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The history books are full of religions' heinous crimes against humanity. Maybe there is some religion out there that is purely benevolent but I have never heard of it in the sea of counterexamples.
If you are currently trapped in a religion, I am here to tell you that you can escape. Once you do, a lot becomes much more clear.
It is also important to remember that religions are human organizational structures, but their basis of authority is "because I said so." We see this structure arise over and over until it is eventually removed for something more based in reality.
I think this kinda gets closer to my point. Humans create these kinds of social organizational structures and have made various kinds throughout history. Both religious and non-religious structures get used in horrendously abusive ways. But to decry all religion as a harmful structure is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I think it's possible to maintain the cultural aspects of faith while removing the abuse and bigotry that often comes with it. And I think you can see that in many of the lives of practitioners that don't make the history book and news. Though I'd never deny that religion frequently gets used as a tool of control, I just think it requires a lack of imagination to say that it always is. Or to say that removing religion from the world would create a world without communal tools of control and abuse.
You are like a younger me who refused to see the 10,000 year history of abuse and realize that any system based on "because I told you so" us unethical and harmful to human life.
I'm not arguing to say we should be basing any society on any religion, but rather that it isn't unethical to teach children religion because it's part of culture and culture should be carried on as long as it doesn't teach intolerance or abuse. Those aren't inherent to religion and any religion that does feature those can probably have them be removed without harming the cultural aspects.
Teaching anyone that they must be judged by arbitrary, unprovable rules or face dire consequences is unethical.
I agree with that, but that's not a core belief of all religions. Even so, it's not hard to imagine a way to teach part of a faith that does have that as a core belief and remove that aspect.
All major world religions with many followers have arbitrary rules and dire spirital, and often physical, consequences for breaking them.
I am not here to argue specifics on religions.
I don't think I could be more clear about why I believe teaching anyone religion as fact is unethical.
You're making a few assumptions that simply aren't globally true, though. 1) That all religious people follow one of the major world religions you're describing, 2) that all practitioners of those religions follow every rule to the letter, 3) that all religion is taught to children in a vacuum without other, reality based, education alongside it
That simply isn't representative of the entirety of religious practice by a longshot. And in doing so, you're ignoring the significance of the cultural aspects of faiths.
Edit: I think the answer would be different if the question was "is it ethical to raise children as orthodox-to-the-letter Catholic Christian" (a few posters have shared some anecdotes that clearly demonstrate the harms with this idea) but it isn't. The question is if it is ethical to raise children with any religious education whatsoever.
You refuse to address the "arbitrary" and "dire consequences" parts of my arguments by pointing at hypothetical religions. I will not respond to that.
To teach someone that they must follow arbitrary rules with dire consequences for failure is unethical.
You can decide what that means for religions.
That just isn't true, I literally agreed with you that it was wrong to teach children in that way 2 replies ago. These faiths aren't hypothetical, I'm just simply not going to get tied down in speaking about the specifics of specific faiths because that's unnecessarily complicated as you don't need to educate someone on every aspect of a religion to pass on the cultural values and aspects of it.
Though I agree we're at an impasse here and neither of us are able to communicate something valuable to the other at the moment. I don't doubt you're an ethical person, especially with the amount of thought and care you've put into this subject, for whatever that's worth.
Edit: I feel like your last sentence implies a huge misunderstanding of my point. I think religion has value as a cultural and communal institution, and absolutely not as a replacement for ethics and science
History is full of heinous things that should never be repeated and we have a moral imperative to teach younger generations about them, why they happened and why they must never be allowed to happen again and how to do your best to prevent them. A lot of them can be traced back to religion, but absolutely not all of them.
Religion is not the single source of bigotry and bigotry is the issue. There probably isn't any faith that is purely benevolent, but there doesn't need to be, it's the actions of those who practice it that matter.
I can easily see the appeal to look at the past and say "we must end religion to prevent the horrors that arise from it" but I think it's a lazy solution. Those horrors happen outside of religion as well and will continue to happen in an atheistic world if the issues causing them (e.g. inequality, injustice, bigotry, abuse of authority, etc.) continue. But by removing religion, you remove part of the many beautiful cultural traditions that make up who all the varied people on this planet are. And I don't think it's useful to destroy cultures.
Edit: of course, religion can't be used as a replacement for a scientific understanding of the world and I think at some point it must be taught that the metaphysics of religion are based in myth, but I think there's a great deal of value in the way religion is part of a culture and fosters community. The threat of religion comes in how that culture and community is used.
Lmao another edit because I thought a lot about this during the pandemic: I also used to think the world would be better off with no religion, but I think that's an easier point to make when looking at the largest religions in the world and the terrible things they've been (and continue to be) weaponized to do. As a thought experiment, ask yourself if it would be ethical to gather every Catholic in the world and re-educate them to deny their faith. Now try again with the First Nation's people, or smaller local faiths in Africa or South America. I won't speak for you, but I think at some point it crosses a line where it stops being a call for rational thought and an end to the opiate of the masses but a vehicle through which cultures are irreparably harmed or erased.