Raised with religion

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Fusilli

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With most of the religious topics going around focusing on people's personal beliefs, I was wondering what people thought about people who are raised with a religion. By this I mean people who are born into a family who all follow a certain religion, and make commitments to that religion at a young age.

Personally, I am catholic, but if people ask now I will usually say that I am *supposed* to be catholic, or that I am agnostic. My whole family is catholic, and I was baptised before I could even talk let alone think for myself. This is one of the major flaws in the Catholic religion I think, as the whole concept of religion is based on faith and your personal beliefs. Even when I made my communion/was confirmed aged about 8, I had no idea of what I believed. I'm not going to go into what I believe though, as it is irrelevant (also I don't want to start any 'atheism v. religion' wars), but I know that there are a lot more extreme cases than this. I'm lucky now that I can form my own opinion without fear of being stoned to death, but there are a lot of religions/parts of the world where people are stuck with the religion they were born with, along with the strict rules and morals than come with it, regardless of what they personally feel.


Opinions?
 
It's all bullshit being brought up that way. It's just as bad as, if not worse than forcing your beliefs down someone's throat, since at a young age your mind is so impressionable that you can't form your own opinion for or against the matter. People should be given the choice of what they want to believe, and not have to be told what they want to believe.
 
I do agree that it probably isn't the right way to bring someone up but it all depends how you go about it. I've been brought up in Catholicism but have never had it shoved down my throat and once I reached an age where I could truly form my own opinions and views on religion my family respected that and put no pressure on me to think otherwise.
While its true that no religion should be forced on impressionable minds at such a young age it can be helpful for them to experience some form of religion in order to more easily have your own more well rounded view as you get older. It all depends what part religion plays in your life and if it is forced upon you in the sense that you are given no choice but to believe what you are told then that is obviously wrong
 
I personally was sent to a Sunday school and church for a few years when I was little, since my family was/is Catholic. After learning a whole lot of stuff, I decided that I didn't believe in all that and chose not to go anymore when I was 7, I believe. I don't know why, but I was a very opinionated and dubious child.

Now I'm 17 and Atheist, but I'm not exactly sure why. It's not like the religion was forced on me, because I actually had a good time at Sunday school and stuff, I think all of it was just too overwhelming for me.

So, I think it's alright to be raised on religion as I was (in moderate amounts) so the child can one day form their own opinions about it, I have a couple friends whose parents basically forced them to follow their respective religions, and I don't really believe that's how children should be educated.
 
thats the main problem that non religious people have with religion, and its that the children are indoctrinated, not given the choice to choose whether to believe or not.

plus sunday schools are actually fun, i enjoyed them, or so im told:wacky:
and thats a great way to not get kids to think about what they are believing in.

and I was baptised before I could even talk
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thats not unique, i was baptised when i was about 7 months i think. but baptisms arent bad imo.

however im sure that there are good things about children being born into religion
 
Placebo said:
thats not unique, i was baptised when i was about 7 months i think. but baptisms arent bad imo.
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My point was that some children (more specifically, babies) are pushed into religion without a say in it themselves, I just used baptism as an example. Sure, it's nothing big in most cases as a lot of people grow up to develop their own opinions, whether it be agreeing with the religion they were brought up with, or severely disagreeing, or somewhere inbetween like I am. However, in some religions (or even very strict christian families) people are forced into a religion which they are stuck with, regardless of whether they even believe in God/the teachings/etc.

I'm not saying that it's bad for parents to bring a child up with their religion, hell no. It can be really beneficial in some ways as it can broaden their knowledge and help them to form their own opinion. Having a religion forced on you is another thing though, and like I said (or think I said) in my previous post, completely defeats the general point of a religion.
 
I was baptised when I was a baby, couldnt talk either lol. And raised catholic. But since I seen Dogma back in high school (lol, I know!) I started to question is my reilgion all its cracked up to be. My whole family were baptised, but dont follow reilgion as they see it as a means of control and believe life is waht you make it.

I question my faith a hell of alot and do get angry very easily when bad things happen to good people and yet rapists, murderers and thiefs walk around.
 
I will personally raise my kids to be spiritual, but I will not shove religion down their throats. I will tell stories and have books from multiple religions and allow them to talk to me about religion when they are ready.

So what's the difference? I think raising a child to be spiritual is to teach them wonder. "There are many mysteries in this world and they are gifts" rather than "we have a God and a big book and you gotta do as they say!"

...but maybe I feel that way because I'm Wiccan and Wicca has a strict 'no proselytizing' policy.

...but even then, I wouldn't be raising my kids to be witches, because that is an incredibly hard thing to be in a Christian nation.
 
I was baptised a catholic before my earliest memories. And in theory it all sounds good and all. But then I notice few people follow what's preached as they should and there are many hypocrites out there.

I decided to break away and call myself Christian. I'm of no true denomination. I believe in the Christian God pretty much. My beliefs do differ in other ways though. I see the Christian God as being of a chaotic nature rather than a lawful one. Why? Because to me chaos represents an unlimited creative/destructive potential. I see it all around me. If God was lawful I feel that the world would be a very different place.

Just what I feel though. And I feel if I impose my beliefs on others, I'm forcing them to conform in a way they really shouldn't. To that extent I'll say I don't believe in raising someone in a specific religion when they don't really have the ability to know what they're doing.

I must say I admire Anthiena's approach. A spiritual side can be a great thing. To the extent I'd greatly consider a strong spiritual side important. Unless it also leads to a person losing their freedoms. Some spiritual beliefs seem to require it...
 
I was never raised to have a spiritual side, so maybe I am missing something that's important, eh?

I think the fact that I've seen so many bad things come from religion (wars, crime, priest scandals, crazy TV religious folk), I moved away from it and turned into a very straightforward and stoic person. I mean, I have a fun-loving side and I smile a lot and socialize enough to drive my teachers insane, but sometimes I can just be brutally honest and apathetic. When something goes wrong with me, I either blame myself or others. When something unexplainable happens, I don't know who to blame besides others. I don't think having a religion (even from birth) makes someone a better person exactly, but I just think it affects their personality and mindset. Either way, I think how parents raise their children affects them as adults over how exposed the children are too religion.

I like the idea of having parents expose their children to a variety of religions/beliefs. It might overwhelm some adolescents, but allowing them to have a choice after studying thoroughly should make a better impact on them.

Yup.
 
This is one of my main problems with religion. Isn't it indoctrination? Most theists believe in the faith that was given to them, given to them by their family, their culture, their geographical location. If you were born of Saudi parents, you would almost certainly grow up to be a muslim. What you believe ends up being random. Children are not allowed to consider all options (atheism and agnosticism included) and I think it's pretty disturbing.
 
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Why did I not find this thread earlier... EXCELLENT thread indeed. Forgive me if I speak my mind for a sec.

Anyways on with it, I know exactly of the vile stuff you speak of. I was force fed early in life to believe a certain doctrine, a certain religion and be ingrained to be a Presbyterian. My father was an elder of the church we went too and our friends and family were basically all of the same.

I was baptized before I was born, so no choice was given to me. So therefore to be honest, I have no idea if I really was baptized, being a skeptic and all. Two of my Uncles were Presbyterian Ministers and so at the time I was just a drone, living my life free .. (a kid of course). I can't be harsh on myself, because I was just living..

My parents put me in a private school elementary, then a private high school and both were christian oriented schools. They did this for good schooling, but also to shelter me from people who actually experienced life for what it was. I respect that still as of today.

When I was 13 I woke up from that little fairy tale with my cousin and his endings and it was like a bad freakin dream. I saw how vicious the little bastards were when one person strayed from the norm. My good friend left our school from all of the bullhockey that was brought about because his father was of muslim descent. The hypocrisy that befell me was utterly shameful. A bunch of extreme right wing drones who only wanted to play their football and then go hunting on the weekends. If you didn't have school pride it was as if you kicked their puppy, better yet backed over their puppy with a semi. You think I didn't make an attempt to fit in, but the more I tried the more unnatural it looked. I started reading words of the bible and questioning them for the first time.. putting two and two together I knew some of this was very fallible. What it all came down to was maybe the Bible was created by man in order to instill values in their kids, not to be taken literally, which would make complete sense for me. The only problem is .. these people were taking it literally. When I admitted I wasn't a christian and maybe one day would.. people were like.. "tyler.... I know you will be one, one day.. you have always been a good person.." A good person doesn't mean you a christian..

Bah. I will be what I will be, because its all I know how to be. You can't expect your kids to walk perfectly in religion if they were brainwashed it as a kid and had no choice. Even today my paps keeps bugging me to go to church on a regular basis. I'm 24, can a man think for himself?

"Standing above the crowd, he had a voice that was strong and loud. Swallowed his facade, because I am so eager to identify with. Someone above the crowd, someone who seems to feel the same, someone prepared to lead the way in.. would you die for me?" - Tool - Eulogy
 
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I was raised, no.. *forced* into a religious belief as a child. I was put through Catholic school. I went to church every Wednesday and Sunday. I went to Youth Groups every Sunday evening. I hated it.

I don't think it is right to raise children with a specific religion. Taking them to church is perfectly acceptable but forcing them to believe or continue to go after they make their own decision based on that religion is flat out wrong.

I do not regret my time spent in Catholic school, per-say, but I do wish my education was a bit better. I was not taught any sort of "English" course until my 5th grade year. The education system in the Catholic school I attended was set to put religion first. I do blame my childhood for my Atheist feelings now but I appreciate that. Being forced to read what the Bible stated gave me strength to interpret it. I found that what I took from the Bible was not necessarily what I believed in.

To each their own. I think children should be allowed to make their own religious paths.
 
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I was raised in a secular household. Thank (not God) Cake for that.

It seems all very well for chastising parents for what I've frequently heard called 'mental abuse' (and it does seem to be appropriate), but, put yourself in the parent's shoes: God, is essentially to you, like your child's fifth Grandparent that lives a long way away. You're going to want your child to believe in him, (particularly if he's a vengeful God).

I disagree that children have no choice about being atheist/agnostic if they're brought up in a secular household. Agnosticism is simply a religious blank canvas, to do with what you will. Atheism is what happens when you decide you didn't want a painting anyway.
Speaking from own personal experiences, my -->spirituality<-- has fluctuated quite a bit, and I do believe that there is probably some supernatural superforce somewhere. I just don't believe it's in any of the scripture of the desert dogma.
 
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It is interesting that those who shout Child abuse! loudest are the very same persons who have no objective justification for their moral stance on the matter. If all we amount to is matter in motion, then there is no transcendent moral authority standing watch over our actions. There is only the blind circumstance of genetic and psychological conditioning, and the neural impulses you experience about the matter, which are commonly identified as outrage, are as accidental and as cosmically inconsequential as the impulses, commonly labeled "satisfaction", that are buzzing around in a Catholic nun's head when she raps a young whipper-snapper's knuckles for being insubordinate.

Sure, you can try to fool yourself with some existential drivel about "creating your own meaning," as Richard Dawkins has apparently opted to do. But aside from it being unclear how undifferentiated blobs of organic goo can create meaningful meaning in a meaningless universe, this approach also subtly admits that you aren't outraged over "child abuse" on objective grounds, but on the relativistic grounds of "your own meaning."

Additionally, if all we amount to is matter in motion, which motion is determined solely by blind laws of nature, then why is there so much bombast about being "free" thinkers who are allowed to "choose for themselves" whether to accept religious propositions?

In all their petty objections to theism, atheists cannot seem to shake the cultural memory of God.
 
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Well my family is a bit religious about things but not very much since we mostly don't do that kind of things.

But I think religions are sort of bad to what I've seen, read, and heard about. v.v
 
I was raised in a Baptist church, and baptized at 5 or 6. I definitely did it under my own steam, and was very hip with the idea of God and good and evil, but I knew extremely little of the world, and nothing about other religions.

Many sects of Christianity will tell you "once saved, always saved." Which, among other things, implies that if you renounce your faith, it never was real in the first place. Which I will tell you is crap, because I believed about as hard as someone can before around 13.

There were a couple of hiccups before then. Dinosaurs, obviously, did not fit in with the story of the origin of the world I'd heard in Sunday school. But, then three things really got me: first, one of my best friends was/is an atheist. I tried to talk to her about it, but it became pretty obvious that pushing it further would only kill our friendship. The idea that I could go to heaven and she couldn't disturbed me, not to mention a long list of great thinkers and artists who also wouldn't be there. Second, I was more than a little in love with this friend. I was a girl, she was a girl, this presented a problem. My faith said that was a sin, but nothing about how I felt felt wrong, there may have been some lust in it, but there was a lot more simple adoration. Third, I started philosophizing too much: would heaven be a nice place? I had been told before that in heaven, we wouldn't even remember those who were not there; that would cause us pain, and there is no pain in heaven. Whether that's true or not (it's certainly not Biblical) I began to think about what a perfect place would be like. Boring. We would stop striving for anything if we had everything. Pain is necessary to happiness, neither can exist without the other.

To assuage my doubts, I turned to the Bible, which was no help at all. Jehovah is a right jealous, cruel asshole, especially in the Old Testament. And what kind of entity wants to be worshiped, anyway? I wanted no part of such a God, even if I burned for it. And even though Jesus is a pretty cool guy, I've serious doubts about miracles and resurrections. Everything we know about the man was written after the fact, in an era where news traveled by word of mouth. That his story was changed and embellished is far more likely than not. He was wise man and teacher, sure, doing the best he could with the people and time he was born into.

I'm something like a Taoist, and something like a Wiccan, and something like an agnostic now, and their words, and those of Buddhism, and Hinduism, and a few secular authors, make a lot more sense, and are a much greater comfort to me.

So there's my story, and here are my thoughts on the subject: It's only natural that you should rear your kids in your own beliefs, that's okay. But make sure they know something about other religions and patterns of thought that isn't filtered through bigotry. They're going to be exposed to it, or come up with it themselves, sooner or later, and it would be better for them if the floor of their faith didn't fall out from under them like it did for me. Make sure they really understand. Make sure YOU really understand.
 
I'm glad that I found this thread. (Epic thread by the way.) I have some first-hand experiences with the subject.

I was born in the backwoods state known as Louisiana. Where you'll be damned to find 2 atheists living within 10 miles of each other. Everyone that I knew in that state was a god fearing individual. I was born and raised with two religions actually. My Father was a Baptist, and my Mother went Pentecostal.

I went to both churches alternatively. Pentecostal one week, Baptist the other. For the longest time, I believed everything that was spewing out of the preacher's mouth. I believed in God, I prayed, and I always assumed that God would take care of me.

This continued for years. It wasn't until that things were going so ridiculously horrible in my life that I started to question God. So the first natural reaction was "I'll pretend God doesn't exist! That'll stick it to the man!"

This, also continued for years. I still went to church, I still believed, but I questioned, and I questioned hard.

It wasn't until my 9th grade year that I finally broke free. It had gotten to the point that I just believed that the mere concept of God was ridiculous. That's all it took, a few years of thinking, some logic, and self-preservation to break free of all my beliefs, and I was now happy.

With religion I was practically a whiny emo kid that was always trying to do the right thing. Without it, I was happy, I was free.

So in my opinion, it's no okay to be raised as such. Everyone should be able to make up their own mind about it.

(You should have seen the look on my parents face when I told them that God wasn't real. Fucking priceless.)
 
I was brought up in an open minded family. Which I am very grateful for in the long run. It has allowed me to keep an open mind not only when it comes to religion but many other matters I have approached in life. My parents do not follow any religion and as far as I am aware my Grandma is a Christian. I say "as far as I am aware" because she never discusses it and is very relaxed about her opinions. She is a very open minded woman who despite being of an older generation and woman of faith, is will to accept changes that newer generations make.

Anyway, I was Baptised as an Infant, more than likely before I could speak, walk or even crawl. Though as my mother isn't a Christian it may seem a little odd to some that she would of had me Baptised. How ever the reason she did this was to allow me the choice if I desire, to follow a Christian faith. Even though I do not follow Christianity, the choice is always there for me if do decide to change.

Personally I don't agree with raising a child into religion but I am not part of that religion. I don't know what is like to have that belief and passion in faith that seems to make people happy. Of course that does not mean that a child should be forced into religion but some parents obviously feel compelled to give their children the happiness they received through their religion. We don't know every parents reason to place their child into their religion but I still don't agree with it. If the child is still given the choice to move onto something else then I'm fine with it.

What I believe doesn't really matter, but what does matter is that when I do eventually have children I will be taking the same approach to religion as my parents and allowing them to choose. Of course they will be supported and will be made aware of the choices they can make but ultimately they will have free choice to choose their own path.
 
mothcorrupteth said:
Sure, you can try to fool yourself with some existential drivel about "creating your own meaning," as Richard Dawkins has apparently opted to do. But aside from it being unclear how undifferentiated blobs of organic goo can create meaningful meaning in a meaningless universe, this approach also subtly admits that you aren't outraged over "child abuse" on objective grounds, but on the relativistic grounds of "your own meaning."

Additionally, if all we amount to is matter in motion, which motion is determined solely by blind laws of nature, then why is there so much bombast about being "free" thinkers who are allowed to "choose for themselves" whether to accept religious propositions?
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Well you have to understand what your parents teach you, you are naive enough to follow at younger age. You don't have enough intellect at the time to decipher that your parents will do whatever it takes for you to believe in a certain subject. Whether it be attending copious amounts of sunday school, youth group, going to church on a Sunday to Sunday basis, going to Mass on Wednesday nights.. going on missions trips.. whatever it takes.

Also when people say they were sheltered as a kid, I laugh. Why? because I too was sheltered. Know what means? You were politely lied to in a PC light. As in lied to constantly to make sure you blame everyone but yourself because of the new excuses given to why you can't hang out with this group of people. I've been told that because this person was a non christian or because this person had less money endowed, that I should not be able to hang out with them.

That's Freakin shiznit! The divide is very deep when raising your kid. You tell them a lie early on and it will come back to bite you in the ass. By conforming them to a religion because it was the way you were raised, doesn't mean they won't question it one day. If they question it and you still make them go.. then you have hell to pay. I understand you want to keep your kids safe. One day though, they will wake up to reality, that the people who are atheists, agnostics, and theists are one in the same. They are all good people, and they should be able to hang out with whoever.

In all their petty objections to theism, atheists cannot seem to shake the cultural memory of God.
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Good opinion. But only an opinion.
 
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