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CronoDAS comments on Open Thread: April 2010 - Less Wrong
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My mother's sister has two children. One is eleven and one is seven. They are both being given an unusually religious education. (Their mother, who is Catholic, sent them to a prestigious Jewish pre-school, and they seem to be going through the usual Sunday School bullshit.) I find this disturbing and want to proselytize for atheism to them. Any advice?
ETA: Their father is non-religious. I don't know why he's putting up with this.
I wouldn't proselytize too directly - you want to stay on their (and their mother's) good side, and I doubt it would be very effective anyways. You're better off trying to instill good values - open-mindedness, curiosity, ability to think for oneself, and other elements of rationality & morality - rather than focusing on religion directly. Just knowing an atheist (you) and being on good terms with him could help lead them to consider atheism down the road at some point, which is another reason why it's important to maintain a good relationship. Think about the parallel case of religious relatives who interfere with parents who are raising their kids non-religiously - there are a lot of similarities between their situation and yours (even though you really are right and they just think they are) and you could run into a lot of the same problems that they do.
I haven't had the chance to try it out personally, but Dale McGowan's blog seems useful for this sort of thing, and his books might be even more useful.
I think that's some very good advice, and I'd like to elaborate a bit. The thing that made me ditch my religion was the fact that I already had a secular, socially liberal, science-friendly worldview, and it clashed with everything they said in church. That conflict drove my de-conversion, and made it easier for me to adjust to atheism. (I was even used to the idea, from most of my favorite authors mentioning that they weren't religious. Harry Harrison, in particular, had explicitly atheistic characters as soon as his publishers would let him.)
So, yeah, subtlety is your friend here.
Dangerous situation!
How do the parents feel about science and science fiction? I believe that stuff has good effects.
One thing to do is make sure the kids understand that the Bible is just a bunch of stories. My mom teaches Reform Jewish Sunday school and makes this clear to her students. I make fun of her for cranking out little atheists.
Teaching that the bible is a bunch of stories written by multiple humans over time is not nearly as offensive as preaching atheism. Start there. This bit of knowledge should be enough to get your young relatives thinking about religion, if they want to start thinking about it.
I'm not speaking from experience here, but that doesn't stop me from having opinions.
I don't believe this is an emergency. Are the kid's lives being affected negatively by the religion? What do they think of what they're being taught?
Actually, this could be an emergency if they're being taught about Hell. Are they? Is it haunting them?
Their minds aren't a battlefield between you and religious school-- what they believe is, well not exactly their choice because people aren't very good at choosing, but more their choice than yours.
I recommend teaching them a little thoughtful cynicism, with advertisements as the subject matter.
I haven't seen any evidence that they're being bothered by anything.
Mostly, I just want to make it clear that, unlike a lot of other things they're learning in school, there are a lot of people who have good reasons to think the stories aren't true - to make it clear that there's a difference between "Moses led the Jews out of Egypt" and "George Washington was the first President of the United States."
Introduce them to really cool, socially near, atheists. In particular, provide contact with attractive opposite-gender children who are a couple of years older and are atheists.
Teach them the basis of bayesian reasoning without any connection to religion. This will help them in more ways and will lay the foundation for later when they naturally start questioning religion. Also their parents wont have anything against it you merely introduce it as a method for physics or chemistry or with the standard medical examples.
Possibly introducing them to some of the content in A Human's Guide to Words, such as dissolving the question, would lead them to theological noncognitivism. The nice thing about that as opposed to direct atheism is it's more "insidious" because instead of saying, "I don't believe" the kids would end up making more subtle points, like, "What do you even mean by omnipotent?" This somehow seems a lot less alarming to people, so it might bother the parents much less, or even seem like "innocent" questioning.
Speaking as someone who is seeing that sort of thing happening on the inside, I'm really not sure how you should deal with it. Even teaching traditional rationality doesn't help if religion is wrapped up in their social identity. I myself was lucky, in that I never did believe in god. I almost believe that the reason I came through sane was my IQ, although I'm sure that cannot be entirely correct. Getting them to socialize with other children who don't believe in god, or if that's not possible, children who believe in very different gods might help. I would also suggest you introduce them to fiction with strong rationality memes - Eliezer's Harry Potter fanfic [edited, see below] is the kind of thing that might appeal to children, although it has too much adult material.
Um... Chapter 7 is not the child-friendliest chapter in the world. Teen-friendly, maybe. Not child-friendly.
Ah, yes. Totally slipped my mind. Part of the problem might be that I was reading that kind of material by age 10 so I'm a bit desensitized. However, I continue to think that the overall package is generally appealing to children. Perhaps delivery of a hard copy that has been judiciously edited might work.
True story: when I was 8 or so, I loved Piers Anthony's Xanth books. So much that I went and read all of his other books.
Even Xanth isn't harmless throughout.
Xanth's dark places are a heck of a lot more kid-friendly than, say, Bio of a Space Tyrant.
Of course. But I can't think of a single Piers Anthony item that I'd actually recommend to a child. Or, for that matter, to an adult, but that's because Anthony's work sucks, not because it's inappropriate.
I'd classify his... preoccupation... with young teenage girls paired with much older men as "inappropriate".
This is one of those "stupid questions" to which the answer seems obvious to everyone but me:
What's wrong with a 16-year-old and a 30-year-old having sex?
Most of my aversion to that theme is (just?) cultural preference. I cannot tell whether I would object to the practice in another culture without more information about, for example, any physical or emotional trauma involved, reproductive implications, degree of physical maturity and the opportunity for the girls to self-determine their own lives. I would then have to compare the practice with 'forced schooling' from our culture to decide which is more disgusting.
Right. And I would consider that inappropriateness sufficient to refrain from recommending the books to a child. The fact that they also suck is necessary to extend that lack of recommendation to adults. Sorry if it was unclear.
Having read quite a bit of Piers Anthony's work, I noticed that it got consistently worse as he got older. I still think A Spell for Chameleon was pretty good (and so was Tarot, if you don't mind the deliberate squick-inducing scenes), but anything he wrote after, say, 1986 is probably best avoided - everything had a tendency to turn into either pure fluff or softcore pornography.
The entire concept of Chameleon is nasty. Her backstory sets up all of the men from her village as being thrilled to take advantage of "Wynne" and universally unwilling to give "Fanchon" the time of day, while about half of them like "Dee". (Anthony is notable for being outrageously sexist towards both genders at once.) Her lifelong ambition is to sit halfway between the two extremes permanently, sacrificing the chance to ever have her above-average intellect because she wants male approval and it's conditional on being pretty (while she recognizes that being as stupid as she sometimes gets is a hazard). Bink is basically presented as a saint for putting up with the fact that she's sometimes ugly for the sake of getting "variety". It's implied that in her smart phase he values her as a conversation partner but actually touching her then would be out of the question. I haven't read the book in years, but I don't remember Chameleon having any complaints about the dubious sort of acceptance Bink offers; she just loves him because he's the protagonist and love means never having to say you want any accommodations whatsoever from your partner, apparently.
I still have some fondness for Macroscope. The gender stuff is creepy, but the depiction of an interstellar information gift culture seemed very cool at the time. I should reread it and see how it compares to how the net has developed.