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Overcoming Religious Indoctrination
- Thread starter (Q)
- Start date
This is where my real issue with religion is. It's not for me to tell people how to live, I just want the same in return. They are the first ones to say just let us be and then try to force their ideals onto the rest of us.
That problem will never go away unless people begin to overcome their indoctrination and stop passing on those ideals to their children.
Simon Anders
Valued Senior Member
One huge area of shared indoctrination - shared by both religious and secular indoctrinators - is what is NOT possible: to do, to perceive, to experience, to change.......
Advertising is an area of vast indoctrination. Couple this with TV programs and children are rapidly taught what is important, how people should relate, where their value as people comes from, what a boy is as opposed to a girl
and so on.
This indoctrination, while more 'pleasant' than the fire and brimstone lecture Q tends to imagine when he thinks of religious indoctrination, is at least as effective. In fact any person who believes that science is the route knowledge should expect that it is more effective. Companies, whether media or product centered, buy the best experts in manipulation available: psychologists and people from the neurosciences to help them develop marketing strategies that will addict children. They do not give shit how skewed the worldview is that they present children.
Advertising is an area of vast indoctrination. Couple this with TV programs and children are rapidly taught what is important, how people should relate, where their value as people comes from, what a boy is as opposed to a girl
and so on.
This indoctrination, while more 'pleasant' than the fire and brimstone lecture Q tends to imagine when he thinks of religious indoctrination, is at least as effective. In fact any person who believes that science is the route knowledge should expect that it is more effective. Companies, whether media or product centered, buy the best experts in manipulation available: psychologists and people from the neurosciences to help them develop marketing strategies that will addict children. They do not give shit how skewed the worldview is that they present children.
Advertising is an area of vast indoctrination. Couple this with TV programs and children are rapidly taught what is important, how people should relate, where their value as people comes from, what a boy is as opposed to a girl
and so on.
Disappointing, Simon, that you would come up with such a weak example, which certainly doesn't rival religious indoctrination in the least. Try again.
Political.
Racial.
Social class.
Good examples, but if you could expand on them slightly as I don't see them rivaling religious indoctrination. Racial comes close, perhaps, but what is the connection to the worshiping of an invisible entity?
Simon Anders
Valued Senior Member
Disappointing, Simon, that you would come up with such a weak example, which certainly doesn't rival religious indoctrination in the least. Try again.
Q, the above is not an argument. For some reason you think writing synonyms for 'I disagree' functions as criticism.
Q, the above is not an argument. For some reason you think writing synonyms for 'I disagree' functions as criticism.
Why should I entertain your poor examples? Provide some relevant content first.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
People are drawn to religion because the tendency to believe in supernatural creatures who capriciously meddle in our lives is an instinct. Religions are collections of archetypes, as Jung calls them: images, ceremonies and fables drawn from instinctive beliefs that occur in nearly every culture in nearly every era. The source of any instinct can be difficult to divine. It may have been a survival trait in an era whose dangers we can't imagine, or simply the random result of a genetic bottleneck or genetic drift.
In any case, the source of religious belief is much stronger than indoctrination. Instincts feel true, and this makes them deeper than things we know to be true from experience, reasoning and learning. It can be very difficult to convince a person to step out of an airplane, because millions of years of instinct tell him he will die, even though he knows that his parachute was packed by his wife who not only loves him but is an expert chute-packer, and even though he has a degree in physics and knows that the parachute will stop his fall.
It's much harder to convince a person that he's wrong to believe in supernatural creatures, since all we have to hold up against his instinct is a total lack of evidence for that belief. We can't say with certainty that supernatural creatures don't exist, only that there have been no credible sightings of one since at least the dawn of the Enlightenment and the scientific method.
So indoctrination is surely a big part of the problem, but there is much more to it than that.
In any case, the source of religious belief is much stronger than indoctrination. Instincts feel true, and this makes them deeper than things we know to be true from experience, reasoning and learning. It can be very difficult to convince a person to step out of an airplane, because millions of years of instinct tell him he will die, even though he knows that his parachute was packed by his wife who not only loves him but is an expert chute-packer, and even though he has a degree in physics and knows that the parachute will stop his fall.
It's much harder to convince a person that he's wrong to believe in supernatural creatures, since all we have to hold up against his instinct is a total lack of evidence for that belief. We can't say with certainty that supernatural creatures don't exist, only that there have been no credible sightings of one since at least the dawn of the Enlightenment and the scientific method.
So indoctrination is surely a big part of the problem, but there is much more to it than that.
So indoctrination is surely a big part of the problem, but there is much more to it than that.
While I would agree with you that there is much more to it than that, there must be a place to start working on those problems. One way is to work on the problem of indoctrinating children into cults. Perhaps that's what Dawkins had in mind when he decided to write a childrens' book on critical thinking.
Society is currently working on many such initiatives that are changing the way we view children and how we nurture and prepare them for adult life. Even the simple concept of spanking children hasn't dawned on many parents that this form of punishment is pointless violence that only leads children to think that physical violence is acceptable and does nothing to teach the child anything else. It is a form of child abuse.
Why then should we not tackle the problem of religious indoctrinating children as it too is form of child abuse?
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
What an odd thing to say. Most atheists come from religious backgrounds and were at one time religious, so they are no more ignorant of religion than you are. Furthermore, as they struggled with their doubt, they studied both religion and irreligion intensely, looking for guidance, so they may in fact know more about religion than many religious people. Finally, they are constantly bombarded by religious people with propaganda to "save their souls." It's likely that they know more about religion than the average citizen. People like me are extremely rare, born into an atheist family and somehow never being exposed to religious philosophy or history until high school, and therefore legitimate targets for the accusation of "ignorance of religion." But there aren't enough of us to be a threat to your millennia-long domination of the human race, so don't lose any sleep over us.The problem with your thinking, is that you are ignorant of religion.
There is no lack of understanding, as I pointed out. As I said, most atheists are well educated in religion, and the vast majority of them once stood where you do and even know exactly how it feels to be religious. So your accusation is fraudulent.You then use this lack of understanding to form opinions. . . .
That's an amusing accusation to come from a religionist, since I deduce from your rhetorical style that you're either a Christian or a Muslim, two communities who have murdered millions of people for the offense of being "heretics," "heathens," "infidels," "pagans," etc. The Christians of Europe actually tried very assiduously to "eradicate" (pls. note the spelling for future reference) the Jews and came uncomfortably close, and the Jews are not even atheists, just a different cult of Abrahamists. It's terrifying to think what they might do if they ever actually encountered a genuine atheist civilization. The only atheists who have tried to commit mass murder were communists, and as has been clarified numerous times, communism is an offshoot of Christian philosophy, specifically the passage in the Book of Acts: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." No practical-minded Hindu or Confucian would ever come up with the laughable notion that civilization can survive if what a man takes from it does not have to correlate with what he gives back. And the nations of those communist leaders had populations that were overwhelmingly Christian (or some other religion), just like our countries, so like Christians everywhere they generally concentrated their genocidal efforts on their Jews although a few Buddhists also got swept up.. . . . and your only ambition is to implement these opinions to try and eradicate a part of humanity.
In any case, the only rational course of action for an atheist is to live by the Serenity Prayer and muster the patience to accept the things we cannot change. Religion is an instinct and instincts cannot be eradicated, so religion is one of those things we cannot change. We may have to wait ten thousand years for humanity to evolve out of its religious instinct, just as we had to wait ten thousand years for it to evolve out of its pack-social instinct. Sure, we'll stand out here with our rational attitudes and try to connect with the occasional troubled soul who feels like his religion is a sham, but even if we succeed in bringing every one of them around to atheism, it's not going to make a noticeable dent in the size of your congregations. I'm as outspoken an atheist as anyone I've ever met, and I've never "converted" any religious people to my subversive little cult of rational thinking.
So just relax. The world is yours for several thousand more years. No eradication of religion is going to take place because it would be impossible.
More atheists are converted to religion than the other way round, so you've got nothing to worry about. But as regards "dangerous," how about the fact that every few generations entire communities of Christians (or Muslims) rise up en masse and commit violence of genocidal scope? Hardly a century goes by that you guys don't make a massive effort to wipe out some hapless society that doesn't agree with you. You Abrahamists have obliterated three entire civilizations--Egypt, Inca and Olmec/Maya/Aztec. There's no greater evil than to destroy a civilization, with all of its philosophies, art, languages, and other motifs lost to the world forever. There were only six independently developed civilizations in the entire history of this planet, and you guys destroyed half of them. That is an incalculable loss, and all of that destruction was done in the name of your motherfucking fairy-tale GOD! It's like little children burning down each other's neighborhoods because they don't believe in Santa Clause or the Tooth Fairy. Pathetic! So don't get on your high horse and tell us what badasses we are because we can see through the sham of religion. At least we limit our disagreement to verbal arguments. You people are the true evil, you use guns.People like you are seriously dangerous to human beings, and I dread the day such minds come to rule the world.
What you seem to miss is that there are two epistemological states.What an odd thing to say. Most atheists come from religious backgrounds and were at one time religious, so they are no more ignorant of religion than you are.
One is the stance of having some experience for the positive comprehension of god's nature.
The other is mentally determining this experience of all others to be an aspect of illusion, etc (based on one's own experience of course)
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But as regards "dangerous," how about the fact that every few generations entire communities of Christians (or Muslims) rise up en masse and commit violence of genocidal scope? Hardly a century goes by that you guys don't make a massive effort to wipe out some hapless society that doesn't agree with you.
While "you guys" are content, and apparently quite happy, to let tens of thousands starve to death every day because of some unsubstantiated speculation that to help, you might cause even more harm. Sort of a "Baron Max-fuck-'em-let-'em-die" attitude?
I don't know, Fraggle, which is worse? Those who want to help and might fuck up; or those who're content to watch tens of thousands starve to death per day and do nothing?
Baron Max