This is equivalent with reference to my objection (i.e. the missing "a way of..."

So you can rephrase my previous post inserting your direct quote if you like. It's the same problem regardless.

Well, I agree that your definition of critical thinking is a bit orthogonal to the major problems with your argument, but words matter and I thought it would help I highlighted the exact missing words in your rephrasing of the google definition that is causing some of the back and forth between you and neeeel/dereds.

Can 'we'? lol.

If Robert asked himself 'Is this true, partially true (for the nits) or false?' then he has begin the process of CT, a process that might, or might not, lead to the acquisition of more complex skills that can be used to determine the truth or not of something. If Robert is 5 years old, I'd consider it enough that he at least asked himself the question, if he is in his late teens, I'd expect him to be able to take it further.

No. The bolded is (possibly) a necessary condition, but it is not a sufficient condition for critical thinking.

Otherwise, things like reading tea-leaves or divine revelation would count as critical thinking, and I'm sure you don't want that.

I won't argue that 'words matter', I'm trying to be a specific as possible, but if I say that I'm encouraging a child to ask 'is this true/false/whatever' I think it goes without saying that it's 'a way' of thinking. It's a different 'way' of thinking than blindly accepting whatever they're told. If I encourage you consider running, or talking as opposed to striking out in a confrontation, it's obv 'a way' of dealing with confrontation. Does that actually need to be said aloud? If it does then I'm not seeing why, I'll think about it more though.

In any case, I'd much rather discuss the 'major problems' with my argument about teaching young children religious views as the truth, than whether or not what I'm doing with my own children is actually CT by the definition of it that a 5 year old would clearly be incapable of understanding and which makes this whole conversation about CT such a nit fest IMO.

It's good enough for me when we're discussing young children. It wouldn't be for much older child, or an adult. I think I've made that clear now.

then call it something else and don't link to a wiki page that says something very different to what you mean and expect us nits to just follow.

and as a nit I explained to you that I'd accept you meant something less onerous but you continued with the line that you'd disproved my claim when it was obvious you hadn't. Unless of course you are 6 and the less onerous definition applies.

This seems to run counter to your thesis about religious parents raising their children, that somehow they're doing something wrong because they teach their children things in a way that doesn't promote critical thinking (but you do). Now we're finding that you've diluted your definition of critical thinking in exactly the manner I've described, which means you should have no problems with religious parenting.

Call it "MB-Style Critical Thinking"

It matters for the reason I laid out with the swimming example. Critical thinking is not defined as thinking about blah blah blah. It is a way of thinking about blah blah blah. Exactly what conditions differentiate critical thinking from other ways of thinking is the important part.
An entailment of your 'good enough for young children' definition of critical thinking undermines your central argument. On your definition, even "God said it, I believe it, that settles it" counts as critical thinking.

We've been over this a lot so I'll be as brief as possible.

1) Loaded questions/inflammatory language.

Here I mean stuff like characterising the passing on of religious beliefs in terms like "urging beliefs" or "there is a God, this is the truth, everyone who doesn't agree is wrong".

Aside from this being a somewhat dubious rhetorical strategy, I just don't think anyone here believes that such rabid dogmatism is widespread among Christian parents, and you have no empirical evidence to demonstrate that this is the case. This leaves you with two options; a) you stop making a general case and start your argument from the position of the moral issues involved when it does happen in the way you describe. FWIW, I gave you a link to the 'Jesus Camp' documentary a few months ago to help with this and you said you were uninterested. Or b) you attempt to establish a general moral principle from which passing religious beliefs to children is morally problematic regardless of the manner in which those beliefs are passed on.

2) Your attempt to highlight a potential conflict between our views on children and religious beliefs, and children and political beliefs (and children and marketing) is a strategy I think is very useful in general: i.e. you are drawing an analogy between unacceptable behaviours w/r/t non-religious beliefs and asking for a justification for treating religion as an exception. The problem is that I don't think anyone here shares your moral intuition that it is morally unacceptable to bring up a child to believe that, say, Margaret Thatcher was the greatest British PM. We might not like it, but it is not something that motivates significant moral disapproval.

3) You have (in the past) explicitly denied consequentialist grounds as sufficient for your moral disapproval of the transmission of religious beliefs. That is, you think it is wrong to instil religious beliefs, regardless of whether they cause harm, or that the methods of transmission are harmful. I suspect this is because you actually want to make the general claim, rather than judging each case on it's merits. There is nothing really wrong with that, but you will need to do more work to show that there is such a general principle (and you will need to drop the loaded language as per my point 2). However, I do think that by denying consequentialist sufficiency for moral disapproval, you are losing a lot of your audience.

4) You have also in the past denied that your moral disapproval is based on the falsity of religious belief. Again, I think this would be a reasonable basis for some general principle, though probably not enough to motivate significant moral disapproval.

5) Critical thinking. Ignoring the problems with your definition, the major objection I find is that it seems to me that parents teaching critical thinking is supererogatory. That is, it is a good thing to do it, but not a bad thing to not do it. Perhaps schools have a moral obligation to teach critical thinking though.

I did call it something else, I called it a less demanding definition of CT for young children that doesn't require being followed through to a conclusion. You failed to acknowledge this for about 3 days and then finally accepted it my less 'onerous' form of CT. So, please don't act as if I mislead you, you simply missed (ignored?) the posts that could have cleared that up for you much earlier ITT.

ok, let's do this properly then, just to see if there's something I can learn here. You've claimed that you "I don't see much evidence of what I consider to be critical thinking." and that I am "someone who, I believe, demonstrates a lack of critical thinking here".

Below, I've picked out some parts of the procedure that would be required for CT from the grown up version on the Wiki page. This is an example of what I consider to be CT. Very early in my time here, I argued that religious people were incapable of being open minded. During the ensuing conversation I:

1) Recognized that there was a problem (hard not to)
2) Gathered information (read people's replies and listened to their arguments)
3) Recognised my unstated assumptions and values (that deciding on one option meant closing your mind to other options)
4) Improved my use and understanding of language (did a lot of googling to see what various terms and phrases meant, discovered Philosophy in the process)
5) Recognised the existence of logical relationships between propositions (or not, in the case of my argument)
6) Reconstructed my pattern of belief (through exposure to wider opinion than I was used to)
7) Drew a 'warranted conclusion' (that I was wrong)

This has also happened in other contexts, such as moving from 'there's nothing good about religion' to 'religion is a net negative'.

So, I believe that I engaged in "A persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports it and the further conclusions to which it tends", as I do in every discussion I have here.

Now, does that disprove your claim?

Taking a quote out of context is misleading. This is what you did.

Given that you've had probably close to 2000 posts since you've started posting in RGT and can only think of a couple things that you've changed (which turn out to be extremely trivial changes), and that your pattern of posting is more like what you've done in this thread (insisting on the correctness of your position despite overwhelming evidence and argumentation to the contrary), it's really hard to consider your efforts as being "persistent." It's simply not something you do in every discussion you have here.

Ok, I should have used the word 'way' but when I factor that into what I think about this, it doesn't feel like it changes anything for me.

Ok, I'm really not seeing how your example is consistent with me telling my kids, for example, that there is definitely a god, and not encouraging them to question that at all, in fact insisting that is true and that they shouldn't question it, and me encouraging a way of thinking where they question the truth/falsity of the available information and I leave them to eventually make their own minds up.

So I'll think about it. No need to respond if you think you'd just be repeating yourself.

Ok, I think some of my points have been taken as a bit more sweeping than they were intended (I thought I was doing a) )but this is useful to me so thanks.

One thing that would really help your position is to openly declare that you don't believe that most religious parenting strategies fit your description:

Given that you've used this type of language virtually every time you talk about religious parenting, the natural conclusion is that you actually believe that this is what religious parenting looks like. And there has been no point in time (in my recollection) that you've conceded that the majority of religious parents don't do this, and that you're discussion a significantly minority situation.

In general, it would really, really help you to use narrower language. I can't recall how many times you've started a conversation with extremely broad language only to find by the end of the conversation that you've scaled back your meaning to something that's almost trivial.

So you think I should hold you to a less demanding definition of CT. If you recall your objection was to me saying you didn't display any critical thinking. Should you as an adult be held to a less onerous definition.

No

In fact my point was that you claimed to employ critical thinking when you didn't. That you considered your response in post 162 disproved that proves rather than disproves that claim.

Clearly not since I just gave you an example of how I use the more 'onerous' form of CT. Your question (I'm assuming it was a question although there's no question mark) would have been relevant before I gave you that example but since it's in the post where you quote the example, I'm a little bemused.

Ok... that it? No explanation for why that's not Ct? I guess we'll just continue to disagree then. Your argument 'you don't think critically' isn't convincing me. Since you think me incapable of CT, if you want to convince me, you'll actually have to do some of the work. If I get to where you want me to be on my own, it would kinda prove you wrong, wouldn't it.

Already disagreed with this previously, still disagree.

Sound you disagree but any actual reflection on your part that post 162 disproved my claim would have caused you to retract it rather than restate it. Hence you were not displaying CT during that/this exchange

My claim isn't disproved by you demonstrating a single incident of CT irrespective of whether I accept the example.

You probably ought to make explicit the things that are implicit. Here, you're taking the claim that you think you're defending to be something different from the claim that was being discussed in context. You do that often.

I don't see how that's true since your claim was that I am "someone who, I believe, demonstrates a lack of critical thinking here". Just the two examples I gave are enough to show that your belief is incorrect. Another example is me having moved, through what I think it's fair for me to describe as a form of CT even though at the time I couldn't have told you what that was, from 'which god' and attempts to undermine theistic belief by showing that they were simply a product of the theist's environment (which I still think is true but I've been convinced by people here that it's not a particularly useful or productive approach) back to attempting to debunk individual beliefs, which I had previously abandoned as futile. I've even found myself IRL arguing the theistic side in efforts to show other atheists that it's not as simple as they think it is, as I once thought it was. These are significant shifts in my thinking and IMO, evidence of an ability to think critcially.

Either way, this is getting us nowhere, is a little bit cringy, it isn't really useful for me and I doubt it's useful for you, and we're stuck in a 'you're' wrong, no you're wrong, no YOU'RE wrong..' loop that's not even on-topic, so let's bin it.

By the way, I had no memory of this, and it wouldn't be like me to ignore or so casually reject a suggestion from you, so I did search and I realise now that what happened was that you linked the documentary, LZ said that "I recently watched Jesus Camp. Mightyboosh would love it! " and when I said "I try to avoid stuff like that tbh. " I wasn't saying that I wasn't interested, I just meant that stuff like that really gets under my skin and I generally don't watch it through choice, (just the trailer wasn't good for my blood pressure). I still haven't seen it but I did make myself watch something similar on Netflix not too long ago.

MB, if you wanted to teach your kids to say "please" and "thank-you" the best way to do that is by you doing it in front of them.

If you want them to constantly question things, constantly question things in front of them.

There you go. Problem solved.

Sure, that's one part of it and I'm a firm believer that you have to be the change you want to see in the world, but it's not always enough. You have to be paying attention for an example to have an impact, and they often aren't...

Did you just respond to my recipe for chicken noodle soup with 'we don't eat chicken noodle soup every day'?

It isn't just one part of it, it is all of it. We are talking about your kids, not the kids 3 houses down. I told you the method. Use the method.

Giving me a single recipe doesn't 'solve the problem', does it. I also have to worry about what my kids are being fed when they're not with me, which is the majority of the time, what's your recipe to solve that problem? I think a better food analogy might be that we broaden their pallets at home so that when they go out into the world and get offered a choice between fried chicken, or lamb and couscous, they don't reject one because they've only ever been encouraged to eat the other. Heck, they might even try some Sushi.

You want to broaden your children's palates in terms of questioning things? Maybe question every third thing? Only question things on Tuesdays? Did you forget what we were talking about?

There is no 'we' under discussion. We were discussing how you can get your kids to question things.

If they learn how to think critically, then they will think critically. It is really hard not to do so once you have learned how to.

Since you've now changed the subject to your desire for your kids to learn about different religions, the answer is equally easy. Teach them about all the religions. The analogy with the foods works. Doesn't matter at all that the schools have a limited lunch menu.