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Joined 2 months ago
Cake day: March 8th, 2025
  • thanks AV@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Is it ethical for a parent to raise their children in their faith tradition?
    31·
    15 days ago

    I appreciate the thoughtful response. My main takeaway, and what i wanted to make clear: the opinions your parents inbued to you were just that, opinions. You disagreed, you might not have liked your parents for any number of reasons. I certainly don’t like my parents, they abandoned me at 18 and became trump supporters. What they didn’t do is raise you with a belief in something for the purpose of controlling you from within and without. You are free to disagree with my opinions and observations, but this is something I can tell from the way you speak and your ability to characterize yourself and your experiences growing up. You were not raised to fear a god who demanded obedience. Your parents, while having been flawed as people, did not force their opinions on you without reason like theology would have to be. They might have lacked the capability to recognize the flaws in themselves but they did you a great service by allowing you the freedom to form your own opinions that disagreed with them. This simple fact is something that religious children of religious families struggle with their entire lives.

    There are people 50 years old who hated their parents and rejected their opinions but still can’t fix the psychological damage that a faith based upbringing inflicted on them. Like, legitimately, I think you are experiencing a life that is completely and radically more liberated than someone raised in a religious household even if the two of you were identical in every other way. It’s not a bad thing. I’m happy for you, seriously. I’m just trying to make it clear how having a secular family gives you agency you can’t even percieve. It’s like privilege in that sense. To you, it is just being. It seems like the rational conclusion one would come to, but without understanding how religion shapes a young mind you can’t appreciate just how much freedom you possess simply by having not been exposed to religious doctrine early and frequently enough for it to manipulate your critical thinking into your adult life. That’s a privilege that most people don’t have, and those who don’t have to work tirelessly for years or even decades to overcome their learned biases to reach the same point you or I have been at or past for most of our lives.

    I hope that clears up some of my first comment. My intent was not that I was trying to exalt your parents for being atheists, but to applaud the ability to allow you to see for yourself and come to your own conclusions. Conclusions which, seemingly, went against your parents beliefs. This is the thing I was praising. I wanted to point out how much of a benefit that is to you, even if it doesn’t feel like it. I hope you’re having a great weekend, and I’d be happy to chat in dms if you wanted to discuss more.

  • thanks AV@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Is it ethical for a parent to raise their children in their faith tradition?
    97·
    16 days ago

    The difference between raising a child explicitly by religious doctrine and explicitly by scientific understanding of the world is, in fact, a huge difference. Yes, religious parents forcing their kid to believe in divine transmutation of water into wine and bread into the body of christ is detrimental to that child regardless of their parents dedication to their beliefs. That child is being lied to. The line is drawn where a child is being guided by falsehoods instead of factual, evidence based reality. Outsourcing your children’s supervision to a self imposed panopticon is child abuse.

    Your parents did the opposite. Your parents not only raised you without imposing a religion on you but gave you access to religious schooling because of its benefits. Your parents not only recognized the benefits but were willing to risk the potential psychological harms that could come from subjecting you to a religious schools curriculum. That is something that you only get from thoughtful and capable parents, which Christians by and large tend not to be. I say this from experience with every single Christian family I’ve ever known.

    You said you’re 50 years old. Imagine being 50 years old having spent every day of your life believing that an unknown deity you can never see or hear is aware of your every action and every thought in your head and that, if a single one of your thoughts or actions displeased that diety, you were going to be forced into an eternity of unknowable torment and punishment for offending your god. That is the life that Christian parents impose on their children. Convincing them, from babies, that everything they do and think is heard and judged. Fundamentally, that is wrong. Raising children in that way is not just wrong but psychologically traumatic. Even for those who “choose” to leave their faith this anxiety around being watched and judged is a permanent impediment. That’s wrong, and parents should not be allowed to impose that on a child simply because they were convinced of it in their childhood.

    Your story unironically proves that atheist parents are far and away better parents than religious ones. Idk how you take that and say who’s to say if one’s better than the other. My parents were “religious” but didn’t force me into any of it. I chose to go to church with neighbors and decided it was lame so my parents never brought it up. That’s what good parents who are religious should be doing. Not teaching their children to do exactly as they do.