Originally published at the USU SHAFT site.
Ive enjoyed several of the videos produced by The Thinking Atheist. This video, however, should make them reconsider their (already rather smarmy) name.
In the video, several atheists relate their Christian upbringing, which they now not-so-fondly remember as brainwashing. Dawkins has sometimes gone so far as to claim that religious education is a form of child abuse. It can be, but the complaints made by the atheists in the video struck me as petty. There are too many grave injustices in this world for me to care about your being dragged to church every Sunday as a child. (Though Ill admit that my religious upbringing wasnt very strict, and I generally dont regret my experience in Mormonism.)
The main point of the film is that its wrong for religions and religious people to target the youth. But if you believed in a real, literal Hell, youd be obligated to do all you could to ensure that your kids averted it. Just as you wouldnt let your kids drink poison to find out its lethal, you wouldnt expose them to or let them hold poisonous (read atheistic) beliefs that would imperil their salvation. If that requires a degree of so-called brainwashing or indoctrination, then so be it. Were I ever to have kids, I would of course try to teach them to be open-minded, critical thinkers. Id even encourage them to investigate the worlds religious traditions. But thats a luxury I have as someone who doesnt believe in the threat of Hell.
To be sure, I think the degree to which religious parents inculcate religious beliefs in their children is often detrimentalespecially when those beliefs are terror-inducing, like the concept of Hell. But this video misidentifies the problem. The problem isnt the indoctrination so much as its content. It doesnt make sense to ask Christians to stop steeping their children in their respective religious faith or to stop proselytizing. To ask this of a Christian is to ask them to be a hypocrite. Again, if you believe in a real Hell, its imperative that you save people from it. No, the only appropriate response is to challenge the very belief (in this case, Hell) that is motivating the actions.
And another thing: Isnt everything you teach children a form of brainwashing? Kids are evolutionarily primed to be sponges for information. Kids may be born atheists, as the video asserts, but they are not born critical-thinkers. Theyre curious, granted, but theyre nonetheless impressionable. Critical thinking is a skill that requires a fully-developed brain and years of intellectual exercise. Even were you to teach your children skepticism, they would accept those lessons unskeptically.
Whats more, I have a hard time believing that the people interviewed here are not raising their kids to be atheists, just as the religious parents raise their kids to be religious. Why is the latter brainwashing, but the former not? Because Christians host concerts and pizza parties (how nefarious!)? Give me a break. Were not talking about a pedophile luring kids into his van with candy, but sincere religious people concerned about the spiritual well-being of their children.
Im very supportive of the movement for nonbelievers to come out of the proverbial closet, but it seems many new atheists expect religious people to go into one. Id rather everyone have a voice in the public square, the marketplace of ideas. The more debate and discussion, the better. This video, though, trades in the kind of lazy accusations and caricatures of religious people that do little to advance our dialogue.
Very good points. By coincidence, I just wrote a post based on a video you posted about being wrong. The thing is that there’s not really a magic formula to figure out exactly which of your own beliefs are wrong — it’s extremely difficult! So parents are going to teach their own beliefs to their children, and some of those beliefs will be wrong — how could it be otherwise?
That said:
I can’t speak for those other folks, but (from personal experience as a parent with lots of friends who are also non-religious parents) in an atheistic household, the concept of God typically doesn’t come up until the kids ask about it (usually after having been exposed to it by religious friends and family members). And when it does come up, it’s often when the kids are a little older, as opposed to kids who are taught the stories of Jesus from the cradle.
I agree that god(s) don’t come up in atheistic househoulds until later, generally. I only meant that I doubt that these particular parents aren’t teaching their kids to dislike religion. If you’re willing to participate in a video like this, you’re probably evangelical and aggressive about your atheism (which is fine).
Very likely.
And — now that my kids are old enough that they’re asking about it — I don’t beat around the bush about my own opinions (as I’ve recounted on my blog — with more news coming up soon!). But I’m glad that they’re exposed to alternate beliefs from their grandparents. I think they will learn more by the experience of seeing that people think differently than they’d learn if I were to bend over backward to avoid the topic myself.
“Dawkins has sometimes gone so far as to claim that religious education is a form of child abuse. It can be, but the complaints made by the atheists in the video struck me as petty. There are too many grave injustices in this world for me to care about your being dragged to church every Sunday as a child.”
This made me laugh.
It seems these days however, everyone wants to be a tragic figure online – even if it means completely inventing a “tragic childhood” from even the flimsiest material.
I haven’t seen the videos. But
“It seems these days however, everyone wants to be a tragic figure online”
is painting with an awfully broad brush.
Yeah, well… it was obviously hyperbole Karen.
Sigh…
No one appreciates art anymore…
@6 lol
Jon, for once I need to disagree with you. The fact Smithy believes he is protecting his spawn from hell by propagandizing them does not strike me as good grounds for asserting that Smithy is morally justified in propgandizing his spawn.
If it did, Jon, then if I believed I was protecting my kids by teaching them the world was full of vicious elves who were out to eat them I would be justified to teach them that simply because I thought I was protecting them from elves. But does my right to indulge in a delusion outweigh my kids right not to be needlessly misled and terrified of elves? At what point do we cease to indulge delusions? When they result in our denying everyone in our society the benefits of stem cell research? Or at some point before then?
At any rate, I ain’t sure passing a delusion onto a kid should be something we refuse to hold people responsible for.
Hmmm… I may have misunderstood what you’re saying, Jon. I guess the term I’m not clear about is what you mean by proselytizing. To me that word can at times mean more than simply imparting information or indoctrination. It can mean an effort to persuade, and that effort to persuade can even involve deceit, appeals to false reasoning, and exploitative tricks. All of those are commonly used by the proselytizers here in my town. So, my early response was based on my understanding you to be saying that it’s OK for a parent to proselytize their kids. But then I came back and reread you. You seem to mean something different than I do by proselytization. So, I’m not sure I disagree with you anymore.
“Brainwashing” is an emotionally charged term, so I’m not surprised that some people shy away from it. I have in times past myself. Let’s try defining it.
Wikipedia has brainwashing down as:
Let’s break it down.
systematically: Yep, there’s a system in place. From Nursery to Primary to Young Men’s and Women’s. That’s a lot of training and reinforcing.
unethically: This is probably the root of the OP. It’s probably not unethical to raise your children in a counterfactual belief system that you sincerely believe in, though it probably is unethical to start a counterfactual belief system. So we’ll give this one a pass for now.
manipulative: Yes. Any system that claims that a person’s eternal salvation is conditional on participation in the system is engaging in manipulation on a huge scale.
often to the detriment of the person being manipulated: Some people feel that the church has benefitted them, some don’t. I’d say no, but that’s because I like the things I believe to be true. (I’m funny that way.) I spent lots of money and years of my life promoting superstition and unreason.
In sum, I find that my Mormon upbringing matches this definition of brainwashing in all but (maybe) one particular. What else can you call it when someone’s critical reasoning faculties are short-circuited to keep someone in the system?
“a process in which a group or individual “systematically uses unethically manipulative methods to persuade others to conform to the wishes of the manipulator(s), often to the detriment of the person being manipulated”
Pretty vague, subjective and generally unhelpful definition.
That could describe just about anything, from the US Marine Corp, to law school, to Greenpeace, to high school football camp, to MTV, and… well… just about any ideology that is pushed in a persistent and organized fashion in our society.
The only question is whether the ideology is viewed as “harmful.” Which is – more often than not – utterly subjective.
Besides, I doubt anyone here has really thought through the human implications of how, exactly, you plan to hold those parents “accountable” for teaching their kids about stuff you subjectively disagree with.
It’s easy to shoot your mouth off online and make big macho talk about “dropping the hammer” on those groups you don’t like. Less easy to really think through the societal problems of resource allocations and ruining homes that you are most certainly implying behind all the angry ranting.
I don’t think I would use brainwashing as the best descriptor for how the Mormon story is taught. Indoctrination, (uncritical acceptance of what is taught) is probably closer to what happens, and on some occasions there may actually be something that approaches religious education, where material is presented as true, but with the advice to examine it (inquiry) without, and this is the critical point, a predetermined answer for your inquiry.
However, to dismiss (#11) “brainwashing” as a “vague, subjecting and unhelpful definition,” is itself pretty vague, subjective and unhelpful.
Well, one good turn deserves another Parker.
That said, I do agree that “indoctrination” is probably a more useful word here. The only question then becomes whether it’s the good kind or the bad kind. Because there’s a lot of “indoctrination” going on in society that we actually agree with – no matter what position you’re arguing from.
“Indoctrination” is what it is. If you think unquestioned, unexamined obedience is good, then you have your subjective answer. By the way, what is the societal indoctrination with which we agree?
Just about any set of values you seriously push on young kids would probably count Parker.
Seth:
If you don’t like the definition I gave, why don’t you find one that you do like? Then we can talk about it.
I don’t find the word to be generally useful to begin with. So it isn’t a problem of what definitions you want to give it. The word is inherently unhelpful from square one. It obscures and distracts more than it clarifies nine times out of ten.
If you teach children critical thinking skills and allow them the space to exercise them, then you’re not indoctrinating them. Parenting doesn’t need to be synonymous with trampling your child’s ability to think for themself.
Jonathan, let’s have a reality check here – no parent really does this.
No parent allows his or her kids to simply muddle things out with no moral input whatsoever.
And if anyone actually did it, it would probably count as criminal neglect.
A parent can be an advocate for their own views, expose them to other viewpoints, make sure that the child knows that good people often disagree, and provide them with the skills necessary to make sense of the issues for themselves. That’s not allowing their children to “muddle things out with no moral input whatsoever” and it’s not indoctrination. False dichotomy.
And it’s not criminal neglect. We’re not talking about letting them decide whether or not to play in traffic.
BTW, this is how I approach religion with my children. There exists at least one parent who does this. Q.E.D. 🙂
Sure, and a lot of Mormon parents teach their kids critical thinking skills too.
So there you are.
@8
Jon, delusions go a lot deeper than simply religious superstition. The universality of western medicine and psychology comes to mind. Besides not all of Religion is about well…fear of elves, as you put it.
Me too. I’ve written extensively about making sure that my kids understand that plenty of people believe differently than Mommy and Daddy — and trying to teach them the tools to think for themselves, even if it means they end up disagreeing with me.
Maybe they do, but can you provide some links? I read a lot of Mormon blogs and atheist blogs, and I’ll tell you this is a frequent preoccupation with atheist parents — How can I teach my kids to think for themselves? How can I get past my own desire for them to just believe like me, and avoid indoctrinating them? How can I teach them to question all authority, including mine? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a blog of Mormon parents sincerely swapping tips on how not to indoctrinate their kids.
On the flip side, I’ve seen plenty of Mormon blogs where the parents share advice for raising their kids to be faithful in the church, whereas I don’t think I’ve seen a blog where atheist parents swap advice on how to be sure their kids will grow up to be staunch atheists.
My particular sample may well be biased, but I think this is a point where there’s a very real difference in the values that secular parents typically seek to teach their kids.
Isn’t this just a matter of not using the same lingo?
No, I don’t think so. I think there is a real difference between “I want to teach my kids to have a strong faith in the Lord,” vs. “I want to teach my kids to think for themselves — even if it means they grow up to have different answers than mine to life’s big questions.”
Yeah, except that in my case, learning to have “faith in the Lord” happened to involve a lot of critical thinking skills.
Or is this one of those instances where “critical thinking” is actually being used as a code word for “agreeing with the atheists?”
The Mormon parents I’ve known (*not a scientific survey) discourage critical thinking about their own religion. I’m sure there are some who are not like this, and I applaud those with the courage to allow their children to evaluate Mormonism objectively.
Can we really say that a parent who teaches their child to apply critical thinking even to the parent’s own beliefs is indoctrinating their child? I don’t think that’s just a difference in lingo. That seems like a qualitative difference in parenting strategies.
How do you see having faith as involving ‘critical thinking’?
I see critical thinking as ‘questioning one’s assumptions by the light of evidence’, while faith means ‘sticking to one’s assumptions despite the lack of evidence’.
No, “critical thinking skills” isn’t coded language. I accept the fact that, as I said, good people often disagree and will apply good reasoning to a problem and come to different conclusions. I think a good question for parents to ask themselves is whether they are helping their children to understand other points of view that contradict their own?
For example, when was the last time you made a good faith effort to explain to your children why some people don’t believe in Mormonism? I’ve done the reverse, explaining the reasons as I understand it that people believe in Mormonism, and encouraging them to ask believers for their reasons directly in case I’m not doing them justice.
Daniel, I don’t see faith and critical thinking as mutually exclusive, but I think I have a slightly different definition of faith: faith can be seen as the decision to take action even though the evidence isn’t conclusive. After we’ve applied all of our reasoning skills to a question, the evidence probably isn’t 100% conclusive. Faith allows us to act as though it were.
For example, the evidence that reducing dietary cholesterol will reduce heart disease isn’t 100% conclusive, but I act as though it is (or at least I try to).
A lot times, however, we skip the first steps of gathering the evidence as comprehensively as possible and then evaluating it critically. That takes a lot of work that we may not have the time or energy for, or maybe we just want to believe a certain way. That’s where faith’s greatest sins lie, in my opinion.
Sigh… I can see where this is going.
Critical thinking to you guys just automatically means rejecting religion. So the mere fact that a person is religious is sufficient evidence in your minds that there isn’t any critical thinking going on.
Of course, I find this sort of thinking to be incorrect (and more than a little self-congratulatory). But I’m not sure I want to expend the effort to convince you otherwise.
And incidentally, the last time I seriously explained why other people believe differently was last week – to my 8 year old daughter. It wasn’t comprehensive, but we talked it over.
Sorry Jonathan, I somehow missed your post. So my previous response might be a bit off.
I see faith slightly differently, though your definition is OK.
I see faith as a decision to commit to discovering something about the world. So at the beginning, you may not have all the data, but you commit yourself to exploring for it. All human action is – in a sense – faith-based.
Scientists wouldn’t search for a cure for cancer if they didn’t have faith that the disease ought to be eradicated. And they wouldn’t bother if they didn’t have faith that human effort is actually capable of doing it (think about it a moment – is there really any reason to believe we can eradicate cancer as opposed to not?).
Gandhi wouldn’t have done what he did if he didn’t have faith that human freedom was a better state than otherwise. All politics is – in the end – faith based.
We all act on ideals that we take for granted on faith, and proceed from that premise.
But the thing is – it’s only by fully diving into a paradigm or course of action, that you can really fully understand.
To understand something, you must love it first. And if you do not love it, you can never fully understand it.
This accusation is totally unwarranted. Please read this recent post of mine where I wrote about the importance of being willing to question your own assumptions. You can see that I linked to a number of my earlier posts where I talked about how I’d learned from my own errors or from recognizing assumptions I’d held without realizing I was holding them — on a variety of different subjects.
Admittedly Chanson, I wrote that without reading Jonathan’s final comment. The accusation would have been much softened if I had.
I do think that Daniel thinks this way, based on my past interaction with him. But Jonathan can have the benefit of the doubt. I wasn’t really thinking too much about you when I wrote it.
It is a serious question, though. A quick google search on “skepticism vs. atheism” turns up a lot of interesting debate, ranging from people claiming that you can’t really call yourself a skeptic if you’re religious to the other pole where people argue the importance of not conflating the two.
Skepticism is so broadly useful that it’s a shame that it has been narrowed in the popular conception to mean religious skepticism.
Seems to me that there is no reason that Religion can’t compel an individual be objective and use critical thinking. Most of the truly Religious people I know are always looking for clarity about how their actions meet up with their beliefs and vice verse. To me it looks a lot like critical thinking and striving for objectivity.
A lot of that striving is done without empirical evidence, as Seth pointed out, even scientific research is carried out with a certain amount of faith in an unknown but hoped for outcome.
Seth, you are mischaracterising my view. I do not think someone has to come to the same conclusions as I do to be a critical thinker.
If you’re a committed Mormon, you probably believe in statements like
God appeared to Joseph Smith.
The Book of Mormon is a factual account of people living in Ancient America
Jesus died to save the world from sin.
If you choose to believe those things, you are doing so in the absence of evidence. That doesn’t qualify under any definition of critical thinking that a reasonable person would use.
Some people here are stretching the definition of ‘faith’.
My uncle used to say, “You wouldn’t try to get out of bed in the morning unless you had ‘faith’ that the floor were solid.”
But that isn’t faith. I actually have a lot of evidence from past mornings that the floor is solid. Today might be different, but I have a very reasonable expectation that future instances will be similar to past ones. That’s just normal inference.
The scientists who work on cancer do not need to have faith that they’ll be successful. They might hope for a good outcome, they might predict their chances of success, but faith is not required.
Faith is the willingness to suspend reasoning in the service of a belief that lacks evidence. I don’t expect Seth will like that definition, but nothing new for this thread.
Daniel, that’s not a definition of faith that most religious people would accept, and rightfully so. It’s a strawman argument because no one believes anything in the “absence of evidence”. The evidence may be horrible and insufficient by most standards, but it is evidence.
You and I don’t believe that the Book of Mormon provides sufficient evidence to believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, but it is evidence of a kind. So saying that Mormons believe without evidence is a mischaracterization of the situation.
The definition of faith as “the willingness to suspend reasoning in the service of a belief that lacks evidence” doesn’t apply to Mormons or any other religious person that I’ve ever met. Of course it’s ridiculous to believe in something without any evidence at all. They don’t see their faith that way. They have the Bible, the belief of their parents, the feelings they label as the Holy Spirit, the existence of the universe, etc. They base their faith on evidence. So only a nonexistent strawman bases their faith on a complete lack of evidence.
Scientists who work on cancer need faith because nothing in science is ever proven 100% true or false. There’s always a probability that the conclusions they’ve drawn from the evidence are wrong. The p-value for an experiment is never exactly zero. That’s at the heart of the Bayesian revolution in the philosophy of science.
The difference between science and religion is that the evidence for most religious beliefs is generally so poor that having faith isn’t really justified, not that religion uses faith and science doesn’t. They both rely on faith.
Jonathan @42 — I was with you right up to that last paragraph: “they both rely on faith”.
Sorry, but saying “I think that theory X is more likely to be accurate than theory Y” does not require “faith”. At all.
Especially since so much of science is not about hoping for one outcome or another. There are a lot of results where the evidence is pointing strongly in one direction (so I’ll believe that conclusion is probably right), but more data is needed. And when more results come in, maybe it will point to a totally different conclusion, which is fine. I’m just curious to know what is the best current approximation to the answer.
Similarly, “Theres always a probability that the conclusions theyve drawn from the evidence are wrong. The p-value for an experiment is never exactly zero.” Sure, but that means that your level of confidence varies, depending on the type of evidence used to reach the result. And you can look at the reasoning and evidence in order to decide what level of confidence is appropriate for a given result. But that is not faith. Hope, faith, and confidence are related, but they’re not the same thing.
I’d say there may be an element of “faith” in your scenario about scientists picking a research direction. Not that they have “faith” in their results being right, but that they may have faith that a given approach or idea will yield fruitful results. Your career is doomed if you follow a dead-end idea, so choosing to devote a month or year or more of your research time to a particular theory or approach requires a certain combination of hope and intuition that might appropriately be labeled “faith”.
Scientists who work on cancer need faith because nothing in science is ever proven 100% true or false.
You’re not describing faith. You’re describing reasoning under uncertainty. They are different things. By defining faith this way, you’ve emptied the word of meaning.
We also seem to have different ways of talking about evidence. If something is ‘bad evidence’, it’s not evidence. If someone thinks that bad evidence is good evidence, then they are mistaken. Of course I recognise that Latter-day Saints think they have evidence. But they are mistaken. As always, if a Latter-day Saint thinks they have good evidence, I and many other people would like hear about it.
I think it would be interesting to do a top-level post where we link to some discussions where believers are discussing amongst themselves the question “What is faith”? (Maybe I’ll try to do that this week, unless one of you would like to write it.) I’m sure Seth can help us out some, but it would be nice to get a range of believer views on the subject. It’s kind of funny to have three atheists debating “what is faith?” amongst themselves. 😉
I agree with Jonathan that it’s not fair to say faith is “belief without evidence”. I think it’s more accurate to say that it’s belief based (at least in part) on explicitly subjective evidence such as spiritual witness or one’s own intuition about what seems or feels right. Daniel will probably object “That’s not evidence!” — but I guess we’ve just shifted the debate to the definition of “evidence”. 😉
That’s how these things go, I’m afraid.
I agree with Jonathan that its not fair to say faith is belief without evidence.
Why not? When you have evidence for something, do you need to have faith in it?
@47 — I explained @45 why not: because it involves accepting a different type of evidence that they feel is valid and trustworthy evidence.
That said, I’m willing to play devil’s advocate on this. I was just thinking of the recent video where some Muslims debated PZ Myers (and filmed it and posted the video). Right at the beginning, PZ Myers argues that the science that Muhammad wrote in the Koran was information that was known at the time, and that Muhammad could easily have had access to. And the Muslim guy immediately starts accusing PZ of believing that on faith! What does that say about that believer’s definition of faith? It looks like he’s saying his definition of faith is “believing whatever you want, regardless of whether you have evidence to back it up.” Seriously, watch the video and tell me what other definition that guy might be using.
Sorry, but saying I think that theory X is more likely to be accurate than theory Y does not require faith. At all.
It requires extremely little faith, but taking a step back from just the statement itself, we can see that making that statement requires the faith necessary to trust your senses, your experimental apparatus, and your ability to reason correctly. Without that faith, a person couldn’t take the leap to express that statement. Maybe scientists don’t think of it as “faith” per se, but that’s what it is.
Youre not describing faith. Youre describing reasoning under uncertainty. They are different things. By defining faith this way, youve emptied the word of meaning.
I’ve essentially defined it the same way as the Lectures on Faith, so it was religiously meaningful to at least the authors. What you’re expressing as emptying the word of all meaning seems to me to really mean that by pointing to the commonality between religion and science, I’m taking away the ability to draw a sharp distinction between the two. You seem to want faith to be what religion does and what science does not.
From what you’ve said, I think you’re trying to say that faith doesn’t involve any reasoning at all, a completely subjective, irrational process. I find that conception of faith problematic. First because human reasoning is never a purely rational exercise. Even at our most rational, unconscious biases affect how we think. No human process of decision making — science notwithstanding — is untainted by irrationality.
Second, for virtually all religious believers, faith is the irrational last step at the end of a chain of reasoning. Religious believers don’t pick their beliefs by flipping a coin. If asked, they will express reasons that they have faith. “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” (1 Pet. 3:15) We may disagree with their reasoning, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.
Of course, the reasons religious believers express may not be the real reasons, but that’s fair to say of anyone who believes anything. For example, if asked why I believe in the Big Bang, I might say that it’s because there is scientific evidence that supports that theory, but the real reason I believe it is that I’ve heard scientists who have worked in the field say that there is evidence and I trust them to have interpreted the data correctly.
Regarding evidence, all evidence is bad evidence if your threshold is high enough. Evidence is evidence and it can reasonably justify certain confidence levels, but it will never justify 100% confidence. Lacking the ability to have complete confidence in our reasoning, there isn’t a nonarbitrary dividing line that we we can draw to class evidence into the two groups, good and bad. Maybe you think 95% confidence is good enough. Maybe I think 51% is good enough. Both are arbitrary.
The dividing line being arbitrary, I can set my threshold arbitrarily high and state that the evidence that you base your beliefs on is bad evidence and therefore — according to what you’ve said — not really evidence at all.
I disagree. I think you are emptying the word of meaning by saying that faith is no more than the ordinary daily assumptions we make in order to function.
Anyway, I just spent some time searching for definitions of faith on the Internet, and — if I have faith that google can direct me to useful information (I’ll grant that as faith) — I’d say the definitions by believers are so all-over-the-map that perhaps the word doesn’t have a useful definition.