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?
I think this kinda gets closer to my point. Humans create these kinds of social organizational structures and have made various kinds throughout history. Both religious and non-religious structures get used in horrendously abusive ways. But to decry all religion as a harmful structure is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I think it’s possible to maintain the cultural aspects of faith while removing the abuse and bigotry that often comes with it. And I think you can see that in many of the lives of practitioners that don’t make the history book and news. Though I’d never deny that religion frequently gets used as a tool of control, I just think it requires a lack of imagination to say that it always is. Or to say that removing religion from the world would create a world without communal tools of control and abuse.
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.
I’m not arguing to say we should be basing any society on any religion, but rather that it isn’t unethical to teach children religion because it’s part of culture and culture should be carried on as long as it doesn’t teach intolerance or abuse. Those aren’t inherent to religion and any religion that does feature those can probably have them be removed without harming the cultural aspects.
Teaching anyone that they must be judged by arbitrary, unprovable rules or face dire consequences is unethical.
I agree with that, but that’s not a core belief of all religions. Even so, it’s not hard to imagine a way to teach part of a faith that does have that as a core belief and remove that aspect.
All major world religions with many followers have arbitrary rules and dire spirital, and often physical, consequences for breaking them.
I am not here to argue specifics on religions.
I don’t think I could be more clear about why I believe teaching anyone religion as fact is unethical.
You’re making a few assumptions that simply aren’t globally true, though. 1) That all religious people follow one of the major world religions you’re describing, 2) that all practitioners of those religions follow every rule to the letter, 3) that all religion is taught to children in a vacuum without other, reality based, education alongside it
That simply isn’t representative of the entirety of religious practice by a longshot. And in doing so, you’re ignoring the significance of the cultural aspects of faiths.
Edit: I think the answer would be different if the question was “is it ethical to raise children as orthodox-to-the-letter Catholic Christian” (a few posters have shared some anecdotes that clearly demonstrate the harms with this idea) but it isn’t. The question is if it is ethical to raise children with any religious education whatsoever.
You refuse to address the “arbitrary” and “dire consequences” parts of my arguments by pointing at hypothetical religions. I will not respond to that.
To teach someone that they must follow arbitrary rules with dire consequences for failure is unethical.
You can decide what that means for religions.
That just isn’t true, I literally agreed with you that it was wrong to teach children in that way 2 replies ago. These faiths aren’t hypothetical, I’m just simply not going to get tied down in speaking about the specifics of specific faiths because that’s unnecessarily complicated as you don’t need to educate someone on every aspect of a religion to pass on the cultural values and aspects of it.
Though I agree we’re at an impasse here and neither of us are able to communicate something valuable to the other at the moment. I don’t doubt you’re an ethical person, especially with the amount of thought and care you’ve put into this subject, for whatever that’s worth.