Re: Read, weep, and take a shower

FurPaw wrote:
> nickelshrink wrote:
>>
>> I'm a maximum freedom person, and if parents want to homeschool
>> or send their kids to camps like this to be instructed in
fundamentalist
>> beliefs - great.  Honest, this is what the US is supposed to be about.
>> If you want to teach your kids that braiding their hair is a sin, or
God
>> speaks to us through jelly doughnuts or whatever, this is supposedly
>> the nation in which you can do it.
> 
> I can agree up to a point, and that point is where it does harm to the 
> children.  This article - which is extreme in the other direction - 
> makes the point that in the US we do not allow parents to perform 
> ****oridectomies or other forms of genital mutilation on their 
> daughters, even if their religion or culture holds that it is a good and

> necessary thing to do to female infants or children.  The article pulls 
> the line way back and claims that indoctrination is equally damaging, as

> is failure to teach children to reason and choose for themselves.
> 
> http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/humphrey/amnesty.html
> 
> It's an interesting perspective.


Whew. Yep, i'd say it's an interesting perspective!  And that it's
"extreme in the other direction."

In all that lengthy thing, am i right in hoping that ALL he claims to want
is a good scientific education for every child, whether that overrides
the parents' wishes or not?

I can get behind that, but he'll be be disappointed  (Not that it's
possible to institute this, i don't think, but heck, maybe it is).  It
doesn't wipe out belief in a soul or a God, and i get the very clear
impression that he wants that to happen - that good knowledge of
science is not all he's trying to engineer.

Because down there, when he answers the perfectly legitimate
hypothetical question (Would you want me to indoctrinate your kid
with my beliefs?)  he answers very sanely and wisely:

"I have the answer: that teaching science isn't like that, it's not about
teaching someone else's beliefs, it's about encouraging the child to
exercise her powers of understanding to arrive at her own beliefs."

....but then continues with:

"For sure, this is likely to mean she will end up with beliefs that are
widely shared with others who have taken the same path: beliefs,
that is, in what science reveals as the truth about the world. And yes,
if you want to put it this way, you could say this means that by her
own efforts at understanding she will have become a scientific conformist:
one of those predictable people who believes that matter is made of atoms,
that the universe arose with the Big Bang, that humans are descended
from monkeys,

(We're fine, so far, but then.....)

that consciousness is a function of the brain, that there is no life after
death, and so on. . . But—since you ask—I'll say I'd be only too pleased
if a big brother or sister or school-teacher or you yourself, sir, 
should help
her get to that enlightened state."

Maybe i'm making too much of the term "for sure."  I do worry about the
part where he very vaguely says that:

"Let's suppose that the privilege of parenting will mean for example that,
provided parents agree to act within an agreed framework, they shall
indeed
be allowed—without interference from the law—to do all the things that
parents everywhere usually do: feeding, clothing, educating, 
disciplining their
own children—and enjoying the love and creative involvement that follow 
from it.
But it will explicitly not be part of this deal that parents should be 
allowed to
offend against the child's more fundamental rights to self-determination."

Later he simply says that such an "offense" will require intervention in
the form of a scientific education.  If that's all, then OK, but if it 
also means
legal interpretation that, if the parents teach religious beliefs in 
addition to the
science, then they're violating the kid's "right of 
self-determination"....
well, i've got a real problem with that.  He doesn't say that and i'm
maybe
reading too much into his essay, but there was this teeny tiny little 
red flag:

"For sure" she will end up an athiest?   (i didn't, but anyway...)

The arrogance of calling anyone who believes in the soul or an afterlife
"unenlightened" is merely annoying.  He can't make it be the case that 
there
is no soul.  Either there is or there isn't.  His opinion is merely an 
opinion,
and i can no more make the existence of the soul true than he can make it
false.  Whichever of us is right, the fact exists independent of our 
opinions.

What bothers me, really, is a hidden agenda that i see and i fully admit
i'm
reading between the lines here. My red flag was: why does he care
whether i or any kid who gets this scientific education, understands all 
that
good science he mentions in the first part of the paragraph - Big Bang,
atoms, evolution - and then still believes that we have a soul and that 
there
is a Creator behind it all?

Would he say "Fine, long as you have the scientific facts, then i don't
care
whether you still have spiritual beliefs"?

Or would he call such a scientifically enlightened person ...um 
"enlightened"?
OK, again his opinion, but i can see a society based on his plan, in which
good bright active minds get quietly shunted aside, glass-ceilinged,
etc., if they reveal belief in a Creator.

I'm probably paranoid.  The not-libertarian-enough US Constitution is
still,
i think, too libertarian to let my worst case scenario happen!


-- 
pax,
ruth


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