Antiseptic, Grim,

Yes, I might have read into the statement

“religion should be kept away from small children (and the parents get a babysitter for when they go to church if they have to), and if parents want to teach or introduce their children to it, then they should wait until their children are old enough to think critically for themselves”

more than what AJ Philips actually intended to say. Namely, I was under the impression he meant it should be enforced by law and non-compliance punished.

If it was meant only as an advice that e.g. a Christian parent can ignore, then, of course, it does not result in a totalitarian infringement of democracy. In it every parent has the right to educate his/her child into a world-view of his/her choice (provided it does not lead to breaking the law), including those who wish to teach their children (or have them taught) to build their world-view along the lines you both described in so many words.

It would have to be seen whether this attitude will make them grow up more tolerant of other people’s life styles and world-views.

I have admitted many times in these forums that I do not believe in a personal God who demonstrates such blatant favouritism. Like the 'two men of religion' depicted in the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Christian God appears to spend much of it's time crossing to the other side of the road.
Having said that, I would never suggest that such a God does not, or could not exist, just because I don't believe in it.
I agree that it does -to some extent- perpetuate the delusion. On the other hand, AJ Philips claims to come from a 'fundamentalist' background, and I was forced to attend Sunday School up to the age of fourteen -when I was large enough to physically rebel.
We both appear to have managed to overcome our indoctrination, at least to some degree.
As a parent and husband, I regard my first (arguably, only) priority to be the protection and nurture of my family. To attempt to deny that most basic instinct to Christian parents, deluded or not, is arrogance of the first degree.

George,

Yes, you did read too much into what I said. I was only stating my opinion of how it should be done.

Better than instituting laws and creating more of a police state, would be to try and reach these people with reason. Granted though, that would take a few generations at least.

<<Let me repeat, we are not talking about university level maths but about primary and secondary schools.>>

Okay, but I still think religion should be kept well away from children entirely until they’ve developed some critical thinking skills.

<<There are many other things that a fanatic cannot base his action on, in distinction to distorted patriotism, distorted religion, ideology, lust for power, hallucinations, etc.>>

I’m not sure what your point is in stating that there are many other things that fanatics cannot base their actions on. That, if anything, strengthens my point.

Distorted patriotism, ideologies, hallucinations and such, are dangerous, but the danger they present is dwarfed by the havoc that has been wreaked by religion over the millennia, and the promise of eternal life and divine reasoning for evil actions ensures that this will always be the case.

I agree that ethics are “moral principles that govern a person's or group's behaviour”, so yes; even the Nazi’s had their own ethics. I can only go back to my point about the promise of eternal life and divine reasoning.

An important distinction between religion and ethics though, is that religion has definitive truth claims that can help to harden the belief of a fanatic.

But I’d prefer not to go down this road any further as I respect that you grew-up in a Stalinist country and don’t wish demean the unpleasantness you experienced.

" ... Our State regularly locks people up for doing so. ... "

My memory from some legal studies is that a delusional religious belief alone is not sufficient grounds to be incarcerated pursuant to mental health laws in this country. The pre-requisites for such action needs be substantiated by additional facts.

Thus, the reality of the present situation, at least in terms of the legal system, is that not all so-called delusional beliefs are considered to be dangerous.

To put it another way, a person may be a reasonable and rational, law abiding member of the community but also hold a belief, designated as such, in some particular God concept or so called Spiritual belief.

An appropriate search of the publicly available databases of legal judgments would likely produce specific definitions of relevant terms.

Hallucinations also are not necessarily dangerous, and at least so far as I have read tend to be an "echo" of sorts of the consciousness of the individual. So, if you were to say make a cursory examination of some famous people who are alleged to have experienced "divine revelation" by way of say visions, if their so called revelations are little more than a pictorial manifestation of their pre-existing belief system then there really ought be no surprises there.

To the contrary, it is of course most often the case that people who hallucinate are suffering from some sort of pathology, which may indeed include a fundamentally altered state of cognitive interpretation, say a state conducive to the formation of delusional beliefs where in say, again for example, the mind extrapolates meaning from the co-incidence of internal thought and external phenomena of nature.

" ... and the cock crows as he speaks in denial of his Lord ... "
(I can actually conceive that the historical JC,if he indeed existed, may have been a very forwarding looking and interesting character, but the amount of b.s. the church have coated him in for the purpose of enthralling the masses beggars belief)

...cont:

Consequently should a person thus afflicted also hallucinate, that is they experience an emanation of consciousness which "appears" to be the product of their external senses but is in reality a product of their own internal mind processes, it is likely that their hallucinations will also be those of the delusional variety, thus re-enforcing the compulsion to behave in an aberrant manner.

e.g. "but God said so" or "the Devil told me to do it," etc etc.

The legal system recognizes the distinction in these cases in theory and has different remedies for criminal behavior based on the individuals state of mind when they breached the law.

Having said that though, our prisons are alleged to be full of individuals with inadequately treated mental and intellectual problems, not to mention those who had not the benefit of
"Law and Ethics" studies.

;-)

Grim,
>>I was forced to attend Sunday School up to the age of fourteen -when I was large enough to physically rebel<<
I did not grow up in Australia, so I can be just sorry to hear that it used to be that bad. I grew up in a Communist country, where the pressure to attend all sorts of “scientific” (meaning anti-theist) “schoolings” - in addition to normal school - was not dependent on our physical size. Nobody “forced us” physically. Rebellion would be punished e.g. by parents being transferred to menial and less paid jobs (of course, there was no formal unemployment), seldom even jailed. At that price it never occurred to me to “rebel” since I always saw my father as intellectually superior to the teacher or “schooler”, who could easily neutralise or correct the anti-theist “indoctrination” - if that is what one wants to call it - I received at school. Unfortunately, not all children were that lucky.

For a while I thought that all who call themselves atheists were as narrow-minded and short-sighted as these “schoolers”, however I soon learned not to generalise just because of bad personal experience. Like those who grow up hating maths just because they had a an incompetent teacher at school who “indoctrinated” them into something they were unable to understand. After all, also children in Nazi Germany or Communist China were indoctrinated, which does not mean that any education towards love of your country of birth should be called indoctrination.