So they admit to targeting children, admit that those children are easily manipulated, but deny using high pressure tactics on children. How is that not scummy? Like a used car dealer denying they use high pressure tactics. LOL
I look it at more as "there's a sucker born every minute and it just makes our job easier." Very scummy. Kids should be raised with an education involving logical reasoning. Hopefully they will realize on their own that there isn't much difference between a fairy tale superhero and an omnipotent father figure..but hey, I'll love my children just the same if they enjoy going to church. No harm, no foul. Free choice is the beauty of America. Indoctrination is the enemy
So, you think he's just lying about using high-pressure tactics? I assume that's the thrust of the car salesman comparison. He might be lying, I don't know these people, but there's a difference between objecting because you think he's lying and objecting because you think even soft-sell tactics are unacceptable. I don't think anyone is going to convert on a single exposure to the gospel. If they win any converts on the playground it's because they're reinforcing somethign the kids are already hearing from friends or parents or whatever. More likely, they leave one impression so that subsequent exposures to Christianity can be more robust and get a conversion later. I guess you think it's scummy, but I don't think it is or that it's anything unusual. Kids are being indoctrinated all the time with a host of things. They're getting messages of atheism, secular humanism, flighty eastern mysticism, and a hundred shades of christianity all the time from school, from friends, from TV, etc. Having someone tell you Christ died for your sins on the playground is akin to the teacher telling you the Earth is 4 billion years old, or your friend ruminating on what kind of animal you must have been in your prior life. It's open season on kids for everybody. I see this sort of objection to parents as the atheist corrollary to christian parents who homeschool their kids to shield them from the godless teachings of the public schools. I don't agree with either approach -- I think kids should swim in the cultural stew they live in.
Whether they use high pressure tactics or not is irrelevant. Children are easily manipulated, period. Anything aimed at indoctrinating children is scummy. And please don't equate Christ dying for someone's sins as fact. The age of the earth is backed up by facts. There is not one iota of evidence that Christ was the son of god. There is no valid correlation between the two.
Fine. Public schools are scummy. The Pledge of Allegiance is scummy. School House Rock is scummy. Recycling and water conservation campaigns are scummy. Captain Planet is scummy.
Public schools are supposed to teach critical thinking, which is the opposite of indoctrinating. Recycling and water conservation? More false equivalencies...
Do you think it would hurt a political candidates chances if he let everyone know he was an atheist in the same manner today's candidates let everyone know they're Christian? It's not persecution, sure, but you can't possibly believe that both groups are treated equally by the majority of the populace.
This is the argument. Too bad when you try to tell religious people to allow kids to choose they just scream they are being persecuted and say family values are being undermined or some stupid ****.
You know, my mother is a devoutly religious Christian. Believes it and adheres to it unequivocally. I've come to understand why, over the years. She barely qualifies as literate, and for the balance of her life was very poor. Most of those things were because of the America she was born in and lived through...one of racially institutionalized second-class citizenship. In many ways, her "Christianity" was the sole arbiter of her humanity, as it was for many people then. But I admit that I haven't met five people in my somewhat-well-traveled life that I would consider "smarter" or "brighter" than her. Intelligence, for me, is oftentimes as much about depth of perspective as it is breadth of vision, and that tenet I attribute almost exclusively to her. I’ve often wondered what her spiritual perspective might have been like had she been able to be better educated… My mother made a mother's attempt to shape and mold me after her own perspectives on "right" and "wrong", fantasy and reality, truth and fiction. But she was never pretentious, overbearing, contentious or fearful. She seemed to believe enough in her faith to allow it to stand on its own merits with anyone else, and ply its trades with obscene dedication in her own life, out of the limelight and absent the “reward” sometimes such commitment tends to desire. I've never considered myself an especially bright person (because of mountains of documented evidence), but my mother always held that bright consciousness I displayed very early on in the highest regard. She would often say that "...God ain't gave you all that good sense, boy, and ain't meant for you to use none of it..."... Double-negatives were my mom’s favorites… My mother never at all seemed threatened by my inquisitive nature...never saw my ability to think and to learn as an impediment to spiritual growth...never thought that somehow, the best way to interact with and understand the world was to wall off sections of it that you didn't like or understand. In point of fact, she found reason more often than not (not a blindness or aversion to tangible, sensate reality) the bedrock of her faith...and in many ways found my "intelligence" the confirmation of that. My mother thrilled at my ability to excel in school. She was actually never impressed at all with any sports I participated in in school…but she would spend long nights sitting up with me while I admittedly struggled with trigonometry, or wrote book-length answers to fairly simple English homework questions (sort of like what I’m doing now…we’re none of us ever very far away from our roots)…she understood next to nothing of what I was studying, but she was fascinated by it…all she could do (and did with a fervor and glee you might see from a small child) was sharpen pencils for me, or bring me glasses of juice…or just tell me to get some sleep… She saw the type of formal education I was getting…even the “waste” of a liberal one of the public school variety…as both vindication and liberation. It proved to her that “God” really was not a respecter of persons…brains weren’t arbitrary or hereditary, no matter what anybody thought or preached or codified…and that education was the way to change the way you saw the world, and the way you lived in the world. My mother is one of the few people I ever saw who RELISHED an extended conversation with the Jehovah’s Witnesses that frequently visited our housing project. Here was a woman who barely read and wrote at a third-grade level (something, strangely, I never found shameful or distasteful), holding her own and often fielding salient arguments with people who had to have been at least college-educated, judging from their bearings. And what’s even stranger was how intently I watched and listed to my mother (from a safe distance, of course…Mom believed in children being children and not in the middle of adult conversations, and had no problem with a forceful reminder) during these exchanges. Both sides of those “discussions” were extant…so there was never really a way to win (just like there isn’t now, no matter what kind of warpaint a religious person wears), but they crystallized for me the value of a keen enough mind to form an opinion that the soul could harmoniously reconcile in its time in this life. I’ve called myself on several occasions an “apostate” Christian…but that’s probably too “liberal” (how apropos) a classification. I’ve read and learned a lot of things from correlated religious and secular sources that has me convinced that at least the “Christianity” that the world has known for the past 2,000 years, is not what it began as in ancient Palestine, and may be altogether fabricated along most (if not all) of its core tenets. It is, at the very least, more of a Greco-Roman amalgamation of the belief systems of the time period than its Semitic roots ever suggested. And amazingly, none of that matters to me. My “faith” has never been threatened by truth or “fact”, as it were. And I learned that from an ignorant, uneducated, religiously superstitious Black woman who by every account should have sheltered and sequestered me behind the one place that even attempted to acknowledge her as a living, thinking, feeling human being. But Mom, thankfully never has been that shallow. She also would say, often: “ …God gave you to me, boy…I can’t do nothin’ but give you back to Him…” Children don’t listen or hear anywhere nearly as effectively as they imitate and mimic. It’s never what you tell a child that matters the most…it’s what you show them. It can’t be that hard…to hold two opposing viewpoints in your mind and not feel threatened or sullied by either one…can it?
^Thanks for your account, mdrowe. I try not to drown in what-ifs as what adversities a person goes through strengthens the character you see in them. I totally agree that it's what the child sees rather than what they're told that impacts them the most. Embracing and accepting paradox is something either extreme factions should practice because without it, they're merely two sides of the same coin shouting ostensibly opposing viewpoints while sharing the same cultural mentality of what truth represents and how it should be respected or enforced. Different symptoms, same root cause.
I think your perspective is kind of messed up equating a public school education with some hacks going around pushing their religious beliefs. Additionally, religion is a very personal thing much in the way you wouldn't want adults accosting your kids on the playground teaching them about sex. As a parent I assume there are certain things you'd want to teach your children over some stranger with an agenda acting contrary to your family's best interests. They target children precisely because they lack the maturity and critical thinking skills to process what they're being told. It's disgusting. Telling a child there is an all powerful being that will send them to hell unless they worship him is incredibly intimidating to a child, certainly far more so than teaching 2*3=6. I'm shocked you'd even compare the two.
I appreciate the sentiment, Invisible Fan. My mother hardly sought or seeks pity or empathy. She never once faulted anyone or anything for her station in life. I hope that I didn't pass on the notion that I pity her. Whatever I know about decency and courage and honor, I learned from her. I'm much more curious than I should be about a lot of things. By-product of being a "thinker", I'm told. Too much of anything can be bad for you.
