Raising a child in a faith isn't brainwashing them (unless you actually DO brainwash them.) When you raise a child you generally impart your own moral standards upon that child so it's not exactly farout to raise them with the same religious beliefs as you. They'll reach a point in their lives where if they don't want to be *insert religion* anymore, they won't.

On the other hand, you could raise a child with absolutely no religion and just wait and see what they wind up believing, if anything. I don't think anyone can really say way is better than another.

Yeah, see, I don't see the current educationnal system achieving that a lot. The current modern society, in fact ; it's not really a byproduct of the educationnal system per se but more of civilization as a whole. See Iran's stunning 95% muslim population. Human beings are not fundamentally rationnal; they are instinctively emotionnal. We had to evolve that way because lions don't exactly make for great debating partners. But I digress; my point is that while, in theory, a sensible moral education can lead a child to come to a rationnal decision concerning his faith, most of the time the fallacy of Appeal to tradition will creep up in their minds until it becomes a self-imposed belief.

You're correct that the alternative is no guarantee either; a child raised in absolute rationnality will likely lash out when he comes into contact with the emotionnally-laden modern society and reject the notions taught to him.

In the end I concede that it is certainly one's right as legal guardian to choose the moral upbringing of a child, but I theorize that the right balance of religion and rationnality would be more beneficial to all.

Perfectly clear he means the latter.

He was being well mannered in accepting not all JW's are the same. Oddly even though you were raised in the faith you do not. I have been caught by pushy people on my doorstep more than once. I don't know anyone who when speaking about them hasn't said that.

You may expect that but it is the height of bad manners to reduce someone down to simply their sexuality. I feel the same way as him yet Elias and I are pretty different so I doubt your simplistic answer is the right one. Humanity's main fault is the need to stick people in boxes, to label people us and them. It is born from our need to be in a pack when we were probably still in the trees I suspect. I find religion fascinating and happily spent years studying it but I would be the first to admit it plugs directly into the human fear of not belonging to the pack and the need to come down on people they perceive as outsiders.

I note despite you claiming to have left your church your mind has not followed your body as much as you like to think it has.

Taste o' your own medicine, eh boy?


One could expect that, but I've felt the way I've felt about all religion since before I knew what sexuality was. Also, I think raising a child with a certain religion, blind to other religions, is no worse than a JW asking a child if he can talk to them about religion.

My favorite part is that you just know how they all act. You're pretty omniscient, dood. My favorite kind of debates are ones where you bring up the other side, and the guy either just ignores it or says your wrong because of how he was raised. Or just bring up that you're gay. Whatever works and doesn't address the point. I'm done with this troll ass topic.

Overpopulation=/=Good but it isn't causing famine. unless you are speaking of very local cases which usually have other contributing factors. Even then there is more then enough food in this world to feed every body.

They don't own their child's mind, but part of being a parent is teaching your kids your beliefs. When they stop being children, they can make up their own minds.

Laughably naive of you. You don't even need to look beyond yourself to know this is not true - even though you seem to be in denial.

I should be more specific.

You have the right to teach your kid whatever they want. You can set rules for them to follow under your roof. However, it's the child's responsibility/choice to make use of how you've raised them. For example, I've ignored 90% of the shit my parents told me.

What is the alternative? Just let them run around as they please? I don't like to sound preachy, but this generation could use a healthy dose of discipline.

Please explain; all he really said was that as a parent, you can teach your kids your beliefs, but in the end they'll believe what they want. Thats probably how it was for a lot of us. It was for me. My parents were christians, and i even went to catholic school for like 4 or 5 years, did my first commuinion and everything. Once i was older though, i never really went back to any of it.

My beef is "they'll believe what they want". It works in theory but it's hard to demonstrate that it is REALLY your natural choice when it was basically "Follow your parent's religion, go atheist, or on the random chance you found another religion, go for that"

What else is there supposed to be? I mean, you said it perfectly. You'll either stick with your parents, become atheist, or go to another religion, no? Arent we all like that?

I don't think it's right to impose those sorts of beliefs on your children in any sort of serious manner. Fear of hell and sin and the devil and all of those terrifying concepts still lingers in the back of many of my since-renounced friends raised Catholic or Muslim or anything else. They don't believe in those things in a rational sense, but the images have been burned into their brains from childhood and will probably never go away.

Dawkins calls it another form of child abuse, and while that is a little extreme, i do find some offense at children being 'raised religious' in their formative years, because you can't just separate yourself from your childhood like that.

Personally, both of my parents were raised Catholic, converted to a more relaxed general Christianity, and raised me to know about Jesus and whatnot, but to read on my own and decide for myself. I never went to church or anything like that, and always got to keep an open mind. For the record, neither of my parents enjoyed their religious upbringings, and believe in God but wish they could somehow reclaim their childhood to not be so set in stone. Belief in God is much more powerful when it comes willingly, and even if you were raised devoutly in one religion, left it, and later came back, you would never truly know what choice you would have made if you were free from childhood prejudice.

I get what you're saying here.

Neither of my parents raised me with strict Catholic beliefs (in fact, my mother practically raised me with an intense fear of Vodou/spirts/demons/all that other stuff) I think the biggest problem is that people don't teach their children that the Bible is meant to be taken literally (and part of that stems from them not being taught the same thing)

I recall being in 5th grade or so and a friend was pretty much preaching about the end of the world because his older brother (in 6th grade) had just read Revelation and had completely interpretted it in a totally fucked up way. When I sat down and read it all I could think was "How can anyone really think all this stuff is going to happen?"

Well, a lot of predictions in the Bible have come true... Fall of the Roman Empire, 9/11, to name a couple.

what.

yeah, wasn't that Nostradamus?

Well, he's not the only one.

Its part of the Bible code that they're always trying to decipher. They've managed to get bits and pieces, including segments that mention 2 towers that collapse and many deaths, something along those lines.

I'll try to find something that explains it better.

I thought they showed that any suitably long book contains similarly prophetic passages like the bible has, if you're looking for them.

Though I never really cared to check on that, I just heard it from someone.

This is correct. The law of averages states that, over a large enough number of attempts, a pattern will merge.

You can look in the sand at your local beach and find whole passages of the bible written in different-colored sand if you look hard and long enough.

But theres a lot more sand than there are pages in the bible.

Are you guys talking about like having a thousand monkeys on typewriters? That eventually one will type the works of Shakespeare, or something like that.

No.

The Bible Code can be applied to books like Moby Dick and you'll get various "predictions," and I'm pretty sure the predictions change depending on the translation of the Bible you use anyway. It has little to do with the book and more to do with it's length I believe.

But there's, on most beaches I've been to, very little variation in the color of the sand. Not to mention that each page of the bible has many words on it, each word has numerous letters, and each letter is a much more complicated shape than a grain of sand.

However, the meaning attributed to each word can vary immensely and is largely subjective

Not to mention the various definitely-not-divinely-inspired translation over the year...

Come on guys geomatria was debunked a long time ago, this is just the same on a grander scale.

Don't give us that bullshit in this topic, B C. Adding that smiley just makes you look even more pretentious.

You're..you're kidding right? You can't be dense enough to think that you represent anyone but yourself with that statement.

I'll get right on it, chief.

He's right about the smiley. You're the only one that uses it.

Usurper throwing a gratuitous on the end of half his asshattery, though, is a totally different story.

No shit? I'm the one who introduced it to the boards, I heavily campagined for it to become a regular emoticon, and it did.

fix

Ok.

Ah, i did a little research on gematria, and actually, whats im talking about isnt gematria at all. Gematria can lead to anything being in those pages because theres no vowels in Hebrew, so its pretty easy to come up with hidden words and messages using only consonants. (literally whatever you want) Even things like Princess Di's death and a bunch of other stuff can be found using that, but its still not really what im talking about, as its been debunked.

The prophecies in the bible are actually pretty specific, not hidden codes. Prophecies such as, "Israel will go into Captivity for 70 years. But I will raise my servant, Cyrus, who will free my people and return them to their home." Then 70 years later, someone points out to the Persian king Cyrus, "Hey, God said this about you 70 years ago, long before you were even born" and he indeed returns them to their homeland. 500 years before he was born, the year of Christ's baptism and death were given. God "predicted" that the Papacy would rule for 1,280 years. In 538, it's final of three enemy states (foretold a thousand years before) was vanquished and wiped off the map. God said one of its heads would receive a deadly wound. In 1798--1,260 years (I incorrectly wrote 1280) later, Napoleon sent his general, Berthier, to Rome Who dragged the Pope off his throne and took him to France, where he died in prison. The Papacy, which had ruled Europe for 1,260 years with terror and evil, as God has foretold, became a non-power. But these are just a few of hundreds. When Babylon was the world's greatest power, God said it would be conquered by Medo-Persia, which would be conquered by Greece, which would be conquered by Rome, which would split into 10 nations, and then the Papacy would arise, and it would destroy three of those nations, rule for 1260 years.

And before anyone says the Bible is old and probably mistranslated, remember the Dead Sea Scrolls that were discovered. They're 200 years older than Jesus, And there were copies or portions of every single book of the Bible (with the exception of Esther) Including a complete copy of the book of Isaiah. The text, which was copied 200 years before Jesus, was exactly the same as the Hebrew text extant. (Meaning the Bible has been pretty much totally accurate) But the various manuscripts vary in a letter here or there, just as spelling changes over the centuries. So we actually DO have the Bible as it was originally written.


That's a lot of text...

No.
You have the Old Testament, as it was written 2000 years ago.

K, but im not talking about the Old Testament. Dead Sea Scrolls, 2 different things.