Theism vs. Atheism ... will it ever be settled?

The T wrote: Justin Bieber exists.  /thread /website /history

Exactly, and that my friends is the answer we have all been searching for, right under our noses all the time

While you are at best misguided to raise your children to follow a religion, it is not something that the law should have anything to say about.

Me obviously.

I shall propose to 4chan that they begin a campaign to edit his name to "Justine" in all occurences of his name.

Textbook wrote: Me obviously.

Textbook wrote: I don't believe in supporting religious claims with evidence because what evidence can there be regarding a mystical being? People who think they have rational, logic and reality based platforms for believing in a magical super-being are deluded. Such a being would transcend such logical constraints and secondly, for the whole 'faith" thing to work, such proof is impossible. When it comes to religion, it's nothing but opinions.

Silly according to you and the huge minority of the world.

Textbook wrote: Seriously dude, religion is dying.

 

Textbook wrote: Well I don't mean completely dying, it will always exist in some form, but dying as a major force. At the very least it's floundering.

Only in the West. But we're not the only ones in the world, and our birthrates are kind of crappy, so I'm not sure that's going to maintain itself over the next century. 

Ivan_Melgar_M wrote: Mr ProgFreak wrote: ^ Do you have some examples for Atheists groups doing these things? Because I'm not aware that any popular Atheist that I would agree with advocates them, and neither do I. Read this:   UK petition against religious upbringing   We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Make it illegal to indoctrinate or define children by religion before the age of 16.   ....   In order to encourage free thinking, children should not be subjected to any regular religious teaching or be allowed to be defined as belonging to a particular religious group based on the views of their parents or guardians. At the age of 16, as with other laws, they would then be considered old enough and educated enough to form their own opinion and follow any particular religion (or none at all) through free thought.   http://telicthoughts.com/uk-petition-against-religious-upbringing/     The highlighted parts are done by the site, and  Mr Richard Dawkins signed it according to them,   Is this enough proof?

This is about childhood indoctrination, and I actually agree with it. I think that I even made a post here where I listed childhood indoctrination as the one exception that I would make. If you like you can consider this as proof that Dawkins et al. are evil men - if you can't see that they are doing this not in order to "forbid religion", but in order to give children a better chance to decide for themselves which religion they want to follow.

Iván wrote:   Now we can't teach our kids according to our beliefs?   Who are this idiots to tell us how to raise our kids?   Iván

They're reasonable people. Their motivation is reasonable. When we're talking about how something like that could be implemented without infringing the rights of the parents - then I fully agree (and I also posted this before) that it would be difficult, and right now I can't think of how it could be accomplished.



Take Islam as an example. When a Muslim couple has a child, it is born as a Muslim, and he/she never has a free choice of religion. Ask the new member from Kuwait who has been posting here recently: Apostasy carries the death penalty in Islam. I think that it is reasonable to fight for giving children the chance to find out for themselves whether they want to be life-time members of such a cult or not. And in order for them to decide that, they a) need to be old enough and b) they need to have some knowledge about which religions there are, and what their doctrines are etc.. "You're a Muslim because we are Muslims" is not acceptable IMO.


Please also consider that in most modern countries there are certain rules that we impose on parents in order to protect children. "Abuse" not only covers parents beating their children, but also many forms of negligence or mental abuse. Forcing a religion on a child before it is old enough to decide - I see it as a form of mental abuse - and so we have a moral dilemma.


Edited by Mr ProgFreak - September 06 2010 at 01:55