Re: Catholic Church admits Bible is BS
Quote:
Originally Posted by ianch99
(Post 36099012)
Good to know. I assume that this is the standard approach with the JW church then?
---------- Post added at 10:07 ---------- Previous post was at 09:27 ----------
Sounds like a self-validating argument. You fail, however, to cover the case where parents attempt to not impose a specific world view (to the best of their ability) and encourage awareness and discussion of many. You also, deliberately, conflate an anti-faith atheist parent imprinting their view with a faith parent doing the same, they do not cancel each other out and does not validate the process.
I understand you have to validate your parenting choices because your faith demands it but that does not make it appropriate in a wider, societal context. The way I see it is that all individuals have the right to determine their own journey in life and not have one imprinted on them during their formative years. There is nothing patronising about the proposition that children can be conditioned during their early years. To imply that young children have the ability to process cogent argument and debate complex issues and so determine their own choices is a weak argument.
Of course, we have centuries of historical precedence to backup & reinforce your position but history does show us that change is possible. I also think that raising this point for discussion & debate does not merit your pejorative response.
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If I fail to account for your favoured scenario, it’s because in my experience, that scenario simply doesn’t exist - even in cases where parents think that’s what they’re doing.
Children always, always, absorb their parents’ ethical framework and worldview, even if parents actively avoid discussion of it, because children observe it in action every moment of every day, from birth. You simply cannot bring up a child without inculcating in that child your own view of human dignity, care for the environment and some sense of how you arrive at your value judgments.
I have made no distinction between active and passive atheism in the home because it makes no practical difference. You bring up your children with a certain ethical framework, whether or not at the same time you give them a critique of alternative ethical frameworks, regardless of whether those alternatives are based in religious faith. If you don’t recognise that you are doing this, you are doing your children a disservice.
Children are not simply miniature adults. They are immature, in the truest sense of the term, and their very nature requires they are taught, ideally by example as much as instruction, how to make sense of the world around them and how to relate to it, what their responsibilities are in it and what wider society owes them. Insisting on their ‘right to determine their own journey in their formative years’ sounds terribly progressive but is actual nuts, and a recipe only for poorly grounded young people who have been left to infer what’s right and wrong with minimal guidance. There’s a term for that: it’s “chaotic home environment” and its consequences are seldom good.
Children actively seek guidance about how to make sense of the world. It is a given in Western culture (and many others) that it is the parents’ responsibility to do this, with varying levels of support from extended family to and wider community, in accordance with family and cultural tradition - unless something has gone wrong and the child is in manifest danger. Only then does the State intervene. You offer your proposed alternative as seemingly morally superior, but it isn’t. |
