Perspective on OP?

Fortunately, no rational adult would use a 6-year old's understanding as evidence that something does or does not make sense. Because that would just be silly.

Most children about that age would rightly state that the earth is round, but many of them have failed conceptual models for what that actually means. (See the conversations of pages 547 and forward.)

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c39...bf12cb1a1d.pdf

Nobody is. So that’s a strawman. The point that you are trying to miss is that six year olds who are developing faith are actually being indoctrinated. When her friend believes in heaven or feels god within her, she is being taught that by the adults in her life at an age when she trusts them to tell the truth. You can want to make this about the merit of atheism vs religion all you want, but the op made a clear statement that I am responding to. Why does religion hold more than atheism? Here is why.

Because you think this is a "better" argument?

I've given you an explicit example from the literature on child development that shows that even when we try to "indoctrinate" children with understandings of a round earth, that they still don't actually understand things. And there's even *MORE* social pressure on children to recite back that the earth is round and yet that *STILL* doesn't mean that they have a meaningful conception of what that entails. So I don't really see what your example is supposed to do.

Children learn what they're exposed to. That much is definitely true. The reason it doesn't "make sense" to your kid is because she wasn't exposed to it in the same way. And even if it *did* "make sense" in some way, she probably doesn't actually understand what she's talking about (see round earth). So to the level to which your child is saying things don't make sense to her, you're talking more about a reflection of the household environment you created around her than what she actually understands or doesn't understand.

My point is that trying to glean information about the world from what 6-year olds understand is probably a bad idea.

I appreciate how you got immediately defensive thinking that this was about the merit of atheism vs religion when I didn't even bring that up.

I'll quote myself:

I'm criticizing the use of talking about a 6-year old's understanding of something as evidence of whether that makes sense or not, and then provided an example about a SCIENTIFIC FACT that shows how little we should trust a 6-year old's understanding. Please let me know where I talked about religion and atheism in there.

The reason is because you make bad arguments and bad analogies?

The bolded is an idea you introduced, not me. I get that you understood I was asserting that a six-year-old's skepticism in heaven is evidence that we should all be skeptical or something along those lines, but that was not my point. I can even see how it seems that way since I made the judgment of it being a silly idea. However, your arguing against that assertion is stemming from you not getting my actual point, whoever is to blame for that. Now I will try to clarify for you again. Heaven is not something that my daughter attached to when given the CHOICE, as I did for her, unlike her friend who was told that it was a fact--no choice. Yes, she was obviously swayed by what she found out I believed myself when she asked, which is why I included that information in the story, but the point I am making is strictly about how a child being introduced to concepts like this are offered them differently by many atheist parents and nearly all religious parents. This partially explains why they are more or less sticky. I told her people believe different things, what those things are, and that she can make up her own mind, and that thus it is unclear as opposed to Jesus, heaven, you will go there if you do all the correct things and believe the correct things. I am not even talking about the merit of the ideas being discussed, I am talking about how they are presented.

This is not that complex unless you want to make it about more than what the OP was driving at.

You are talking about it as a "choice" when that's really not the right framework. The level of "choice" at that age is not nearly as strong as you seem to be thinking.

She was swayed well before then. And once you've declared your position, I think it's a lot closer to the type of "indoctrination" that you believe is happening with religious parents. You've taken away whatever intellectual freedoms that you thought you were giving. And the way you've expressed yourself here on this forum are strongly suggestive of the types of negative signals you've sent your child throughout her life with regards to religion.

I'll quote you back to yourself:

Do you really think you parented in a way that this type of attitude was not communicated to your daughter? And you think she came up with that "on her own"? If so, you're delusional.

I would agree that there's a lot of stickiness here. But it's not for the reason you're thinking. It's the same reason that children (and adults) struggle to adopt to new knowledge and information over the course of their entire lives. It's not because of a difference in atheist parents giving their children more intellectual freedoms or whatever.

I'm not claiming it's complex. I'm claiming you're wrong. But the reasons you're wrong have a lot to do with the fact that six year olds don't think as independently as you seem to think they do. She's not allowed to go around telling other six year olds that what they think is ridiculous in the exact same way that the other six year olds aren't allowed to go around telling your daughter that her beliefs are ridiculous.

But as an adult, I can say to you that your beliefs are ridiculous AND give you reasons for it. And as an adult, if you think the same of my beliefs you may say so. And then together we'll weigh the evidence and come to our own separate conclusions.

As of right now, I think your argument is weak because your claim of a form of intellectual autonomy for your daughter is most likely false, and that you have had a much larger influence on her conclusion than you seem to have admitted. Her negative belief about God is as strong as the positive belief about God of the other kids, and that has a lot more to do with you than with her. To whatever level of "indoctrination" you believe has been imparted on the other kids, you have done the same to yours.

Why are you allowing this to happen ?? go away, take your daughter to another place and save yourself from the cannibalistic Christians. Its your responsibility and you come here to muff the jargon of those who deny and by some means vilify the religious under a pan blanket of being "better" ?

Its you who are the pressure hiding under a patina of "rationality' for you are giving her nothing, let alone understand the nature of the child in his/her evolution out of childhood.

At the age of six(6) and during the first 7 years of childhood the child "mimics" the elder and during the next 7 years the child expects and loves authority and that, specifically is you.

When the child passes into following age or the age of future maturity , then and only then, can she or he be expected to pass judgement and comprehension of their milieu.

You've living with a crick in your butt and now your giving it to us. Lol

You seem to love to have arguments that you have already won in your mind or lived out previously. It is obnoxious, but not particularly interesting to me. I told you that I am not only aware but keenly aware that she reached her conclusion based on what I said to her. I reiterated it in another post. Now you think you are informing me that it is the case, or somehow are sure that I don't understand that as much as I should, because, like, you want to find out where I am wrong. Here is the simple point again:

I left the possibility of an unknown answer even though it is clearly guided by me. Yes, I told her that many people will decide when they are older, because like, she is not only too young to form that kind of opinion but too young to understand THAT she is too young, but still needs her questions answered. And yes, now to my point, none of that....literally none of that is afforded as part of the conversation to her friend whose Auntie is in heaven. Since we are talking about why one indoctrination is stickier than another, this is a reason. It is not about which conclusion is reached no matter how much you want it to be. You can try to reframe the conversation to how much kids understand instead, and why the assumptions you have provided for my position are wrong, but you are engaging with your own version of who you think I am. It is an entirely different conversation you would like to have. Go ahead and play both sides of the board. Not going to waste a whole lot more effort trying to shake your faith in you imaginings about me tho.

OP: "why does religious indoctrination stick better than atheist indoctrination? Must be because it makes more sense to be religious. Discuss."

Me: "It could be because there is a different level of indoctrination going on from a very young age, here is a single example of how my kid is being exposed to it compared to her friends and how she is processing it."

Non-defensive poster: "Oh no! why don't you leave then!! You are a bad parent who doesn't understand kids. Your tone betrays your true feeling! LOL."

Yeah, yours does too.

There really isn't anywhere to go. I live in one of the more liberal parts of the country and my 10 year old son the other day told me "I wish I believed in god because all of my friends do."

As long as they aren't being directly prosthelitized to by the teachers or adults in positions of authority, that's the best we can do.

Yes. But your statements imply that you think she reached her conclusion on the basis of that particular conversation. I'm claiming that it has more to do with the previous 6 years of her life and not your statement in that specific moment. That statement didn't do much of anything at all for the openness of her beliefs.

Not really. That's like saying to her "You're free to believe X if you're stupid." I mean, it's a possibility, but you're clearly disdainful of it. So it's clearly not the open possibility you think it is.

But it isn't a valid reason. You're not actually a different type of parent. You put up the same implicit and explicit blocks that other parents do. You just agree with yourself, so you think you're not doing something wrong, but religious parents are. It's pretty dumb and not an accurate reflection of reality.

I made ZERO comment about which conclusion is reached. And I welcome you to quote me saying something specific to you on that matter.

Except that your parenting and your child's level of understanding are EXACTLY what you're talking about.

Read this part slowly. What conclusion she drew is not the interesting part of the story to me. She believes in the tooth fairy. She will believe anything I tell her until it is proven different. No ****. The difference is what I am doing and what I will continue to do. Because guess what? The OP was not about what 6-year-olds believe the first time they talk about heaven---it was about what people decide to stick with when they get older. That starts with what they are told and how they are told it when they are at this age--but news flash--it doesn't end there.

No see, this is how you imagine the conversation went because even though you stated that we as adults can have a more in-depth discussion about topics here than are appropriate for a 6 y0, for some reason you have faith that I talk to my 6-year-old the same way I talk to adults.


Just lol. Seriously. Tell you what, when my I teach my kids songs about how there is no god, when I have holidays themed around denying religion, when I introduce my kids to the concept of the afterlife just so that I can tell them it is false, when I actively teach them that prayer is pointless and discuss NOT doing it every night before bed, when I take them to a buillding created for our comunity with the explicit purpose to talk about how there is no god every week complete with lectures on the same by a revered leader, when I send them to summer camp that has atheism based activities and rewards them for not believeing, when I get them ordained as atheists as infants and keep the pictures of the cerimony on the wall of my house along with symbols of non-belief....then maybe we will have a starter here. Me answering the question of what do I think about heaven because she has never heard me--or anyone else-- talk about it until a kid at school who clearly HAS had those topics hammered already should have been one clue for the astute reader that, no, I have not been guiding her toward an atheist conclusion all this time even with the lack of the activity on this list. It is different. Why the **** would I have? Do Christians actively teach their kindergarteners all about how Ganesh and reincarnation are not real? What about Wicka? No? No.

And I didn't make a judgment on who is right or wrong, what I said is it is different. Right or wrong has nothing to do with the OP, but again, you just can't get there.
Um, okay.
And:

And then in the very post you ask for a quote:
Are you joking?

No, I am not. I suggest you re-read the OP, then read my response as if it was answering that OP, not some other discussion you wish I was having.

I have *NEVER* made it about the specific conclusion. I welcome you to quote me where I've made it about that.

Nope. I'm saying that if you think your underlying attitude doesn't show through to your child, you're delusional about yourself as a parent.

Ironically, you're pretty much backwards.

https://www.barna.com/research/most-...ve-teen-years/

Those kids that you think are extra sticky because of all the involvement actually are not. I'll leave to you to reckon with reality.

But you actually believe you're right and they're wrong. That's the key feature here. You send signals of your beliefs all the time, just like religious parents do. Maybe you don't sing songs about it, but if you think you're raising your child in some sort of neutral household, or that all religious parents raise their kids in overtly antagonistic ways towards people who believe differently, you're simply delusional.

Nope. You are clearly failing at reading comprehension. If I say you shouldn't reach conclusions based on what 6-year olds think, I mean it for both things that they believe are true and things they believe are false. That is a statement that is valid irrespective of the actual belief that's held. I simply showed that even things that are true, they don't actually understand and are merely repeating back things that have been said to them.

It isn't about *WHICH* conclusion they reached. Their understanding is simply not something that is to be trusted.

Maybe you're confusing the difference between criticizing the content of a belief and the mechanism through which one comes to believe it? My criticism would be just as valid if someone were to say, "Even my 6-year old understands the substitutionary atonement of Jesus! Let the children come to him!"

When did I say that I was raising my kid in a neutral household? I even used the word indoctrinate for atheist households. I was commenting on why it is a different level, which it factually is by the example I gave and the many, many others that are observable, and how that has an effect on the stickiness of the belief into adulthood—not the ****ing birth of it which is what you want to stick to because you feel judged. I don’t care. Your willingness to fill in gaps and just determine what is true about me based on what works for your argument is ironic af given the topic, but I’m not banging my head against the wall anymore. You win. If I thought the things you attribute to me, if I held the position you assigned me or if I was making the points you have extrapolated and assumed you may even be right.

The level of effort to indoctrinate kids into religion or a lack of religion is a clear factor in why they will stick with it later. You all have it as part of your ****ing identity. I do not. I would very very rarely even think about the existence of god if it were not brought up in my life by religious people constantly. I used the anecdote of my daughter to illustrate that. You just didn’t get it.

Potty mouth.

I'm sure I've recommended it before in this forum, but I will again: The Sacred Canopy is an excellent book about the socialization of religious belief. (Sociologists would refer to "socialization" where you say "indoctrination", but the idea is similar enough. Anthropologists would talk about "enculturation".)

Berger's work in the sociology of knowledge is very interesting in general, in my opinion.

Oh, wait. You are pretending we are talking about the specific conclusion and not a conclusion now. Got it. Sure you never talked about litigating the specific conclusion of heaven, but then again neither did I. I talked about the idea that a kid who believes in heaven would reach that concept without very specific input, as opposed to rejecting it without very specific input. This is a fundamental, and I have to assume deliberate misunderstanding of the difference between conditioning a specific belief to be accepted vs not, which is what we are talking about.

Oh wait, you are pretending that I have not stated over and over again since before your input that I have a monumental influence on what my child believes. But guess what? I don't talk about religion often at all, and if I do it is not in front of my kids, and if she asks about it I treat it like a subject that demands a delicate touch so she can survive the onslaught of rhetoric she will receive. She does not know my attitude about sex, she does not know my attitude about drugs, she does not know my attitude about abortion, or immigration policy or how our finances are broken down. Someday she will, but not today. I look forward to learning from what she thinks about it more than teaching her anything about it, and that goes for religion as well.

Oh. You are pretending the topic was level of participation and not religious identity. No. No, it was not.

You are ignoring the OP in this thread, yet again, because you want to talk about what you want to talk about instead. Oh.

Wait, so you think others are right and you are wrong? And the bolded kinda betrays a delusion on your part. I never said anything remotely close to that. The level you have inflated my position and invented attacks is indicative of something. I admit I am not sure what, but it is weird. Might be worth some self-examination there, because it is a pretty knee-jerk projection.

So what? What does that have to do with anything I said? You are talking about the conclusion she drew, I am talking about the discussion that led to it. It is not fully baked, and not relevant what she thinks except that rejecting a concept that is presented is very different than accepting it.

I didn't say anything like that, though. What I said is actually right in line with what you are ad nauseum repeating as if it is a contradiction to my original point. It isn't. What I said was that her response was natural for a 6-year-old, meaning there was no reason for her to accept heaven without it being fed to her as a truth by me. This indicates that for the 6-year-olds who DO believe in heaven, it was fed to them. They are repeating what was taught to them, as you have stated. If you still want to pretend there is a congruence between belief and non-belief because you need that in order to frame atheism as a belief system, sorry bud. The conclusion I have reached about the afterlife that I suppose I have passed on to my daughter thus far is that I don't know what happens after you die and I don't share the faith that others are right.

Not knowing happens all the time with things that we can then find out later. For example, why do planes leave contrails? Is it because they are spraying mind control drugs on the population? I don't think that is true, but I don't know for sure. I also, at one point didn't know what they actually were. So if my daughter asks me are they spraying mind control drugs on us because one of her friend's parents has told they are, then I can say I don't think so but I am not sure. When she asks me what they are then, I can say I don't know. Until I look it up and we find out together, we both don't know--we do not have a belief--and not accepting chemtrail conspiracies is not a belief. If she fills it in herself "it is marshmallow fluff!" then we would have one, but she did not do that and neither did I. There is a big difference between where we have arrived and where her friend has.

Google says it is condensation turning to ice. Now I can explain liquids and gasses and solids using steam as an example, we can discuss why that makes sense etc. All things that have already happened for the other kid except with conspiracy and suspicion offered as fact.

But what if we stay not knowing? That does not become a belief. Rejecting chemtrails, or marshmallow fluff theories, or even what we find on Google is just not the same thing as accepting one of them as the answer. I am comfortable not knowing, I don't need to make it a big part of who I am every day and defend it vigorously because it is not shakey in my mind or heart. My opinion is that we are just an odd step on the evolutionary path right now that can wonder more complex questions than we can answer, but we still try. If you asked every 6 year old in the world how an internal combustion engine worked you would get some pretty interesting answers, some that might even make sense if you accept it or fill in gaps, but none of them would be accurate enough to build one. That is what religion is to me. But I can accept I don't know how to build an engine and that I don't know what happens after we die. That is not the same as accepting Jesus as my personal savior.

I think the simple answer is that most people are not born atheist but become so at one point in their life. Hence retention doesn't really apply to atheists and its a flawed comparison

Even if you are born to two atheist parents it doesn't necessarily make you one because you might still be confronted to religion, whether through friends, or school, or your social environment, community and such, and so develop some sort of belief system

That may not make you a believer but it doesn't make you an atheist either.. in between I guess..

Reality isn't subject to popular opinion. Humans are remarkably susceptible to magical thinking, that doesn't mean the supernatural is real.