Column: Should a Parent Facilitate Religious Belief?
When it concerns parenting, a serious question is whether one should raise a child to be religious or not. To put the question in its proper context, it must be noted that the fundamental purpose of religion is to find truth — ultimate truth. Truth is the core value behind religious belief. If one learns something that proves their religion is wrong, and they’re actually treating religion seriously in its proper function, they will reassess their beliefs. This means that, fundamentally, it is not one’s own religion that should ever be instilled into a child, because if one’s religion is actually true, they need not fear the truth. Instead, the goal should be to equip one’s child with the proper tools and a clear head to pursue the truth.
It is the nature of religion to be empirically unsubstantiated. Religion, conceptually, concerns itself with the metaphysical, the experiential and attempts to identify an underlying order in the world that cannot be validated objectively. Therefore, for the religious, as religious truth cannot be confirmed through the traditional scientific methods, it is often the case that one becomes religious through “spiritual experiences” that occur in the conscience. This is important to note because if the way that one comes to religious truth is primarily through experiences and consciousness, it is important that one’s conscience develops in such a way to be impartial so that the truth can be sought after unbiasedly.
The placebo effect is a well known psychological phenomenon that shows the susceptibility of the brain to preexisting beliefs or expectations. The placebo effect is when the psychological state of an individual causes them to react to nonexistent stimuli merely because they believe that the stimuli exists. A great illustration of this is an auditory false alarm. If someone is listening for a certain noise with the expectation that the noise will play, they are likely to react to false alarms in their consciousness even if there’s never an actual noise. A false pretense generates a real reaction in the absence of actual stimuli. This absolutely applies to raising a child to believe that certain preconditions are factual.
If a child is raised their whole life being told that if they do A, B will happen, would they really be able to accept the outcome if when they did A then C or D occured? Or would their mind instead trick them into experiencing B because that’s what they’ve been cultured into accepting?
An example that illustrates this point, particularly in our state of Utah, is the invitation to read the Book of Mormon. Please note: This is not an attack on the doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it just happens to illustrate this point perfectly. LDS members invite people to read the Book of Mormon and pray about it’s truthfulness because they claim that the individual “will gain a testimony of its truth and divinity by the power of the Holy Ghost.” If a child has been told his or her whole life that this will occur, such a huge expectation has been set that if he or she attempts to pray about the book’s truthfulness, it is extremely unlikely that he or she will ever be able to go into the situation objectively. Children’s belief that a specific outcome will be the result of their study, instigated by prior teachings, distorts their own found conclusions based on their personal seeking. If this was a scientific study, the experiment would be deemed biased.
If there’s a scientific study, and someone believes that they know the outcome prior to conducting an experiment, it reveals a bias that will inevitably cloud their study and judgement. Why don’t we treat our religious searches in the same manner? It is much better and more honest to start with a null hypothesis — a hypothesis that asserts that there’s no connection between two things — and if one’s null hypothesis happens to be proved wrong for that individual, then he or she can start to dig deeper and pursue that faith.
The best that we one can do for our children is to raise them in such a way as to become competent individuals who are capable of thinking critically, enabling them to pursue the truth free from bias. After the child has been raised to adulthood in a non-biased way, to the degree which that is possible, the child can be presented with the parents’ religious beliefs as a theory and if they actually contain truth, let the child decide that for themselves. In fact, to raise a child in religious ideology merely indicates that a parent is skeptical of the validity of their own faith. This manifests itself because they are acting as if they believe that if the child is left to their own accord and choice, they will inevitably reject the faith. If their religion is true, what do they have to fear? To indoctrinate a child in a manner such as this is to prioritize ideology over truth and dogma over fact.
We all have values and truths that we want to share with our children, but if these values and truths are unsubstantiated, and there’s a chance that our belief systems are blatantly fraudulent, to teach them to our children as fact would be to ideologize our children. Instead, beliefs need to presented in their proper context, after the child is old enough to think for himself or herself. We need to be very careful with how we raise our children. It is not morally right to take away an individual’s ability to think clearly and to place confines on their search for the truth.
Kristian Fors is a student at Utah State University majoring in Economics and Philosophy and is an opinion columnist for the Utah Statesman. He can be reached at krfors@gmail.com.
Well written, but inherently flawed due to the implicit bias presented in your hypothesis, the moral high ground you claim to stand on requiring “faith” and “hope”(my words not yours) to meet a scientific-esque standard you set, then drive home your point by including a swipe at the LDS community as the perfect example for your posited, yet straw-man like argument, which just solidified your bias. arguing against Judeo-Christian values, which include teaching your children to believe? Boring. Suggesting that such teachings damage a child and his or ability to judge soundly? Stale. You don’t offer anything new. Even if you wanted to appeal to authority due to your educational focus, you still run into the problem that I can an appeal to the efficacy of Jude’s-Christian principles and guidelines to teach my children by referencing the Founding Fathers if you’d like – but that still provides no substantial foundation for a discussion. An appeal to authority provides nothing but “well, George Washington believed so there!” It’s silly. Again, nothing here provides anything new or even interesting. I encourage you to continue your studies and to look for measurable and statistically relevant information before using clearly trod, unoriginal frameworks to present biased and opinionated allegories shaming people for following through with what they believe. The perception of emotional and intellectual violence you so clearly believe is being lathered onto children, by parents, is also diametrically opposed to actual violence engaged in by truly damaging and terrorizing dogmas – so please resist the all-to-often comparison of teaching a child to murder non-believers vs teaching a child to not kill, to not lie, to respect her/his elders, etc. With your education there is so much good you can do for families, for children (a topic that you are clearly passionate about), and for those people going through a crisis of faith. As an old scientist, and someone looking for the original in the mundane, I believe you have the desire to do good, so find a way :-). But this? This is not it.