When I was young (young -- 9 actually, grade 4 -- young) I was into Dungeons and Dragons...series 1 stuff, not the series 3 and 3.5 that the kids are playing these days. Anyway, I remember when my parents got me my stuff D&D stuff, they were nervous because there had been a rash of news coverage about how dangerous it was...that kids would lose themselves in the fantasy. Indeed the concern was that we would lose our ability to determine the difference between the story and the real world. (This belief was largely given steam because of a few events that did happen where some kids in California dropped a little acid, got dressed-up as thieves and paladins and wandered around the sewers attacking each other with sword-like implements.)
Flash-forward to 1997. Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone is released to much praise becoming a seemingly overnight hit. Subsequent books in the series earn further accolades. But in the last many years we've heard rumours of problems, groups of conservative parents banding together to state that it's dangerous to let kids use their imaginations in this way (??? - go figure on that one). Or the church, the church denounces all things Harry Potter because evil takes too-prominent a position, and because the books proffer fantasy over reality. In fact, Rev. Gabriele Amorth of the Vatican said, "By reading Harry Potter a young child will be drawn into magic and from there it is a simple step to Satanism and the Devil,"
In both of these cases the subjects are put forward as fiction. FICTION. The kids know that it's fiction -- ask them, they know. So why is it that when something so purely *fictional* is put forth as *fact* (or at least half-fact), the world is not up-in-arms?
Stop forcing children to read the bible. Or at the very least tell them it's no more real than Harry Potter.
I'm just terribly dismayed that I'm more surrounded by deeply religious people than I thought I was a few months ago. And more so when I see parents forcing their children into the same religious shackles; your children are too young to decide for themselves, ergo they are not religious, they are simply repeating the actions and thoughts that you're brainwashing them with.
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I think one of the major problems in all intellectual discourse (or “lack-of-intellect”-ual discourse) is that critical thinking is a skill not sufficiently well taught. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I tend to think of myself as a reasonably intelligent person; further braving the danger of the impression of nationalistic pride, I think that I have come through a respectable educational path: Swedish elementary and secondary schools, Canadian universities. Even so, and even given a natural tendency toward skepticism and a love of learning, I didn't learn to critically disseminate sources until rather recently; presumably it was gradual over the course of many years, but it reached a culmination (relative, of course, to whatever my present understanding may be considered to be) less than two years ago when I started to read research papers and came to realise that even at the cutting edge of scientific endeavours, there are opinions and errors and uncertainty, and even in very well-written papers by very intelligent and educated people, even in papers with terrific and accurate ideas, there may be errors. (Reading Darwin's The Origin of Species was perhaps a more obvious lesson in the same, although more recent.)
So where am I going with this? Well: Even with the resources available to me, I was still left with some nasty residual notion that purported factual writings fell into the two categories of “true” and “not true”. This is, alas, a dogmatic view—one with room to eliminate dogma I could identify as false, happily, but dogmatic nonetheless. Here we go back to Arrogance Land: I suspect that if I was left with so faulty a perception for so long, then a great many people—certainly not all! But a significant chunk of the population, whether large minority or majority great or small—are probably likewise impaired. Evidence certainly seems to back up my arrogance, here.
Now, I think it is essential for a rational view of the world to accept or reject every purported fact provisionally, and to keep in mind that even well-established facts like the theories of gravity, electromagnetism, and evolution have a probability of (very very slightly) less than 1, and even way-out-there conjectures like (equivalently) Christian theism, voodoo, and Russellian teapotism (with apologies to the late, great Russell for coining such a term) a probability (very slightly indeed!) higher than 0. P=1 is dogmatic acceptance. P=0 is dogmatic rejection. 0<P<1 is acceptable territory for rational thought. (Of course, we may often have ε ≈ 10^(-x) for quite a large x…)
As I'm writing that, it seems to me that a reasonable hypothetical model for “Truth” would be a Bayesian network of facts...
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