Category: Teachers/Educators

New article from TIME:

• Studies from the Pew Research Center have highlighted a “rapidly growing” group dubbed the “nones,” because they don’t identify with a religion. Largely made up of young people who were raised in a faith but later left it, the “nones” are changing how religion is seen in the U.S. And while not every single “none” is an atheist, it’s clear that the younger generations are disregarding religion at rates never seen before, and that more Americans than ever are going to have to inform their families that they don’t share their faith. With a stigma against atheists that often paints us as Satan worshipers or even worse, that task can be daunting for some non-believers.

See full article here: https://time.com/6128721/tell-your-family-you-are-an-atheist/

• “Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.” (Aristotle)

Is difference between this above child and the more mild cases of religious upbringing of children we see  one of degree, or of kind.  Picture a child who is not vocal like this one, but holds similar or more mild conservative Christian views.

Here is a helpful analogy video on religious child grooming: inundating a child with just one kind of religion, excluding others and secularism:

BONUS: Thinking about logic and humor – have you ever noticed the connection between logical errors and humor?  Picture a reductio ad absurdum: a method of proving the falsity of a premise by showing that its logical consequence is absurd or contradictory. So: “The Earth cannot be flat; otherwise, we would find people falling off the edge.”  That people are not falling off the edge makes Flat Earth proponents false/wrong, seem silly, which is to say hilarious!  Question: Is the video of the conservative Christian preacher child above in the first video (i) not something we should care about, (ii) horrific, (iii) hilarious, or (iv) profoundly true?

One thing you sometimes hear is that without God there could be no objective morality (the oughts), because if moral rules/principles don’t get their authority from God, where could their authority come from?

Of course, this way of thinking is wrong. Children from a very young age understand what being a “friend” means without God having anything to do with the knowledge. So, kids can extrapolate from this understanding of friendship principles like “you’re being a better friend if you play the game your friend wants to play than if you selfishly demand to play your favorite game” or “you are being a bad friend if you steal your friend’s toy car.”

Another important point here is that the key elements of morality such as altruism are present widely in the animal kingdom, and so aren’t simply implanted in humans as the unique and special pinnacle of God’s creation. One article on this topic makes such points as:

• “Since altruism, empathy, and gratitude all underpin moral behavior, finding them in our fellow mammals suggests that they run deep in our brain biology and did not come about because of moral reasoning or religion. In fact, probably the opposite is true—religion developed because of our innate capacities for caring.“

• “[I]n our attempts to study our animal brethren and avoid anthropomorphizing them we sometimes miss their very real similarities to us. According to the scientists Morell interviews, birds are capable of complex communication, elephants have long memories and strong social networks, and dolphins will act altruistically. These scientists are convinced that many higher order cognitive abilities are not limited to humans, and that we only need look a bit further to discover them in animals.“

see: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/morality_animals

ARTICLE: Finding Morality in Animals
Two new books explore research on animals to better understand the roots of human morality and challenge human specialness.