Are most aspies Atheists?

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Choice, yes.

Making correct choices is predicated on having an informed view point. That is why it is important to explain to your kids that some people in India think that Vishnu is the supreme being, and that native Americans venerate the manitou spirits in everything. And so on.

Because if you tell your child "Ford makes the best automobiles" and deny them the chance to ride in a Chevrolet, they are not making an informed choice. If your kid says Mcintosh apples are his favorite but hes never tried even a granny smith as comparison, how can it truly be said hes chosen a favorite?

We see this all the time in atheistic communities (such as /r/atheism/ on reddit). Someone will go off to college and discover the amazing fact that its actually possible to not be a Christian. That not everybody is! And suddenly, their doubts make sense, and they realize, despite being born again at 14 that they are on a different path through life. If they had known otherwise, they could have spared themselves years of turmoil.

I'm very impressed that you take the time to expose your children to a variety of alternate viewpoints Rho.

What is a non-believer if not an atheist, exactly?



I wasn't raised to be religious...or to hold a belief in god...and haven't in the meantime encountered evidence for one, hence my atheism.

Raising children in a religion by definition isn't "letting them decide for themselves"- I've come upon believers who are still repeating the logical fallacies for their beliefs that their parents regurgitated to them when they were tiny children. The mind of an adolescent is extremely susceptible to input by adults and authority figures.

If a person at some point thinks there's evidence of a deity, then they can decide which deity is most plausible.

All else is indoctrination.

Don't be impressed yet. My oldest is only 3. In terms of religion, I'd like to see my children have the same or similar experience that I had.

For all practical purposes, I took a lot of time off from church in college. It became nearly nonexistent, but that's probably the same story people.on both sides have. What made the difference for me was that even though I took time off from CHURCH, I never took time off from faith. I was exposed to plenty different viewpoints. In my case, I'd really made my decision at an early age. I think a professing believer really cannot "deconvert" if the faith is genuine, so for me there never really was a choice--but on the other hand, I didn't really want a choice. It really is possible to get it right the first time, and I consider myself fortunate.

The thing is, I don't want my kids exposed to a lot of external influences out there. Not now. I merely accept that I cannot protect them forever. At varying times, I have had some of the same questions that atheists ask of God. I bet not a single one of my sunday school teachers or preachers could have answered those questions. But I can guarantee if one of my own children came up with some of the same challenges I thought up, as I'm sure they will, I at least will have an answer.

Being exposed to other ideas isn't necessarily what I want. It's just something I'm not foolish enough to pretend that I can stop.

Nor is it inevitable that if my children are exposed to other beliefs that they will abandon what I and my church teach them. And, as I've learned myself over the years, abandoning certain teachings is not the same as abandoning Christ.

Last edited by AngelRho on 20 Apr 2011, 6:57 am, edited 2 times in total.

I disagree, though. All a parent can do is the best he can. I call Pascal on the risk of instructing a child in a particular religion or philosophy.

If we truly cannot know, then it is fallacy either way. If you DON't raise a child a certain way, I.e. to believe, then you really are teaching them not to. If the theists are correct, then it's the atheists who are guilty of indoctrination. If the atheists are right, then the opposite is indoctrination. The way public school classrooms are often handled, many of the ideas teachers put forth is indoctrination. There WILL be unwanted influence no matter which side you're on, but as I've said before, children themselves will ultimately be responsible as to the sufficiency of what they've been taught. Receiving certain instruction only improves the LIKELIHOOD that they will tend one way or another.

Fuzzy is right on this point. Many of those users in atheist forums had a steady diet of their pareent's views and changed their minds when they hit college. This doesn't happen for EVERYONE, though, because religious beliefs can be just as logical. But if a parent doesn't teach his children anything about God to begin with, then nothing is likely all that child will ever believe. It's a tough call in postmodern culture. So if I err, it is on the side of safety.

Last edited by AngelRho on 20 Apr 2011, 6:59 am, edited 1 time in total.

Amen. Couldn't agree more.

You should be willing to accept that you answer may not always be satisfactory to your child when he reaches a point when he starts to become intellectually aware.

No...you're allowing them to come to their own conclusions when their mental faculties are fully-formed.

If the atheists are "right" about what??? Atheism is not a belief. It's a lack of belief.

Really? It's PUBLIC schools where children are discouraged, even suspended, for asking questions and thinking critically? Don't think so.

Nope. The vast majority of people, like I mentioned, believe what their parents believe, because they are indoctrinated at a young age. The prevalence of varying religions around the world is extremely heterogenous.

If by "improving the likelihood" you mean "statistically dooming them to a lifetime of having their thoughts and beliefs restricted to the religion they were brought up in".
That makes sense. Er...it would if throughout all of history someone had come up with a single sound logical proof resulting in a deity existing.

Doesn't that tell you something? That unless indoctrinated as small children, people generally don't see reason to believe in god?

"Safety" meaning "ensuring my children are raised to believe the nonsense I believe"?

or Pascal's wager.

How does he know which one of thousands of gods to tell them to fear/believe in/pray to?

One false move, and Anubis is weighing his kid's heart against a feather in the underworld.

They're going to do that anyway. It makes no difference other than that I've helped inform them about what I believe to be true. I can't make them make the same decisions I made or draw the same conclusions I made. I can point them in that direction, but they ultimately have to make up their own minds.


Atheism is the assertion there is no God, simplistically speaking of course. You DO believe that there is no God, else you wouldn't as an atheist make the assertion. There are a lot of things that I don't believe, but because I lack a belief doesn't make me an atheist.

Now, if "lack of belief" is all that matters, then you're more likely agnostic--you have the option of believing or not believing in God, but your belief or lack thereof is driven by your lack of knowledge of a God/god/gods, your belief in the unknowability of any deity. If this is how you feel, then you aren't really an atheist. More like an atheist-leaning agnostic at most.


While it is true that the courts more often support the right of students to believe and exercise their faith, even in school, the students rights cases that come before a court do so because teachers and administrators are active in trying to keep any religious sentiment out of public school dialogue. I think maybe the teachers mean well and do not intend the outcomes in classroom discussion. But it is the result of anti-religous sentiment that has driven them to that point, to not properly understand what you can/cannot do in school. So while you cannot tell students what to believe, you ALSO still cannot teach creationism alongside evolution. It's "not science." Has science conclusively proven there is no Creator? If not, why are other speculative ideas of creation/beginnings of the universe taught?

I'm not going to debate creationism/evolution, nor do I wish to open up that debate in this threat. My point is that public school classrooms in some places have become unfriendly to religion. In that sense, yes, indoctrination DOES happen in the classroom. What I'm trying to get at is if THAT is fair, then it should also be fair for parents to teach their children what they wish, particularly in regard to God.


Depends on the belief or religion. Many Christian denominations don't put such a strangle-hold on their family members if they do not ultimately conform. I won't love my children any less if they do not carry on my faith. There are groups out there, though, who will completely cut off their family members, including children, if they fight against their parents' faith. If you grow up in Islam, they can even kill you (according to the religion, not taking local/national laws into consideration).

Even the threat of death and outward conformity cannot force you to actually believe anything. The Roman Catholic Church learned that one the hard way.


False assumption. Your assessment is unnecessarily negative. Why assume every single person brought up this way would have wanted it any different? I've had plenty of opportunity and even reasons to change my mind. In the end, I concluded that my faith makes more sense than the alternatives. Why assume other people are too ignorant or too lazy to draw the same conclusions? You seem to have a low opinion of human intelligence in general.


Logical proofs for God have been around for centuries.


Or unless indoctrinated as small children, people generally don't see reason to believe the world is round? The point is that we believe what we are taught. Your logic here is flawed. I was "indoctrinated" to believe things like numbers exist. Should I now disbelieve everything I was "indoctrinated" in regards to basic mathematics?


Another false assumption. You don't know with 100% certainty that it is nonsense. Come to think of it, you don't even really know what I believe, aside from my own admission that I'm a Christian, and you may perhaps have read some of my other posts on my religious background. But you only know what little part of the story I've thought to tell or thought was relevant to any given discussion. It would be difficult even in just one day to convey all that I think/feel on the matter, and I just don't have that kind of time on my hands. So you really have no idea whether what I believe is nonsense or not. You're just making a lazy generalization based on your own bias.

You do not "know" it to be nonsense.

So as long as there exists at least the possibility that there is a God, that Jesus was and is the Christ, that Jesus paid the price of atonement on behalf of those who would believe, and as long as human nature is sinful and destined for destruction without the atonement, it makes better sense that a good parent would warn their children of the eternal consequences of the choices they make in the living years.

But there is also the possibility of Mohammad being the last great prophet. It is also just your opinion that the Koran is nonsense.

And what atheism do you think atheist parents need to teach their children?

I`m a practicing Catholic, though I do admit to being borderline agnostic.

There`s no way I can ever know for certain whether anything in the scripture is true, but I choose to believe it anyway.

I have NO IDEA. I'm not an atheist. I suppose it's not really any of my business what you teach your children, nor can I presume to tell anyone what THEY should teach their children.

Putting the specifics of religion/non-religion aside, you have to follow your own conscience. Let's take the atheist position, for instance. You're starting from the assertion that "there is/are no God/god/gods." If you also take the position that you will not indoctrinate your children to believe/not believe one way or the other, then you face a dilemma. You COULD just never even mention it. But that's not really fair to the child because if they aren't aware of or hadn't considered the possibility of going to church, they probably aren't going to do it on their own. The failure so to speak here on the part of the parent is the parent has unwittingly indoctrinated the child with an anti-religious sentiment by passively or tacitly discouraging the child from attending religious services.

If the child is influenced by friends--let's say outside school and outside church attendance--that he should try out this whole "belief thing" and turns out buying into it, that puts you at odds with the child because you can't encourage your child without compromising your own belief/lack thereof. You don't believe in God, but you can no longer outwardly disapprove of God, either. As unlikely a scenario as this might be, it is not an impossible one.

Or...

You could actively influence the child by stating outright this God stuff is foolishness. But then, you aren't really letting the child decide for himself, are you? That would mean you don't really believe children should even have a choice, and that puts you in the same camp as believers who want their children to have a religious instruction.

You can't win here. If you profess to let the child decide, one way or another you do contribute to the process. Either you indoctrinate your child to believe as you do or you allow the child to fall into a faith or pattern of thinking you disapprove of. If you're ok with the compromise, then there's no problem. At the least it's only mildly dishonest, and that is something you as a parent have to decide if you can live with it.

I haven't read the whole thread here, but it seems to me that AngelRho is misunderstanding the nature of atheism. If I understand your argument, you seem to think of atheism as a belief system. It isn't. All atheism refers to is the lack of belief for whatever reason.

This is actually not entirely accurate. Generally what atheists tend to believe is that there is no evidence for gods and one should withhold conclusions on the question until evidence is found. Until then, it makes more sense to rely on the actual evidence in the world around us. As there is no credible evidence for a god, atheists do not believe that a god exists.

One does not teach atheism. One might teach critical thinking or the scientific method. These are structured forms of logical thinking which help the thinker to arrive at clear, well supported conclusions. One might tell one's children that if they choose to believe in a thing, it would be a real good idea to do so because there seemed to be a solid, supportable reason to do so. But you can't teach the absence of a thing. You can't teach "not believing" I understand that there are some "atheists" who are really wedded to a specific notion of what one must believe, but that's a different matter. At that point it ceases to be atheism and becomes its own particular ideology.

It seems to me that the appropriate thing to teach one's children is how to think for themselves. That way the child has the tools to examine the arguments on all sides and come to conclusions on their own. At any rate, that was how my parents raised me. They were happy to discuss questions I had, but ultimately I had to make my own decisions. They encouraged me to look at other people's points of view, look at the evidence and draw my own conclusions.

As for Pascal's Wager, believing in a god as a way to hedge one's bets in case there really is a god seems like a weaselly thing to do. If there was a god, don't you think he'd see through that?

Why do you choose to believe?

I'm curious what's tipping you to the theism side.

Atheism:


Irrelevant question, and misleading, if not dishonest. First, science's focus is the natural world, secondly, evolution != atheism, necessarily, as much as you can claim it is, given that there are christian teachers and biologists that agree with evolution and believe in a creator.


That reminds me of the demotivational picture posted in another thread: "Religion: treat it like your penis. Dont shove it down your children's throat".


You mean all those begging the question "proofs"?


If something doesn't make sense, I'd say it is nonesense.


Pascal's Wager fails: false dichotomy.