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?
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.
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.
No. Simply put no.
it’s nice to have culture or whatever, but practicing a religion is inherently unethical as it is giving legitimacy to a scam and perpetuating objectively bad ideas
Not all religions are abrahamic
They are all unethical tho
religion itself is a categorically problematic approach
Yes, it’s their familial culture and it’s up to the kid to decide whether to break out from that or not later
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
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.
Are you really comparing learning about safe sex to indoctrination to cults?
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.
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.
It depends on how you view the parent/child relationship. In most countries parents have a sort of “ownership” role of their child. A right to raise them in their own way, religion and traditions. It is THEIR child to teach, and raise.
This has become pretty contentious in Norway, and Norway has lost cases child protection cases regarding this in international courts. Our child protection services has taken children from their parents and that has ended up in international courts in some cases. This is due to a difference in opinion in what is acceptable and OK ways to raise a child, and what constitutes the rights of the parents and the rights of the child. In some of these cases Norway have rightfully been convicted. But you won’t lose the ability to raise your child in Norway over nothing, as some people will have you believe. The child protective services can’t explain why to the public, and the parents can pretend to be innocent.
Personally I believe parents do not own their child. I believe parents are in a privileged position and lucky to be allowed to raise a human (yes, also biological), and that the privilege should be revoked if the parents are not sufficiently fit to raise the child.
The perspective of ownership is harmful in my opinion and does often conflict with the interests of the child in my opinion.
Should the child get vaccinated? Yes, exceptions are only allergies.
Should the child be home schooled? No.
Should the child interact with peers at the kindergarten and school and get the social skills they need? Yes
What sorts of punishments are acceptable?
Should the child be heavily involved in religion? No, but should learn about it, and can in a limited degree practice it. But no religious schools, or religious camps. Genital mutilation should not be allowed for boys either. If they want to, they can do it as adults. Doing unnecessary surgery on a defenseless child due to religion is in no way acceptable.
If the parents are neglecting their child, how much neglect is okay before the right/privilege is revoked?
If the parents are addicts, what then?
Etc.
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.
If it impacts someone else besides yourself.
I think it’s important to teach children the cultural traditions of their family and religion can be a good tool to teach children the social contracts of ethical behavior. The abstract metaphysical elements of faith can be a good substitute until they’re old enough to understand the usefulness of moral behavior from a social contract perspective.
The line is crossed when religion is used as a tool to teach bigotry. But the world is made richer by cultural traditions and those should be carried on.
This would be true if religion were not so often used to suppress and hurt people.
It’s true that it’s unethical to raise children in a way that suppresses or hurts them or tells them to do that to others, but that isn’t a requirement of religion, even if it’s a trend of some. There exists an entire globe of different faiths and practitioners of varying levels of orthodoxy, to malign every last one of them as abusive and harmful isn’t just a gross over generalization, it simply isn’t a truthful representation of many many faith practitioners.
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.
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.
Edit: I feel like your last sentence implies a huge misunderstanding of my point. I think religion has value as a cultural and communal institution, and absolutely not as a replacement for ethics and science
History is full of heinous things that should never be repeated and we have a moral imperative to teach younger generations about them, why they happened and why they must never be allowed to happen again and how to do your best to prevent them. A lot of them can be traced back to religion, but absolutely not all of them.
Religion is not the single source of bigotry and bigotry is the issue. There probably isn’t any faith that is purely benevolent, but there doesn’t need to be, it’s the actions of those who practice it that matter.
I can easily see the appeal to look at the past and say “we must end religion to prevent the horrors that arise from it” but I think it’s a lazy solution. Those horrors happen outside of religion as well and will continue to happen in an atheistic world if the issues causing them (e.g. inequality, injustice, bigotry, abuse of authority, etc.) continue. But by removing religion, you remove part of the many beautiful cultural traditions that make up who all the varied people on this planet are. And I don’t think it’s useful to destroy cultures.
Edit: of course, religion can’t be used as a replacement for a scientific understanding of the world and I think at some point it must be taught that the metaphysics of religion are based in myth, but I think there’s a great deal of value in the way religion is part of a culture and fosters community. The threat of religion comes in how that culture and community is used.
Lmao another edit because I thought a lot about this during the pandemic: I also used to think the world would be better off with no religion, but I think that’s an easier point to make when looking at the largest religions in the world and the terrible things they’ve been (and continue to be) weaponized to do. As a thought experiment, ask yourself if it would be ethical to gather every Catholic in the world and re-educate them to deny their faith. Now try again with the First Nation’s people, or smaller local faiths in Africa or South America. I won’t speak for you, but I think at some point it crosses a line where it stops being a call for rational thought and an end to the opiate of the masses but a vehicle through which cultures are irreparably harmed or erased.
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.
Ideally when properly understood each religion usually means well and enhances oneself in some way, from my little studying into a couple popular ones they seem to be aiming for similar things so I’m less and less convinced of inherently biased religious practices and more and more convinced of sucky people.
I think spirituality goes hand in hand with mental health and when we understand it badly we dig ourselves into deeper holes or when we understand it rightly we keep ourselves from falling in holes.
If what you teach someone helps them, that is good, otherwise just leave them alone.
No. Children should be taught about all the major religions and allowed to decide for themselves.
