ChristInsanity

the-quiet1:

christinsanity:

All of them do, all of them…

Interesting paradox for anti-theists, if you ask me.

If religion is the product of indoctrination, then how is the argument of “it’s different from racism and sexism because you choose it” valid? If it is, on the other hand, choice; then a good part of anti-theistic commentary falls apart, seeing as it’s largely based on critiquing religion for supposed indoctrination.

Well I don’t see any paradox in there(*). First - religion includes racism and sexism in most cases, while neither racism nor sexism include religion.

Second - indoctrination is a separate issue. You can indoctrinate a person into a religion, racism or sexism as indoctrination itself requires indoctrinator to strip  a person being indoctrinated out of his ability to ask questions.You can do that with all three concepts.

Third - indoctrination and choice don’t exclude themselves. It is just that having been indoctrinated you think you are making obvious and obviously correct choice while not asking any question whatsoever regarding it’s validity and validity of premises this choice is based on.

Last, but not least, two ideas may be subject to same or similar processes (in a specific regard or as a whole) while not being correlated. With young and fragile mind you can do many ugly things - you can make a young person believe she is fat no matter what weight she is, you can make him believe he is a piece of shit and only worshiping a man-made idol might save him, you can make them believe the leader of your country is God Descended and his death is a life-breaking tragedy or you can make them believe the race they originate from is somehow worse than their own.

Indoctrination has many faces but one core issue - “Don’t ask questions! Just DON’T”.

I don’t know that argument(*) but it seems it is somehow twisted. As I said - choice and indoctrination doesn’t exclude themselves as these are issues of to separate domains - latter just makes sure the former is done according to ones wishes and not on a basis of sound and logic premises. If you take that argument literally then there is a paradox, indeed. It doesn’t matter though, cause the argument has an invalid construction, something like ‘if evolution is true then why don’t we live in space’ thing, if you know what I mean…