In his latest book Daniel Dennett asserts that bringing up children in religious environment is a monstrous abridgement of their freedom.  He recommends that any religious information be kept away from growing ypungsters until they are grown sufficiently to be able to make mature choices.

In the first place children are also brought up under political indoctrination.  Leftists assert that capitalists are monsters that would be better dead, free enterprisers assert that leftists are impractical utopians, deserving to be poor.  Artists and intellectuals assert that their bourgeois neighbors are boring boors, without an understanding as to what life is about.  Bourgeois, in turn, look on artists and philosophers as impractical and unproductive dreamers.

Dennett also fails to realize that religion consists of three parts:  ethics, teleology, and theology.  True religion cannot be taught as a college course, it has to be lived and practiced.  You can teach ethics as a course, but its memorization does not lead to practice.  The teleological question “what for” needs to be answered. 

To answer that, we have to resort to theology, to devise a structure that answers the teleological question “what for” in a satisfying way.  Otherwise, young people will sink into pure hedonism, the most obvious of which is the drug culture that provides instant gratification.  Once addicted to instant gratification, any society will neglect to invest in future, because it sees no future.  The most obvious sign is the falling of birth rate far below the replacement level, insuring the disappearance of that nation, that culture, that civilization.

Seski, you missed one component of religion: worship. I expect that Dennett has no clue about this, but children brought up in a religion with a rule of prayer, a liturgical tradition, a sacred calendar, anything of that sort will have a different view of the world because of it. Now, if someone asks Dennett why the view of the world without is less an imposition than the view with, what do you suppose he would say?

Stephen

The reason mere ethics instruction fails to sink in is because any effective ethical system requires the “haves” to share their wealth with the “have nots”. That can be done in two ways. One is that the giver feels pleasure in giving.  The other is that a habit of giving has been inculcated in the early childhood, and continued through the formative years, so, in adulthood it becomes impossible to break.

Compulsion doesn’t work.  “From each according to ability, to each according to need” merely results in abilities disappearing, and needs mushrooming.  Alternatively, the “haves” may secrete their wealth, as it happened in the former Soviet Union, with specstores, spechospitals, specresorts, specclubs, and so on, for the ruling class, ot the “nomenclature.”

Looks like Seskis has posed for our Socialist LOL readers an unanswerable query!!!

Sveiki!

To Seski and/or Spectator: does awe have any place in your world view? 

To my mind, awe is the basis for worship, which Stephen, quite rightly, highlighted as an essential and irreducible component of all religions. 

Priecīgus Svētkus!

Elizabete

Awe is the driving force that makes people behave ethically.  Children who have not been taught to experience awe grow into indifferent or even unethical adults.

No recorded historical society, culture or civilization has been without a religion.  Every aboriginal tribe found by anthropologists also sports a religion. Perhaps it is impossible for any group of humans to survive without a religion.  Even the life of the atheistic Soviet Union may have been prolonged by religion.  In the dark days of World War II Stalin suspended his campaigns against religion, and encouraged priests to address the troops, so they would be motivated to fight better.

No system of ethics, no matter how just and fair, can stand alone.  There must be an incentive to obey it, to live according to it, to refrain from hurting others to further one’s own welfare, to provide one’s own pleasures.  You devise a perfect ethical system, and the guy next to you says “So what?” “It is fine for others, but not for me. I am so rich, so powerful, so smart, that no one can stop me from having my way!” Every ethical system requires that the “haves” share their fortunes with the “have nots,” and an incentive must be provided for such a sacrifice.

Children must must learn from the very beginning that there is an invisible moral universe with laws just as firm and unforgiving as those of the physical universe, and that unethical behavior has undesirable consequences.  Ethics must be practiced from childhood on, practiced until it has become a habit, with all its moral consequences.  To make it understandable to a child, it must be clothed in religious terms, such as having an omniscient, omnipotent father in Heaven.  In philosopher Kant’s words:  “If God did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent Him!”

Professed atheists are moral because they have to compete with Christians and other religious faiths for the acceptability of their ethical values.  In the absence of such religious benchmarks they are likely to go awry.  This is the reason why no atheistic civilization has made a mark in history. A society can tolerate a minority of atheists in their midst, but in the case of a complete takeover that civilization would self-destruct.

Every religious community has a code of ethics characteristic of that religion. The community as a whole lives by that code, so social pressure can be applied to youngsters tempted to take the easy road to unrestricted pleasure. Consequently the society remains functional and viable, capable of surviving setbacks and disasters.

Secular communities lack such a code, so their young people can easily succumb to peer pressure leading to unrestriced hedonism, the use of alcohol, drugs, promiscuous sex and deviant sexual behavior.  This in turn leads away from individuals taking responsibility for their own actions, work ethic diminishes, creativity suffers, and that, in the long run, leads the society to ruin.

Kant failed............
Who’s next?

pete

High divorce rate is not a sign of progress.  It doesn’t point to an enlightened society.  It is a sign of social malaise.  Divorces are not due to a lack of compatibility:  the spouses of subsequent marriages are very much like their predecessors in looks and in character.

The reason for the modern skyrocketing divorce rate is the inability for spouses to forgive and forget occasional slights, most of them unintentional.  When that load reaches the breaking point, the spouses are so incensed at each other that divorce seems to be the only way out, with no chance of reconciliation.

This malaise can be traced to a decline in religious faith, especially Christian faith.  Christ preached forgiveness: “You shall forgive your brother not seven times, but seventy seven times seven.” Forgiving and forgetting lightens the load of bitterness that tends to accumulate among spouses, and opens the way or love and lightness in family life.

It is time for preachers to stop mending the world, and start mending the families of their flock. There are too many people who “love humankind”, but can’t stand their families, their neighbors, their employers, their associates.

Romiešiem bija kanalizācija un ūdensvads, nerunājot par visu citu, bet nāca kristieši un ieviesa mēslu kaudzes uz ielām, slikta ūdens akas, kam sekoja mēris un holēra, nerunājot par visu ko citu tikpat drūmu. Aptuveni tūkstoš gadu bija tumšie viduslaiki, un izrādās, ka ar to vēl kāds lepojas. Morāle īsa: atkrist tumsonībā — mirkļa spļāviens, vajag tikai atbilstošu izglītību un vērtības.

pete

Romieši palika tik slinki, ka negribēja vairs strādāt, tikai ēst un skatīties cirku.  Tā nu viņi palika atkarīgi no viesstrādniekiem, kuri vēlāk sadumpojās un pārņēma valsti.

Daniel Dennett and his cohorts are showing an awfully deficient knowledge of religion.  Their proposal to keep religious knowledge away from children is equivalent to forbidding them to learn any language until they are mature enough to choose one intelligently.  They forget that it is almost impossible to learn anything from compatriots without using a language.  Even a bad language is better than none at all.

It is the same with religioin.  Religion is not simply a belief in a superhuman power.  Some religions, such as Buddhism, do not even acknowledge any such power.  Religion is a code of conduct on how to lead one’s life, an engineering model for life.  Such a code of conduct needs to be acquired as soon as the infant is ready to interact with other humans in their lives.  Even though it is possible to learn such a code of conduct on one’s own, a better approach is to learn one that has been time-tested over generations.  Putting it simply, it is impossible to lead a life without a religion, and a self-devised system is very likely going to be inferior to one that has been refined and time-tested.

From LITUANUS
LITHUANIAN QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
Volume 33, No.3 - Fall 1987

THE ANCIENT LATVIAN RELIGION — DIEVTURĪBA

TUPEŠU JANIS*
... If the ancient Latvians had been asked what their religion is, they would have been baffled by the meaning of the question. Their religion was their way-of-life (dzives zina) and ultimate concerns were not couched in abstract dogmas or analytical cannons. The highest aim of human life was to live in harmony with Nature and other members of society — to follow the will of the gods. Personal worth and integrity was expressed in terms of possessing the many Virtues, and there was no need for conceptualizing such religious metaphors as sin, atonement or redemption.

“Your religion is just a religion, but mine is a way of life.”

I rather prefer:

“I am not an atheist. It’s too big a commitment.”

Shus li che dut nah

Stephen