Indoctrination

Indoctrination- it's imbuing a mind with a certain doctrine or ideology, usually of a bias nature and into a young, or vulnerable mind. Indoctrination is the typical tool of the religious for injecting their beliefs into their children. Most religious people don't have trouble admitting that their beliefs are taken in faith, and substantiated only by personal experience, if that. Many are honest enough to admit that their personal experience is not enough for others to believe in their god without experiencing something themselves. Plenty of those same theists, however, take no issue with teaching what they believe through faith to their children as fact. As a child none of the religious adults who informed me of the alleged sacrifice of Jesus, the flood survived by Noah, or the commandments carried by Moses, ever once mentioned thousands of denominations of another dozen mainstream religions that contradict everything they were telling me. Nor did they even hint that their lessons were anything shy of established facts, leaving no inch of room for the possibility of doubt. These are the same people who preach that we should "teach the controversy" in public schools.



I remain ever curious as to the motivation of religious people to inject their children with religious knowledge at such a young age. I understand the desire to take advantage of the absorbent young mind, but surely that window of time during which children's minds are so open to learning could be more productively filled with academic, social, or secular moral values. Is there no faith that the very God the parents wish to inform their children of would not extend the absorbency of their minds at least to age of 12 or 13 to accept knowledge of him? It seems to me that a parent who bolsters both religious confidence and intellectually honesty would have no problem waiting for a child's mind to develop well enough to evaluate options and make data-driven decisions. Why not wait until children grow to an early teenage stage to inform them of all the mainstream religions in great detail. Why not show them all the religions at an age they could process the information, and justify why their religion of choice is the true one? Then they could explain what their religion offers that those other religions don't in the way of proof for its claims. It seems to me like the ultimate test of faith to stack one's religion against the others on equal footing and allow your God to shine the truth through the appropriate one, if any in the child's mind.

Might it be that a freshman in high school would be less likely to swallow stories about talking animals, talking plants, and human resurrection as pure truth? Might a young teenager have more critical questions than a toddler when being told about a global flood with every species crammed on a boat, or a man surviving inside of a fish for three days? Might the adolescent mind be immediately inclined to place those stories under the fictional category they belong in? I consider the refusal to present the concept of their religion on an equal playing field at a more mature age to be a lack of confidence in the credibility of their faith on behalf of religious parents.

Some will argue that it's best to teach their religion at a young age for moral lessons, but I can see no more reason for a child to learn what you consider the source of morality until they are old enough to understand it. The emphasis should be on what the moral lesson is, not where it comes from. Teaching them to not steal or do physical harm to one another at a young age begs no God like motivation to make sense. Parents might also argue a need for their children to be religious at a young age so they will be saved in case they might die at a young age, which is the typical justification for baptism- a ritual of religious commitment typically made at age before the child can even understand words, let alone theology. These motivations, however, suggest that a God who requires them would condemn a child to hell just because he allowed that very child to die before it was old enough to understand the religion that he wanted it to commit to worship through. I do understand the comfort theists garner by worshiping a god, but to worship one so petty, cruel, hypocritical, and prone to child abuse would be anything but comfortable to me.