from being involved in LGBTQ support groups.
Where do you think the line is between practicing your own religion faithfully and unethically forcing your beliefs on someone else?
No it’s not ethical. I say this as a queer man indoctrinated in Christianity. I was lucky to make it through childhood without killing myself. I tried several times. Religion is a cancer that should be exterminated.
I am a trans woman who was raised Catholic, so I feel similarly. I’ve had to do so much work in therapy just to get to a place where I can accept myself for who I am. A lot of those old beliefs were baked in deeper than I realized.
I carry a lot of resentment towards my (very devout) parents for raising me in the church, but I also recognize my experience is not emblematic of every person’s experience being raised in a religious household.
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I’d say yes, as long as they’re tolerant of their children questioning those beliefs and developing their own later on in life. Parents will always make an impression on their kids, that’s just what being a parent is. It can get more nuanced of course. Teaching your kids homophobia is unethical, but that’s regardless of whether it’s for religious or other reasons.
It’s not ethical to train your child’s brain to believe fairytales. It’s like foot binding, forcing an unnatural form on their growth. They grow up handicapped.
The problem with “faith” is its literal meaning: belief that is not based on evidence.
A society based on faith can only work is everybody has the same faith (think: Ancient Rome, theocracies, communist countries). The only reason modern Western democracies work is precisely that they are not based on faith but rather on evidence, on reason, on truth-seeking. This is the amazing and historically anomalous heritage of the enlightenment and it’s looking more fragile by the day.
Teaching kids fairytales and calling it truth is the reason religion exists. It’s the reason it’s so hard for adults to leave the religions they assimilated as children. And in a free society where we have to find a way to live together, it’s profoundly dangerous.
So my answer is: no.
Imagine how different society would be if people weren’t introduced to religion until they were 18.
There probably wouldn’t be much religion, how nice that would be. Religion would mostly cease to exists if children were not indoctrinated before they developed critical thinking skills.
Religion relies on naive children being brought into the fold, and to a lesser degree damaged and desperate adults needing hope or something to believe in.
Same place america is with safe sex: it doesn’t solve any problems, just defers the issue of ignorance and learning until adulthood
Are you really comparing learning about safe sex to indoctrination to cults?
No, i’m comparing learning about safe sex to learning about skepticism and critical thinking. Refusing firsthand experience with the cults that are ubiquitous won’t save people from those cults, it will just keep them from developing the skills necessary to cut thtough the bullshit until they’re suddenly thrown in the intellectual deep-end at 18.
What? Safe sex solves a significant amount of issues like sexually transmitted diseases and underage pregnancy. What In the world are you trying to say?
Yes, but people learn about it late (if at all), and we end up with lots of adolescents getting STIs/pregnant/etc.
What In the world are you trying to say?
America has a problem with sex ed because people don’t learn about safe sex; many still learn abstinence only. This doesn’t stop STIs nor teen pregnancies, it doesn’t stop SA, it doesn’t stop myths about men and womens reproductive systems from proliferating, it just defers the problem of educating people until later. Basically, America’s sex ed is to avoid teaching people about sex, then hope they suddenly know how to have safe sex when they’re 18 because they’re 18.
Likewise, deferring learning about cults until they’re 18 doesn’t stop people from getting indoctrinated, it just expects 18 year olds unfamiliar with cult tactics to suddenly be immune to cult tactics because they’re 18.
I think the ethics mostly come into how you raise them, religion or not. It’s ethical to teach kindness and empathy. It’s ethical to allow your kids to explore while asking them questions that help that exploration. You can do those kinds of things no matter what faith (or non-faith) you practice.
Speaking as someone who was raised in an environment that gave lip service to kindness and empathy but was really very harsh, judgmental, and rigid, only one of my siblings kept something reasonably approximating my parents’ faith. The rest of us are mostly some variety of pagan. Each of us had a painful journey out of our parents’ faith to something. No matter how you raise your kids, they are their own people and will come to their own conclusions. You can make the path much more difficult than it needs to be or you can set them up for a much less traumatic journey.
Definitely think that kids should be explained different beliefs early on… plus they should be respected if they don’t want to follow the same beliefs, and be able to opt out of any traditions… though I suppose the faith I follow tends to be a lot less “damned to hecc” than some others, so to some parents if breaking a tradition means making their kid go to hell that’s probably a lot tougher of a thing than im imagining it to be
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This would be true if religion were not so often used to suppress and hurt people.
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The history books are full of religions’ heinous crimes against humanity. Maybe there is some religion out there that is purely benevolent but I have never heard of it in the sea of counterexamples.
If you are currently trapped in a religion, I am here to tell you that you can escape. Once you do, a lot becomes much more clear.
It is also important to remember that religions are human organizational structures, but their basis of authority is “because I said so.” We see this structure arise over and over until it is eventually removed for something more based in reality.
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You are like a younger me who refused to see the 10,000 year history of abuse and realize that any system based on “because I told you so” us unethical and harmful to human life.
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Their kid, their call up until the point the child’s safety is in danger.
I have no more right to tell them how to raise their kids than they have about my entirely hypothetical and undesired kids. I may not agree with their choices and they may not agree with mine, I may think they are raising their kids to be less moral, they may think the same with the added bonus that I’m condemning mine to an eternity of torment.
That’s life in a pluralistic society.
Their kid, their call up until the point the child’s safety is in danger.
You’re answering the legal question instead of OP’s ethical question. You’re not wrong in your legal answer, but that wasn’t what OP was asking.
I think that’s the ethical answer too.
We can’t know who is right, so I don’t see any ethical way to intervene.
I hate when I see parents giving their kids a screen instead of interacting with them or worse, ignoring their kid im favour of their phone. But again, I don’t feel it is ethical to interfere.
If a child is homosexual, I would argue its unethical to teach them they are freak of nature and they are wrong or broken. However, its not illegal.
It’s act vs rule ethics, what is ethical in a particular situation may not be broadly applicable to society.
Edit: And from the religious parents perspective, letting your beloved child suffer an eternity of torment is probably not super moral. I may disagree but that’s their perspective and there’s no arbiter make the call.
You’re citing Bentham Utilitarianism but you could make a stronger argument for your side if you cited Kant I would think.
Utilitarianism makes sense from first principles, Kant is just his opinions.
Ethically, depending on the religion, it is absolutely mandatory for parents to teach their children their religious views.
For example, let’s make up a cult. “Pireneists” are devout religious cultists that genuinely believe in their god, Kundo. Kundo’s holy book says that any who partake in the evil plant, the peanut, have been led astray by evil and will suffer for all eternity in the dark chasm of the lost.
For parents who legitimately believe this it would be completely unethical for them to let their children eat peanuts, their mental state has everything to do with their ethical mandates. The only ethical thing to do is to teach their children about their beliefs in such a way that the children will follow the same beliefs for their whole life. Indoctrination is indeed within the bounds of ethics.
To you it may seem silly. In fact to most of us this is peak idiocy and if the leaders of the pireneists have been known to take money from people to pay for their lavish lifestyles you could say that the organization itself is evil. However the mental state and beliefs of the parents override the fundamental veracity of the claims of the cult/religion. True or not, the parents believe and their inaction would be unethical.
I’m not sure this is a question of ethics. It’s a question of whether you agree with a particular parent’s world view. A good parent tries to set their child on a positive path in life, and they are going to pick a path based their personal knowledge and beliefs.
Even if you try hard not to “indoctrinate” your child with any particular world view, they will still see you as a model for what to believe and how to behave. You will tend to be your child’s baseline for what “normal” is, at least early in their life. Your beliefs and behaviors will affect your kids whether you want them to or not.
The fundamental difference between religion/spirituality and science/reason, as far as I’m concerned is this: religion demands that you accept something as an indisputable truth and that questioning it is not only discouraged but forbidden and will be met with an arbitrarily horrific punishment (eternal damnation, etc), with what the specific something is dependent on the teacher, their interpretations and their intentions. As a mental framework, I don’t think it’s healthy for either individuals or societies to unquestioningly accept - or be made to accept - that any ideas are defacto sacred.
I think that’s a very narrow view of religion though, albeit one that is true of a lot and I agree is toxic. Ironically since you’re a UK person, it’s a type of religion I associate with the US and the American right (though I also know through friends growing up that it can be fairly common in some Muslim and Hindi groups)
I think a lot of times religion is used as a kind of cultural link: ‘this is why we have these traditions, this is a moral we have that we can explain with this story’ etc. And with that context I think it can be fine, even helpful to raise someone within a religious tradition
I guess I broadly agree with you mostly, but I would say that religion can be coherent with critical thinking and open-mindedness: it’s cultural as much as its about fundamental belief
(and when it is about fundamental belief then yeah it’s often awful)
Yes, it’s their familial culture and it’s up to the kid to decide whether to break out from that or not later
I think it can be done if the parents are tolerant, flexible, and understand that people are naturally curious about other worldviews. Unfortunately, that’s a stratospherically high bar for a lot of people. When the parents sincerely believe that their child’s eternal soul is in danger, ethics come second.
Ironically, I think the people best suited to give religious guidance are agnostics, who readily admit that they don’t know squat about the afterlife or other supernatural topics. Ideally, they won’t pass on hate or bigotry whose only basis is ancient hearsay or hallucinations.
I’m with Terence McKenna here: Culture is not your friend
