Atheists raising their children to be religious; I'm screwed

[Darth Wong]

I never understood how people can say (aside from speaking from irrationality), how religious-based ethics are in any way superior to humanist ethics.

It's simple enough: they are incapable of grasping any form of ethics other than Appeal to Authority. Even when they discuss secular ethics, what do they do? They put a secular Authority up on a pedestal. For example: see American Founding Fathers.

[Rye]

Kids take information based on authority to begin with, for obvious survival reasons. Some don't grow out of it. God is the ultimate "Father" who, like Santa and other fictional parental tools, sees everything you do and notes it down, so you can't get away scot-free when you do something bad when the parents aren't watching. I can understand why parents would use such fictional entities in making their kids behave, especially when they're not there to supervise, even if I don't agree with it. It's a carrot and stick.

A kid can quickly learn to go down two avenues for any given course of action: do what's right, or do what you can get away with. I'm guessing these ex-catholics conveniently ignore the second group from their own memories, or even when they made the second choice.

[Justforfun000]

Darth Wong Wrote:

It's simple enough: they are incapable of grasping any form of ethics other than Appeal to Authority. Even when they discuss secular ethics, what do they do? They put a secular Authority up on a pedestal. For example: see American Founding Fathers.

Thinking back, it's interesting to recognize the difference between people with a strong personal mentality, and the "sheep". I was always questioning everything. Maverick oddball in all senses of the word and I was proud of it. The most important thing people have to figure out is the "why" to their beliefs or actions. At the end of the day, good morals that happen to be a small portion of some religions is no argument for the religion ITSELF. People in fact use this as an unfounded justification that if SOME tenets of Christianity are unquestionably positive, then the other beliefs should be given the benefit of the doubt. However, it's basically another Appeal to Authority fallacy, isn't it?