Hi cba,
Reasonable men may disagree on nearly everything other than the use of reason itself. Pierre Boutroux noted:
"Logic is invincible because in order to combat logic it is necessary to use logic.‘’
Two-valued Aristotelian logic might one day be surpassed by an improved logic, but for now we do well to remember that Aristotelian logic is better than no logic at all.
I’m not suggesting that there is only one correct way to bring up a child. Musical parents, for example, might successfully raise their children in musical environments, while children whose parents love to sail will undoubtedly be raised on and around sailboats. It matters little whether a child should learn to sail or to play the violin, but to do either successfully requires an irrefutable logic. To teach a child to sail the boat directly into the wind is to teach the child nonsense.
Alone wrote:
This is a good point, Alone. People too often think of their children as their clones. A child is in no way a vehicle for a parent’s immortality. A child is simply one more unique human among six billion other similarly unique humans. My brother once came across a heaping box of letters in a trash bin. These letters were written by a WW1 Doughboy to his mother. The hundred or so letters contained a fascinating personal history beginning with this man’s induction into the Army, through the trenches of France, up to the signing of the Armistice. His mother had saved every precious letter but his grandchildren were so little interested that they set the entire box of letters out with the trash. How much do you know about your own distant ancestor’s lives? So much for thinking that we might continue to live on in the hearts and minds of our offspring! Darwin’s good ideas, for example, persist not because he taught them to his children but because he wrote them in his Origin of the Species.
Consider as well those who wish to achieve a sort of genetic immortality through their children. These folks would do well to remember that to have a child is to already have your gene-pool diluted by half. A grandchild will only retain a maximum of 25%, while your great-grandchildren will only have a maximum of 12.5% of your personal gene-pool. By the 8th generation your progeny will retain less than 1% of your genetic individuality. Allowing 25 years per generation and given the unreasonable assumption that each of your offspring will produce their own offspring; in the span of 725 years just under one part per million of your genetic identity will remain undiluted. So much for acheiving genetic immortality through one’s children!
The fundamental value of sexual reproduction is precisely that it shuffles the genetic deck of cards. Sexual reproduction is a pyramid scheme that dilutes rather than preserves genetic identity. Unless you happen to be the mother of all humanoids (Lucy, as she is sometimes called), sexual reproduction is nearly useless as a means for achieving personal genetic immortality.
A parent uttering such stupidity evidently misunderstands the fundamental moral asymmetry; reproduction is a right, murder is a crime.
Kurt Weber wrote:
Kurt, no one said anything about society assuming the responsibility of a parent. What I have said is that the parents are responsible not only that they should teach their children, but also they are responsible for what they teach their children.
Only our thoughts are free. An expression of our thoughts is an act. Acts are bound by responsibilities. The examples are endless: Shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, inciting the passions of a mob to riot, directing the accountants of one’s own company to “cook the books,” slandering someone’s name in public, etcetera.
The teaching of my freely held ideas to a child constitutes an act, and we’re responsible for our acts. A gruesome example comes to mind. Suppose a man believes that dogs should kill children. It’s a horrifying thought, nevertheless, you and I both believe he is free to hold it. But is this man equally free to raise and train his Rotweiler puppies to kill children? Does the argument that he has the right to educate his dogs as he sees fit, sound familiar to you?
Even if his dogs never kill, the training of dogs to kill children constitutes an immoral act. Likewise, it’s an immoral act to train a Muslim child to hate the Hindus. It’s wrong to teach a child that the Earth is flat or that our daily fates can be determined by reading Tarot cards.
Brainwashing a child in a fundamentalist religious belief is equivalent to placing his or her mind in a straight jacket. Even if the straight jacket is one day removed, the child’s normal growth will have been stunted. As a child matures he or she is perfectly free to make persoanl choices, to follow Scientology, Astrology, or even to bore a hole in their own head (yes, some groups see merit in this).
We wouldn’t think of exposing children to pornography so why would we allow them to be subjected to extreme dogmas before they’ve had the chance to tune-up their own nonsense detectors? I’m arguing that children should have the right not to have beliefs beaten into them. A child’s mind is not an empty vessel to be filled with the parent’s ready-made beliefs. We ought to teach our children how to think rather than what to think.
Michael