Kepler
Si certus es dubita
Re: Religion Thread: We Could Say a Prayer
Training your kids to believe the stuff you believe is fairly unavoidable. Especially when it comes to religion parents not only believe they have a right to do it, they believe they have a duty to do it because of {MAN IN SKY SILLINESS}. Even if we gave every parent a PhD education in history, psychology, and comparative religion, most of them would still pass on their superstitions and prejudices in the same way they pass on their language.
But, again. I don't worry that much about it. Take bigotry as the classic example. Each generation begins by passing down their bigotries. The dumb kids retain them and the smart kids reject them assuming there is some counter-narrative available to them, typically because of personal experience. So, the wave of tolerance proceeds slowly. Most people are over being anti-Irish or anti-Italian. Things get dicier with racism and misogyny, even worse with homophobia, even worse with transphobia. But eventually these bigotries will die out. The Bible is always hijacked by dummies to protect their bigotries, and there is always enough stupid scripture available to back them, so in general conservative religion is the last bulwark of bigotry while progressive religion is often a leading edge in its slaying.
Eventually the bigots simply die without passing their idiocy on. That's how we got rid of widespread religious bigotry and it's how we got rid of racism in the educated classes, and it's how we'll get rid of misogyny and homophobia and transphobia eventually. The carriers are usually incapable of adaptation but they run out of clock time. Humanity improves itself via death.
So your parents passed their religion to you because they thought it was Essential To Your Immortal Soul or some other fairy tale, but it didn't irreparably harm you. There you stand, a living rebuttal to the idiocy of conservative religion. You'll call your religion a natural outgrowth of theirs and be on your way, and they can't argue with you. At least, not for long. No doubt they did exactly the same thing with respect to their parents, and so on back to the first sun god.
It all works out on a long enough timeline. Religion itself will never die because it serves a useful purpose for many people. But religion is constantly changing (Fundies are morons for not realizing this) because it is just another language: it's an arbitrary human invented tool to serve a purpose, and since its landscape is always changing it is always changing. Christianity in 500 years will be uniformally tolerant of all sexuality for the same reason that religion now no longer practices human sacrifice. The atavisms no longer serve any useful human purpose and die off.
Jesus himself will be an atavism someday, like Akhenaten or Zoroaster, once humanity progresses beyond his words. But judging from the gap between the Gospels and how the people who invoke him actually act, that won't be for a long, long time yet.
Training your kids to believe the stuff you believe is fairly unavoidable. Especially when it comes to religion parents not only believe they have a right to do it, they believe they have a duty to do it because of {MAN IN SKY SILLINESS}. Even if we gave every parent a PhD education in history, psychology, and comparative religion, most of them would still pass on their superstitions and prejudices in the same way they pass on their language.
But, again. I don't worry that much about it. Take bigotry as the classic example. Each generation begins by passing down their bigotries. The dumb kids retain them and the smart kids reject them assuming there is some counter-narrative available to them, typically because of personal experience. So, the wave of tolerance proceeds slowly. Most people are over being anti-Irish or anti-Italian. Things get dicier with racism and misogyny, even worse with homophobia, even worse with transphobia. But eventually these bigotries will die out. The Bible is always hijacked by dummies to protect their bigotries, and there is always enough stupid scripture available to back them, so in general conservative religion is the last bulwark of bigotry while progressive religion is often a leading edge in its slaying.
Eventually the bigots simply die without passing their idiocy on. That's how we got rid of widespread religious bigotry and it's how we got rid of racism in the educated classes, and it's how we'll get rid of misogyny and homophobia and transphobia eventually. The carriers are usually incapable of adaptation but they run out of clock time. Humanity improves itself via death.
So your parents passed their religion to you because they thought it was Essential To Your Immortal Soul or some other fairy tale, but it didn't irreparably harm you. There you stand, a living rebuttal to the idiocy of conservative religion. You'll call your religion a natural outgrowth of theirs and be on your way, and they can't argue with you. At least, not for long. No doubt they did exactly the same thing with respect to their parents, and so on back to the first sun god.
It all works out on a long enough timeline. Religion itself will never die because it serves a useful purpose for many people. But religion is constantly changing (Fundies are morons for not realizing this) because it is just another language: it's an arbitrary human invented tool to serve a purpose, and since its landscape is always changing it is always changing. Christianity in 500 years will be uniformally tolerant of all sexuality for the same reason that religion now no longer practices human sacrifice. The atavisms no longer serve any useful human purpose and die off.
Jesus himself will be an atavism someday, like Akhenaten or Zoroaster, once humanity progresses beyond his words. But judging from the gap between the Gospels and how the people who invoke him actually act, that won't be for a long, long time yet.
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