4 ms·
My mother's mother was religious but her father was an atheist. My mother's religious but my father's an atheist. I'm an atheist. From what I understand, you w
by strken 3y ago
My mother's mother was religious but her father was an atheist. My mother's religious but my father's an atheist. I'm an atheist.
From what I understand, you would say that my mother was indoctrinated and I wasn't, despite both of us growing up in nearly identical households with parents who had the same spread of opinions. This seems like an obvious double standard to me.
She's religious because her school had really good religious role models who taught Mendelian genetics and seemed like respectable adults, and I'm an atheist because I grew up in the Richard Dawkins vs creationism slapfight and didn't get a good impression of religious people during it. It's got nothing to do with indoctrination. Her religious education was arguably less of an indoctrination, since mine was administered by Access Ministries and wasn't particularly nuanced, while hers involved something pretty close to comparative theology.
- kelnos 3y agoI think arguably your story is somewhat exceptional. While there are certainly many households with mixed atheist/theist parents, I don't think that's all that common. Most common would be religious indoctrination from two religious parents. I don't have a good handle on what's more common on the atheist side: indoctrination into the "be against religion at all costs" camp, or the "we don't believe in that stuff, but we're happy to answer questions and help you find answers and learn about religion if you want to" camp (the latter of which I certainly wouldn't classify as indoctrination). My hope is that the latter type of atheist family is more common. But that may just be naive wishful thinking. But I think your situation, with one atheist parent and one theist parent (and same for one set of grandparents), is likely less common than all three categories above. And I would also expect that your mother's situation, where she was introduced to religion during early school years and allowed to make up her own mind, isn't all that common either. But even then, I question how much she really got to make up her own mind. I suspect if she had attended a secular school with no religious role models, she may would have ended up an atheist. I think the point I'm trying to get across is that I think agnostic atheism is generally born out of a lack of indoctrination. Both theism and strong atheism usually come from being indoctrinated into that sort of thing. The fact that your family is different -- and IMHO fairly rare -- doesn't really invalidate that. It just means there are exceptions, which... well... welcome to our messy universe, where precious little is absolute.
- strken 3y agoI think you're simplifying it too much. Kids -- and often adults -- follow the example set by other people without any particular attempt to indoctrinate them. I don't think you need to encourage uncritical belief from your kids when the majority of the people around them believe the same thing. Not to downplay the fact that indoctrination does frequently happen. I just don't think it always happens, and exceptions seem to be quite common for the people around me, though I don't live in the US.