Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris
If I fail to account for your favoured scenario, it’s because in my experience, that scenario simply doesn’t exist - even in cases where parents think that’s what they’re doing.
Children always, always, absorb their parents’ ethical framework and worldview, even if parents actively avoid discussion of it, because children observe it in action every moment of every day, from birth. You simply cannot bring up a child without inculcating in that child your own view of human dignity, care for the environment and some sense of how you arrive at your value judgments.
I have made no distinction between active and passive atheism in the home because it makes no practical difference. You bring up your children with a certain ethical framework, whether or not at the same time you give them a critique of alternative ethical frameworks, regardless of whether those alternatives are based in religious faith. If you don’t recognise that you are doing this, you are doing your children a disservice.
Children are not simply miniature adults. They are immature, in the truest sense of the term, and their very nature requires they are taught, ideally by example as much as instruction, how to make sense of the world around them and how to relate to it, what their responsibilities are in it and what wider society owes them. Insisting on their ‘right to determine their own journey in their formative years’ sounds terribly progressive but is actual nuts, and a recipe only for poorly grounded young people who have been left to infer what’s right and wrong with minimal guidance. There’s a term for that: it’s “chaotic home environment” and its consequences are seldom good.
Children actively seek guidance about how to make sense of the world. It is a given in Western culture (and many others) that it is the parents’ responsibility to do this, with varying levels of support from extended family to and wider community, in accordance with family and cultural tradition - unless something has gone wrong and the child is in manifest danger. Only then does the State intervene. You offer your proposed alternative as seemingly morally superior, but it isn’t.
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You are basing your argument on the premise that a faith-less (or rather a faith-neutral) upbringing cannot be one based on a moral and ethical framework. You cannot (or do not want to) to accept this is possible. That's fine, that is your right.
You equate a faith-neutral upbringing as "nuts" but as the saying goes "you would say that". I understand your inability to accept the premise since your faith demands you must not but this does not invalidate the argument and more importantly, invalidate the proposition i.e. every person has the right to determine their own world view and not have one imposed upon them.