Questions Left Out of Jubilee’s Atheist-Christian Panel Discussion

How much literature, research, or experience do you think is necessary for a person to have before they establish their beliefs?

42. Wait…

Can parents and pastors really compete with the amount of influence a secular school system (7-8 hours per day) and a media-saturated culture has upon young minds? Honestly, compared to churches which one has more power to indoctrinate minds, the school system or churches?

What kind of suspicious, conspiracy mongering people are they? I don’t think teacher or adult in my public school pushed _any_ religious belief or non-belief on students. They don’t tell people there isn’t a god, is a god, which one(s), none of that. As opposed to a church, where they push their beliefs in every service and activity. Only a quack can take religion neutrality and turn it around and call it indoctrination and godlessness.

1) No more than it is dangerous for the uneducated to debate literature or nuclear physics. The only hazard is looking foolish.
2) There’s nothing humble about it. “I am definitely right and if you don’t take the carrot I’m offering, you’re getting the stick of hell.” Not humble.
3) No. My main regret is that I am too satisfied with life- comfort breeds complacency.
4) Because my brain doesn’t do faith. I was raised religious, and as a child, I was utterly convinced that Noah’s flood was actually a flood of fallout, and that they weren’t humans, but were intelligent dinosaurs who destroyed their civilization in a nuclear war. I believed that, but was, at no point, sold on the “god” thing.
5) One shouldn’t have beliefs. One should have conclusions that follow from evidence. I do not believe in gravity, but I accept it because to do otherwise would contradict the world as we know it.
6) Having participated in the public school system, I would argue that they cannot manage the task of educating, let alone indoctrinating. In the modern world, they do little more than keep the children in a controlled environment for 8 hours a day. The media- it is not some monolithic organization controlled by a shadowy conspiracy. They’re a market driven force: they sell what people buy. They have no interest in indoctrination, they only care about sales. So, when one worries about what “the media” pushes, one should look to ones peers for the explanation.
7) Not counting idiots trolling on the Internet, nothing leaps to mind. I find Christianity itself offensive- it’s a reality denying death cult with exceedingly questionable morals- but I find nothing offensive about Christians. I tend to view religions as fandoms, and treat Christians like Twilight fans, or some other fandom I dislike.

Having participated in the public school system, I would argue that they cannot manage the task of educating, let alone indoctrinating.

While I agree more or less on the education component, I would argue that public schools are instruments of indoctrination (but not religious indoctrination), and indeed were created primarily for that purpose. My favorite example is an elementary school assignment I saw at a conference a few years back: students are instructed to read the entire assignment before beginning, then given several steps in which they’re asked to do silly and/or impossible things, followed by a final step (call it N) instructing them to ignore all previous steps. The smarmy moral, apparently, is that if only they had followed the instruction to read everything first, they could have skipped all of the difficulties of steps 1 through N-1. (The fact that they are eventually supposed to do the steps out of order is tacitly omitted.) What point does this assignment have, other than teaching impressionable children that they should blindly follow arbitrary orders from authority figures?

The history of the “schooling” of Native Americans in this country is especially appalling. It consisted primarily of men with guns taking children away from their parents each morning so that the children could hear their parents’ culture being belittled all day long. It was explicitly intended to assimilate the children and turn them against their parents values, hence the need for men with guns to make it work. While things are subtler these days, truancy officers perform essentially the same function now.

Honestly, compared to churches which one has more power to indoctrinate minds, the school system or churches?

I’m going with churches. Schools mold children into mindless idiots through carrot-and-stick grading systems, public shaming, and a curriculum based on rote memorization. Churches mold children into mindless idiots through carrot-and-stick promises of salvation/damnation, public shaming, and through forced recitation of meaningless prayers learned by rote.

A more interesting question is which form of indoctrination is more dangerous. Schools indoctrinate mainly as a way of creating drones to fill the need for low-skilled and unskilled labor, who will accept exploitation without asking questions. Depending on the religious sect, church indoctrination can serve purposes ranging from generating a stream of tithe income for the priestly class to generating a stream of suicide bombers.

@ Richard Wade,
My thanks to you for expanding my horizons today. Gifts like these are priceless…

Hemant, you have far more patience and grace than I would in that situation . . .

A kid goes, for 7-8 hours a weekday, to a place where he probably doesn’t want to be, sits around doing boring crap that he probably doesn’t want to do, and has his activities directed by a person or persons who he only sees for that time period and has limited personal involvement in that kid.

Then he spends the rest of his time around family, doing family things centered around whatever the family believes, which are directed by a personally-involved community of which this family is a unit.

Yes, I wonder if they will be able to compete.

Why does an atheist get offended when a Christian is humbly offering eternal happiness?

it’s all a matter of perspective: This is related to a discussion I recently had with a longtime (Catholic) Christian friend. She asked me why it should bother me that fundamentalist Christians say I’m going to Hell, when I don’t even believe in Hell. She pointed out that many of those fundies think that she is going to Hell too, since even though she is a Christian from her perspective, she is the wrong kind of Christian from the fundagelical perspective. I did not have an answer at the time, but later I figured out that the issue is not that the fundies think I am going to Hell, it’s that they think *they* are going to heaven. From their perspective, their time on earth is short and temporary (especially as compared to eternity in heaven or hell). From my perspective, my time on earth is all I have (and (so far) the earth is the only home humans have access to). Someone with an eternal perspective who may not care so much about physical and material things has the potential to influence public policies in directions that could be detrimental to the materilaist perspective

Hemant–thanks again for coming to Jubilee, and I hope it’s not the last time!

For the sake of clarity, the reason we didn’t get to most of the questions above was simply lack of time, and that the conversation was going in other directions.

Though you’re right, I did regard *some* of those you’ve mentioned as not worth asking. 🙂 The reason I took the trouble of typing/publishing all of them was to hopefully elevate the discussion next time around.

For the perspective of an atheist who was in the audience, check out http://rustophilus.wordpress.com/

“Is it dangerous for uneducated Christians to engage in debate with atheists?”

It depends on how educated the atheist is about religion. It’s generally dangerous for someone who’s uneducated about their own position to engage in a debate with someone more educated about it than the person who believes it. Think of it as being like in a political debate. You might think you’re right on a political issue and even if you actually are right, it’s still dangerous to engage in a debate with someone else who knows more about the subject than you do if you haven’t educated yourself about your position thoroughly enough.

“Why does an atheist get offended when a Christian is humbly offering eternal happiness?”

It depends on the people involved. Sometimes it’s in the manner of how it’s presented. If you present your arguments in a rude and judgmental manner, you’re only going to upset someone. Nobody convinces someone to change their mind after being told how stupid they are for not agreeing with you. If you’re a Christian who believes in the doctrine of hell, some atheists are offended by the mere concept of hell and you’re probably better off not engaging in a debate with them. Other times Christians are mistaking constructive criticism of their beliefs as anger. Don’t be quick to judge an atheist as being offended just because they’re critical of your beliefs and arguments.

“Do you ever feel like you’re missing anything in your life? Or maybe that there is something more…even if it’s not God for you?”

I’m not dissatisfied with my life though it could be better. I wish I was out of college and living on my own already, for example. But you don’t have to turn to God or religion to commit yourself to something bigger than yourself. You can get involved in a cause that’s important to you or join political activist organizations or your local secular humanist organization.

“It seems like atheists in general at one time believed in God, but then turned away because of some type of hurt, lost a loved one, etc. They are angry at God, it seems. Why are you an atheist?”

To put it simply, because of the lack of evidence. I looked at the claims of religion and I couldn’t understand how a loving god could torture people for all eternity in hell. My conclusion was that either God was evil, God was good and didn’t care if you worshiped it, or God didn’t exist. A god who was evil is not a god I could bring myself to worship on moral principles even if it existed and if God existed but didn’t care if I didn’t worship it, then it didn’t hurt to not believe in it. While I was raised religious, not all atheists were raised religious and not all left the church for angry reasons. Some atheists left for philosophical or logical reasons. You shouldn’t jump to conclusions about why atheists don’t believe in God but instead you should just ask the individual atheists why they don’t.

“Can parents and pastors really compete with the amount of influence a secular school system (7-8 hours per day) and a media-saturated culture has upon young minds? Honestly, compared to churches which one has more power to indoctrinate minds, the school system or churches?”

The majority of America is Christian of some sort and you see religion in the media all time. Turn it on to Fox News and it seems like they’re always talking about Jesus or how they’re being “persecuted” for being Christians. Schools in general are not anti-religious, they are neutral to religion. Just because schools are not teaching fundamentalist religion does not mean they are teaching anti-religion.

“What do we [Christians] do that offends atheists most?”

What offends me most is when Christians try to force their beliefs on others, especially through government law, and when Christians act like if they aren’t given special privileges, they’re being persecuted for their beliefs.