[Al_U_Card]

Kids are sponges. It is up to us to ensure that what they sop up does neither overfill their capacity nor leave them dried up on the shelf. As they grow, so does their sponge aspect, so .... teach your children .... you are their live-in examples and they will surely follow for the sponge contains only what it absorbs.

[EricK]

barmar, on Dec 30 2007, 03:42 AM, said:

EricK, on Dec 29 2007, 05:36 PM, said:

There's nothing wrong with teaching children that there are people who have these views, and these are the reasons they have these views, and all the scientific data suggests that they are wrong.

Isn't that the "brainwashing" that was suggested should be avoided.

Therre's a difference between religion or politics - where despite what people may say their views are not primarily determined by the evidence, and science where the consensus is determined by the evidence.

Teaching kids just one religious or one political view as if it were the correct one might be called "brainwashing", but teaching them the current scientific consensus (and why it is the consensus) can hardly be considered the same thing. If you use the same word for both then the language becomes next to useless.

[beatrix45]

macaw, on Dec 28 2007, 01:14 PM, said:

The only reason to have children is to brain wash them.  Can't imagine why you'd want to have them otherwise

Maintenance of racial purity is too important to be left to outsiders.

[kenberg]

Al_U_Card, on Dec 29 2007, 11:09 PM, said:

Kids are sponges. It is up to us to ensure that what they sop up does neither overfill their capacity nor leave them dried up on the shelf. As they grow, so does their sponge aspect, so .... teach your children .... you are their live-in examples and they will surely follow for the sponge contains only what it absorbs.

I think that this seriously underestimates the capacity of young people.

I see the activities of adolescence as, if the kids survive, a verification process. Adults tell young people all sorts of stuff. Some of it they believe themselves, other parts they don't really believe but they feel they are supposed to say it, and during adolescence kids experiment around a bit to see what's what.

Recently I read "The Book Thief". I recommend it. The central character is a young girl growing up in Nazi Germany. A line that struck me: "An eleven year old girl is many things but she is not stupid." Exactly.

[kenrexford]

I find this humorous, EricK.

Don't brainwash your children to your own views.

To accomplish that, don't take them to listen to people who will lie to them and not admit that their views are wrong.

Instead, teach them about how the other group is wrong.

Use your own viewpoints as to what is true because your group has said that their truth is THE truth, as a concensus opinion of your group.

Cite your method of analysis as proof that your world view is internally consistent.

Really amazing.

I happen to agree with your conclusions, for the most part, as to what is TRUTH, but I find your analysis of "brainwashing or not brainwashing" humorous.

[pclayton]

barmar, on Dec 28 2007, 02:15 PM, said:

pclayton, on Dec 28 2007, 04:46 PM, said:

Teach by example. They'll figure out the rest on their own.

But if your "example" is that you go to Mass every Sunday or Synagogue every Saturday, and you drag them along, doesn't that influence them? They're naturally going to be more comfortable with the church they have more experience with. And the sermons they've listened to are the belief system they'll probably adopt.

I'm not a religious person, but I was raised Jewish. So I have even less belief that Jesus was the Son of God than that there's a God at all. If forced to choose between Israel and Palestine, I'm biased towards Israel due to the cultural connection. When I went to Hebrew School, they taught us that Israel won the Six Day War fair and square, and they have a right to the territories they annexed (Sinai, Gaza, and the West Bank), and being the gullible child I was I bought into this.

It's hard to shake beliefs like this that are embedded when one is young. It probably helped that my father was agnostic, despite having been raised in a pretty religious home. Although I found religious stories and practices fascinating, I was always more interested in science, and rationalism has allowed me to overcome the religious brainwashing. But that doesn't mean that I have to reject my heritage -- it's still the case that my "people" have been persecuted in many eras, and we mustn't forget things like the Holocaust.

Its quite simple really. We go to church on Sundays (try to anyway, right now Kimi is sleeping and I probably won't rouse her for about another 3 hours) and expect that the children will go with us. For some reason, they don't give us one ounce of grief about attending. We don't 'drag' them anywhere. When I was a teenager, I hated to going to Mass. I thought it was a waste of time and robbed me of sleep that I needed after tipping cows on Saturday nights in Northern Montana.

I fully expect them to make their own choice. As a matter of fact, this is a frequent topic. If they choose to belong to another faith, or become Atheist, I really don't care. Frankly I'd be disappointed if they didn't make a conscious choice for themselves.

You make two statements that reaffirm that I'm doing the right thing:

Quote

And the sermons they've listened to are the belief system they'll probably adopt.

Quote

I'm not a religious person, but I was raised Jewish.

We were all kids once. Somehow we can escape the grip of our parents influence and think for ourselves.

[sceptic]

certain people bring up thier children to believe what they want them to believe (despite various outside influcences)

Racists will constantly jibe at people (perhaps in private, perhaps in public) in what we may see as an unacceptable manner, but this rubs off (this behavior rubs off on the kids), may be they have to conform to feel that they fit in with the family
(I consider this a form of brainwashing)

I also consider that this is the case with Religion

[kenberg]

I imagine this, like many things, could go on forever. Some parents probably cannot imagine much worse happening than that there kids could turn away from the church. You apparently would regard it as a very bad thing if your kids grew up religious. My concerns have always followed different lines. Some years back, when my older daughter was a young adult, a woman came up to me in a shopping mall and introduced herself as being a friend of my older daughter's some years back.

Oh, yes, I remember you, what are you doing now?
I'm a go-go dancer. This is my friend Jim. He's a male stripper. [I'm not making this up. His handshake was clammy, by the way.]

There are worse things than how my daughters come to see religion. I'm fine with one of them being religious and the other not. I'm glad they keep their clothes on in public.

My best wishes to all of you with young children. May you have good luck or God's blessing, whichever way you think of it. Not everything is within our control.

[sceptic]

Quote

You apparently would regard it as a very bad thing if your kids grew up religious

Not sure how you come to that assumption

[jdonn]

Quote

You apparently would regard it as a very bad thing if your kids grew up religious

It would arguably be a bad thing if they grew up religious because one thing is all they knew and they were never exposed to any other choices. It would not (necessarily?) be a bad thing if they grew up religious because they made an informed decision.

[HeavyDluxe]

Just a quick comment here... I get frustrated at these conversations because we fail to see the indoctrination that lies on *both* sides.

For example, I choose to indoctrinate my kids into a rigorously religious mindset/worldview. I teach them, both in lesson and modeling, a particular way of viewing the world and processing problems. They are, at least as much as we can enforce, made to approach the world through a particular set of presuppositions.

However, if I were a non-religious, free-thinking type I'd be no less ideological. Think about it, I still am indoctrinating my kids into a particular worldview. The presuppositions are obviously vastly different, but the bottom line is the same: "We Who-ze-faces view/approach the world this way."

So, it's worth noting that the A/B distinction here is a bit of a straw man.

Sincerely,
The resident fundie, homeschool brainwasher and family

[blackshoe]

beatrix45, on Dec 30 2007, 07:46 AM, said:

Maintenance of racial purity is too important to be left to outsiders.

Oh, certainly. No one should teach their children, or allow them to be taught, to be other than human.

[kenberg]

sceptic, on Dec 30 2007, 12:22 PM, said:

Quote

You apparently would regard it as a very bad thing if your kids grew up religious

Not sure how you come to that assumption

Sorry if I am jumping to conclusions but the fact that you keep referring to religion as all that crap and simultaneously discussing religion and racism was, I thought, a clue. But then I am always misguessing queens also.

[Al_U_Card]

Completely
Realistic
And
Practical
?

[barmar]

EricK, on Dec 30 2007, 05:26 AM, said:

Teaching kids just one religious or one political view as if it were the correct one might be called "brainwashing", but teaching them the current scientific consensus (and why it is the consensus) can hardly be considered the same thing. If you use the same word for both then the language becomes next to useless.

The point I've been trying to make is that the line is not so black and white. If religion is correct, then teaching kids scientific theories that disagree with the religious viewpoints would be "brainwashing". The difference between teaching and brainwashing is all in your point of view about the particular subject being taught.

To a KKK member, all those bleeding-heart liberals in the ACLU are just a bunch of fools, the Black Panthers were a terrorist group, and it was clearly their duty to pass on this "truth" to their children (and anyone else they could get to listen to them). The concensus isn't always right -- there was a time when the concensus among highly educated people was that the Earth was the center of the universe.

[EricK]

kenrexford, on Dec 30 2007, 02:52 PM, said:

I find this humorous, EricK.

Don't brainwash your children to your own views.

To accomplish that, don't take them to listen to people who will lie to them and not admit that their views are wrong.

Instead, teach them about how the other group is wrong.

Use your own viewpoints as to what is true because your group has said that their truth is THE truth, as a concensus opinion of your group.

Cite your method of analysis as proof that your world view is internally consistent.

Really amazing.

I happen to agree with your conclusions, for the most part, as to what is TRUTH, but I find your analysis of "brainwashing or not brainwashing" humorous.

I don't think you are quite accurately reflecting my opinion.

I don't think an opinion is true because it is the consensus opinion; I think it is true based on the method that was used to arrive at the opinion. It just so happens, that for scientific ideas, that method will be sufficient to convince the majority and so will coincide with the consensus.

What is so annoying with most religious and political views is that the people who espouse them are quite content to use the scientific method when it comes to most other things, but as soon as that method leads to something which disagrees with their pet theories, they suddenly discard it. It is this incosistency which is evidence that they have, in some sense, been brainwashed.

[EricK]

barmar, on Dec 31 2007, 03:04 PM, said:

EricK, on Dec 30 2007, 05:26 AM, said:

Teaching kids just one religious or one political view as if it were the correct one might be called "brainwashing", but teaching them the current scientific consensus (and why it is the consensus) can hardly be considered the same thing. If you use the same word for both then the language becomes next to useless.

The point I've been trying to make is that the line is not so black and white. If religion is correct, then teaching kids scientific theories that disagree with the religious viewpoints would be "brainwashing". The difference between teaching and brainwashing is all in your point of view about the particular subject being taught.

To a KKK member, all those bleeding-heart liberals in the ACLU are just a bunch of fools, the Black Panthers were a terrorist group, and it was clearly their duty to pass on this "truth" to their children (and anyone else they could get to listen to them). The concensus isn't always right -- there was a time when the concensus among highly educated people was that the Earth was the center of the universe.

It's not a question of whether the something is true or not; it's more a question of how you arrived at that opinion, and what methods you use to perusade someone that they should hold those views.

You can brainwash someone into believing something that happens to be true, and conversely, you can persuade something of something which happens to be false without brainwashing them (if what evidence there is isn't quite conclusive).

[kenrexford]

Merely assuming that the world is governed by logic is an assumption that is not provable.

Sure, you can establish consistency of observations within the bubble, to a degree. However, all that does is to establish that your method of viewing the interior of the bubble is reliable, not that it is truth.

I know this is weird, but consider the concept behind "The Matrix." A computer-generated reality is internally consistent, because of programming rules, but not "real" in a sense. A person can pop in and out of the program and affect that artificial world in a way that is played out with internal consistency but by way of an external trigger.

Whatever caused the "Big Bang" is unknown, but it may well be an "external trigger." If a Big Bang is possible, resulting in a flow of what we consider "reality," why is implausible for a "lesser bang" to affect our reality?

Take a situation that might be described as a "miracle" by a believer, such as the parting of the red sea by the hand of God. The water sloshes around at the end. However, no explanation for its parting is possible. Nor is anything internally inconsistent a result, at least that we can measure. The water dries up. We assume, after the fact, that the conditions a posteriori were arrived at by conditions a priori, but we know so little about the conditions a priori that we cannot prove that assumption, at least with the knowledge that we have.

Now, if someone really did have a peek outside the bubble, or a message sent to them from outside the bubble, then how could we prove or disprove their claims while inside the bubble? We do not know the rules outside of the bubble, nor can we test anything outside of the bubble.

Suppose you wanted to reverse this thing. Suppose that you could download an artificial intelligence into an otherwise-functioning human with all intelligence wiped clean from the brain of the human, or perhaps never present (yet) in the human (an embryo, perhaps). Might you create an artificial world for that AI to develop in, with multiple AI's interacting? That artificial testing world might allow you to pick one or more AI's that suited you as prospective children. When you find one, after running the simulation, you download that AI into the brain of the developing embryo and have your child of choice. You of course create a fake myth within the system, to avoid a child freaking out when he is born into this new body in a new existence.

If we could, in theory, do this, then why not the other way?

[kenberg]

This is somewhat piggybacking on what KenR just said how assuming that the world is run logically is an assumption.

Let's take a specific example, the Virgin Birth.

You hardly need advanced scientific training to realize that virgins don't generally give birth. It's fundamental to many Christian belief structures that it happened. It was a miracle, or it was a Divine Intervention, or something on that order, but it happened. Since I don't, myself, believe that it did happen I may be misstating their view but I think I have it about right. One of my college professors (John Berryman) remarked: I don't believe in miracles but I have more respect for those who do than for those who are absolutely certain that they cannot happen.

I think that properly approaching this would, or at least could, defuse a lot of tension. No one, as far as I know, suggests that in medical school students be taught that the reproductive theory they are learning is only a theory and there should be equal time allotted for the theory of pregnancy by divine intervention. The doc may or may not believe in the Virgin Birth, that's his business, but he teaches the standard theory. So it can be with evolution. A person may believe that God created man. Perhaps by setting the evolution in motion, perhaps in other ways, but at any rate, God was somehow behind it all. This need not lead to demands that some spurious theory with, at best, little scientific merit be given prominent place in a biology curriculum.

In short: A person may believe in the Virgin Birth and in God and he need not give up his career in science. He should not try to represent his religious beliefs as scientific fact. Then we can all get along.

[blackshoe]

re: Virgin Birth. How long had Mary and Joseph been married at the time Jesus was born? How long was she pregnant? And how in the Hell did Mary convince Joseph to set aside his marital "right" to have sex with her?

I don't believe it either.