Get em young.
Before they have the opportunity to aquire critical thinking and reasoning skills.
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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Yep, I believed all this crap, right up until I could really think and started asking questions. Then my faith was suddenly the issue and it wasn't that they couldn't answer my questions, it was that if I stopped asking I would find the answers. ๐
Me being a poor 7 year old in a broken down trailer and seeing the priest's mansion, the same size as the church in a dirt poor town, cured me.
We have a culture of teaching kids to be open to indoctrination and blind acceptance, it's good for making good capitalist consumers. Hell, even atheists and agnostics often fail to see the harm they're doing with shit like Santa Clause.
Either we teach kids to value truth or we don't. We should teach them to appreciate fiction for what it is, without spending years trying to blur that line and then later complaining that they need to "grow up."
I generally agree. I do think there is value in letting children discover truth iteratively over time and at more depth as their ability to comprehend complex topics grows.
We do this all the time in science. Classical mechanics, for example, is functionality enough for the vast vast majority of people despite the fact that we know it to be factually incorrect. We know that it isn't the truth, but the approximations it affords is sufficient for many things.
We live with these abstractions of truth everyday that make our lives livable. Small falsehoods about the nature of reality. "The switch turns the light on." Is a falsehood, but a reasonable abstraction.
I, too, like to believe as many true things as possible. I also would like to know what abstractions are used and how they are used.
Teaching children incremental abstractions isn't all bad... And in many cases they can teach them significantly better than starting at the end result.
I'm not saying that we should teach children to believe in falsehoods intentionally. But letting a 3 year old believe in Santa isn't going to ruin them. Participating in the mythos of Disney for a child's sake won't undermine their ability to critically think later in life.
Reminder it's always projection.
Very true