Posted on 11/27/2007 11:53:56 AM PST by Between the Lines
Christian kids are typically sent to Sunday school for lessons on the Bible and morals. For nonbelievers, there's atheist Sunday school.
With an estimated 14 percent of Americans professing to have no religion, according to the Institute for Humanist Studies, some are choosing to send their children to classes that teach ethics without religious belief.
Bri Kneisley sent her 10-year-old son, Damian, to Camp Quest Ohio this past summer after a neighbor had shown him the Bible.
"Damian was quite certain this guy was right and was telling him this amazing truth that I had never shared," said Kneisley, who realized her son needed to learn about secularism, according to Time magazine.
Camp Quest, also dubbed "The Secular Summer Camp," is offered for children of atheists, freethinkers, humanists and other nonbelievers who hold to a "naturalistic, not supernatural world view," the camp website states.
The summer camp, offered across North America and supported by the Institute for Humanist Studies, is designed to teach rational inquiry, critical thinking, scientific method, ethics, free speech, and the separation of religion and government.
Kneisley welcomes the sense of community the camp offers her son.
"He's a child of atheist parents, and he's not the only one in the world," she said, according to Time.
Atheist and humanist programs are expected to pop up in such cities as Phoenix, Albuquerque, N.M., and Portland, Ore., and adult nonbelievers are leaning on such secular Sunday schools to help teach their kids values and how to respond to the Christian majority in the United States.
Outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins argues that teaching faith to children can be dangerous, noting the possibility of extremism.
"The point about teaching children that faith is a virtue is that you're teaching them that you don't have to justify what you do, you can simply shelter behind the statement 'that's my faith and you're not to question that,'" he argued in a debate with Christian apologist John Lennox last month.
A recent study by Ellison Research, however, found that most Americans who attended church as a child say their past worship attendance has had a positive impact on them. The majority, including those who no longer currently attend religious services, said their attendance at church as a child gave them a good moral foundation and that they are glad they attended.
Yet today, nonbelievers want their children to participate in Sunday school the secular way.
"I'm a person that doesn't believe in myths," says Hana, 11, who attends the Humanist Community Center in Palo Alto, Calif., according to Time. "I'd rather stick to the evidence."
If a Muslim doesn't care that you think it's wrong for him to explode himself and twenty other people, does that make you wrong?
You wanted a rational argument, please put aside your emotions and address it logically.
How long before they’re forced to accommodate all other “religions” in with their own “non-religion” in the same manner that the ‘Freedom FROM Religion’ pukes demand from Christians?
*Crickets Chirping*
Regarding your inalienable right to life, you are confusing the term. The right is inalienable except for God (obviously we all die).
I’m less sure of the following but: I think also that the collection of words is what is important “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” . . . this is freedom from an arbitrary government ruled by men with no limit on its power. Also, realize this grounding of rights in God was done in a political document and as a political act. We are not looking at Biblical theology here but the Founder’s explanation of their right of rebellion. The grounding of rights in God rings true but to raise the phrase to the level of scripture does not.
A right is something that should not be violated by other people. A clot blocking coronary arteries and causing cardiac arrest does not violate one's rights.
If a right can be given or taken away arbitrarily, it is not inalienable.
I’m less sure of the following but: I think also that the collection of words is what is important “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” . . . this is freedom from an arbitrary government ruled by men with no limit on its power.
If the rights are truly inalienable they apply whether one is a US citizen, a Brazilian, or stranded on an island with other victims of a plane crash. If you're dropped on Greenland with a dozen other people, simply being out of US jurisdiction does not make it ok to rape and murder each other.
Also, realize this grounding of rights in God was done in a political document and as a political act.
Does that mean you are devaluing the significance of our right not to be killed, enslaved, raped, imprisoned unfairly, or exiled?
So ... is stealing right or wrong? Please prove your answer rationally.
Logically, your premises have no connection to each other or to your conclusion. You did not construct a syllogism.
I do not want to be hurt.
I am equal to others.
Therefore I should not steal.
I do not want to be hurt.
Stealing hurts others.
Therefore I should not steal.
(still doesn’t work even connecting the two premises)
I do not want to be hurt.
I hurt others who are my equals if I steal.
Therefore I should not steal.
(still doesn’t work . . . why not! The connecting premise is “I should not hurt others who are my equal” but that is the conclusion you are trying to prove . . . it is circular).
The premises individually don’t lead to the conclusion of altruism either: Because I do not want to be hurt I should not steal from others even when I can get away from it. Because I am equal to others I should not steal from others even when I can get away with it.
Sure there is. It's a more effective evolutionary strategy. Animals that cooperate and socialize tend to do better than animals that don't.
Therefore: It is logically consistent that I should treat others as I would like to be treated.
I don't want to be stolen from, it's fairly safe to say I share this opinion with pretty much all of humanity, so therefore I should not steal from others.
Are you saying cooperation is a non-zero-sum game? :-D
Exactly, "acts of God" are not a violation of your rights.
An inanimate clot is not a moral agent. The effects of such are amoral.
A person is a moral agent. The actions of such may be either moral or immoral.
is designed to teach rational inquiry, critical thinking, scientific method, ethics,
That's funny, all concepts developed in the most part by past generations of God fearing men...
And abandoned in the present by many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, sad to say.
It is all about motives. While the general definition of 'altruism' attributes no selfish motives what so ever to the act being done, the scientific definition attributes the motive of one's own genetic preservation to the act.
Exactly right. What I think you don’t get about Old Testament history is that the acts of the Israelites as commanded by God were an act of God, the same as a bolt of lightnening or a blood clot. It is where they acted contrary to the word of God that they sinned. You are making yourself the judge, applying the Christian standard that you have internalized to God himself without acknowledging the creator and his sovereignty over his creation . . . which is essential to make sense of the Old Testament and the New Testament. That standard of right and wrong derives from God and is only meaningful in terms of our relationship with God. If God chose he could have made a world where a rap on the knuckes felt good and was an act of kindness and we’d all go about giving each other uninvited cracks on the knuckles and calling it good.
Please explain why the general definition excludes helping members of one’s family and ingroup. So far you seem to be saying you exclude them because the scientific definition includes them, which doesn’t make sense.
I wouldn’t say the scientific definition attributes any motive, it just describes what is. Certainly ants don’t defend their colony to the death because they think, “I cannot breed, so I must do everything I can to protect the colony so my mother can survive to pass on more of the genes that I share.” They just do it. In the same way humans don’t sit around calculating what percentage of genes they share with the people they might save (we didn’t even know how altruism developed until recently, so for most of humanity’s history this wasn’t an option, and even now that we understand altruism we would think it ridiculous!), they just do it. Certainly we think we’re doing it for other reasons—love, compassion, patriotism—but we wouldn’t feel these emotions if they had not been useful in engineering humans to act altruistically.
I guess they learn the ethics of environmentalism and global warming.
If it were truly good to do these things, you ought to find them praiseworthy, glory in them, and joy to do them. I hope if you imagine yourself as one of those men you would instead feel sick to your stomach. If not, you're a sociopath.
If God chose he could have made a world where a rap on the knuckes felt good and was an act of kindness and we’d all go about giving each other uninvited cracks on the knuckles and calling it good.
In that case it would be good. As it is, no one wants to be disembowelled, so doing so because "God" told you to is evil.
If you ever wanted proof that atheism and humanism are religions, then examples where they act like religion would be invaluable.
This is a clear-cut example of these acting like religions all the way down to copying them.
A shocking assertion, I know...
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