Theology, I have tried to point out, isn't prone to being tested.
I got that.
Still, theology is being a faculty. Would you like to erase it from the field, so it cannot be further something one shall be able to study? So, from your point of view, all topics need no further study which cannot be tested to be true or false. As a consequence, all religion needs to be eliminated?
What practical impacts of that being the case, do you see will happen, if religion is gone? Philosophy shall go? History shall go? What about arts? None of them fit to the method of clean proof and disproof.
No churches, no chapels, no religious communal gatherings, no songs, no prayers? Where then to find the words to farewell someone who died and whom you loved? No need in doing that? What kind of dignity shall be practiced instead? Do you have a substitute? Or is no substitute needed?
Not at all. But there is a qualitative difference between matters which we can test and those we cannot. This is why I say I am incompetent to judge these matters.
I would never presume so. For myself, I cannot ascertain the truth of matters I cannot test, so I cannot depend on my grasp of them. I make do with my own sense of right and wrong, having tested my fundamental beliefs in a harrowing process that caused me to abandon confidence in rumors and assumptions, in acculturation I absorbed as a child. This was undertaken at great risk, shattering my religious faith, my affiliations across society, and even my family. When I discovered beliefs I could not support factually, I was compelled to moderate them to suspicions, and those I was able to falsify I had to abandon.
For me, I was unable to say I believed in claims I found factually insuperable, and this included religion. I can only make such statements for me, and I have repeatedly pointed out my reticence to challenge others' beliefs, because of how harrowing that process was for me. As for what replaced it, I have pointed that out also, that I no longer have certainty about anything. The best I can arrive at is that things that have been tested and not disproved are potentially true, at least until better understanding falsifies them in whole or part. This is greatly humbling, and why I say I am incompetent to make such judgments and am lucky to be able to tie my shoes, regarding my intellectual capacity.
While that is something, you and I can talk about within a private dialogue, I do not approve of it to be a message spread throughout the youth, for example. Not as the most significant message they get but as being seen as something that will meet them throughout the years of being an adult.
To formulate it differently. If I start with certainty, and my child is the very being that begins life with a blank state, I provide it with a certain form of commonly practiced habit. The child has no intellect on its own. It does not understand prayers, being held at the table, to be thankful for the meal, it just accepts it as a given. If you have signs spread around your household of religious nature, they are a given, but not understood by the child.
But if you start with uncertainty and you do not have a habit, do not have anything which relates to something specific, you do not use common phrases in accordance to that specifics, and in fact you use nothing whatsoever, the child, when it becomes older, has no ground on which it starts to ask questions about the spiritual nature of life. Why should it? There is no reason to question something when that something didn't take place.
So then you have raised your kid in a secular way, where you have not used specifics to teach it in a non-secular way.
Here, my thesis: Secularity, being the only way of raising a kid, produces later adults who do not connect in a deep way towards all given religions, but more in a way of tastes and preferences.
Teenagers and young adults may perceive themselves as tolerant and think that they appreciate different cultures in terms of their religious backgrounds. But since they themselves were not educated with religious specifics, what motivation shall they have, to either appreciate or question religious faith genuinely in the first place?
Modern, western young people grow up with modern parents who may have a Buddhist figurine in one corner of their household, they may grow up with pictures from the Hindu God Khali, nicely adorned in a frame, they may grow up with other bits and pieces from all over the world, but interestingly enough, what a modern household avoids, is to showcase is Jesus Christ on the cross, having a bible laying around, for example. Modern people collect those things from all over the world, appreciating the pleasures of the art but not the discomforts of the meaning. Would they be genuine Buddhists or Hindus or Muslims they would stick to all aspects of the specific culture, the pleasing ones, as well as the not so pleasing ones.
From my perspective, I doubt there are many genuine believers at all. I cannot speak of other nations but my own country has stripped itself off of Christianity and what we are now left with is so called "wokism". It's a highly individualistic, highly self centered cult which propagates "you can be whatever you want", utterly entangled in its contradictions. We have it now written into legislation, so it went to be official that feeling offended is now the base for becoming "integrated". The question is: into what?
Since we do not talk in private but in public, and since we must assume that someone else could read what we spread, I find it crucial to what we feed the field with. Everything publisized with a strong pull towards leaving religion out of everyday life, because it cannot be proven false, will support further the closure of local churches and local facilities to gather as Christians.
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Now I was the one to use a wall of text. And I could go on and on and on.
While I think you mean knowledge, I must disagree even with that. Kids are information vacuums. Upon reflection it is obvious that kids must be able to attain such knowledge as is necessary to successfully live to reproduce in order to perpetuate humanity, which obviously has continued to exist for hundreds of millennia. Before they learn to talk, they have absorbed the knowledge necessary to support the use of language to conform to cultural circumstances, which are enormously variable across the world.
Your expectation of the burden of parenting is accurate, because it is parents that primarily deliver to kids all that wealth of knowledge they attain to, and this knowledge then creates the foundation of understanding kids continue to build on during their educational careers, whether they are subjected to government indoctrination day camps or not. I chose to homeschool in order to prevent the enormous deception and disinformation public schools inflict, which I consider more important and formative than any actual factual information they could acquire thereby. In hindsight I was right to do this. My sons have always outperformed their public school peers, and today continue to be autodidacts and professionals that are admired and followed by their peers, and indeed, everyone that knows them.
While I cannot take credit for their achievements, I can be pleased that I did my best to prevent them from being burdened with false indoctrinations they needed to break and replace later, which I believe has enabled their lifelong success at achieving their goals. It is a mistake to believe that giving kids some false history is better than no history, because kids make their own history from the events in their lives, and the rest is just words. It is the events they experience that provide actual relevant historical information to them, and this creates a filter through which they read every word all their lives. If the cultural context provided them is some contrivance that does not affect their lives, they will dismiss it with prejudice. This is why the Preacher's kids are so often noted to be so rebellious, because so many Preachers are hollow shells of pretense of religion while actually demonstrating much different values to their kids than they preach.
I undertook to involve my kids in my professional, economic, spiritual, and social environment, which demonstrated to them the actual moral and ethical standards I lived, that I also sought to profess in the ritual and daily prosecution of our home. It is a mistake to believe that other spiritual traditions are hollow and void of meaning to their professants. The shrines to Ganesh Hindus maintain are no less significant to them than are kneeling in prayer before bed to Protestants and Catholics. The same sense of worship and gratitude to deity is felt and expressed by Shinto and Buddhist celebrants as in any other tradition. Atheism is a faith no less than Islam or the other Abrahamic religions, however, one thing I have never been is an Atheist, because if I cannot judge certainly how this universe has come about, I equally cannot judge between no one and some particular one. Atheists pretend to know that no god created the universe, which is no less merely faith than saying some particular god did so, whether Raven or Jesus, or any other.
The fact is that I have no specific information, and this is the truth no faith honestly states. Every tradition makes claims of being the one truth and all others evil heretics or heathens. I simply note that this is what they do, and that there is a purpose, a propaganda purpose in doing so, to create cohesive societies that can succeed at war. That seems to me to be the true purpose of religion: to defend society from aggression from others, and to successfully conquer others. I leave the lessons of history to demonstrate this fact to those that care to weigh the matter per their capacity to judge such record. Those that have been burdened with indoctrinations very often are incapable of viewing such record objectively, but must weight the record via the special exceptionalism their indoctrinations have accorded their society.
It is obvious from the conflicts in the world today that this exceptionalism is the main driver of war, whether in the Ukraine, Israel, Ethiopia, or anywhere else, people's are pitted one against the other and each claims to be the rightful victors based on their religious worship of the right god(s). I have sought to provide my kids with traditions and rituals meaningful and real that enabled them to themselves judge what is true and what cannot be true, as I have argued throughout our conversation. I owed them this as their father, to teach them the truth that they are the only judge of themselves that matters to them, and I hope I have managed it as well as I kept them fed, housed, and clothed until they escaped my rule. From their success at living their lives by their judgment, I have succeeded admirably, and I am content with that parental achievement.
Of course, you disagree. You raised your kids out of the public school and you have done well. You cannot do that here, school is mandatory. I have been at a court case where a mother was fined who rejected to send her two children to school during the years 2020/21 and I was aware of other cases during my profession where I found out about parents who were in trouble with the school system.
I did not question your unique way of raising your sons, since you have let me know. I find nothing wrong with that. I tried to give you my way of seeing the things I mentioned above. Since you find nothing of appreciation towards that, I will no longer defend my case.
I wish there were better options there. However, I did try to support my contention that kids do gain knowledge without formal educational direction, whether homeschooling or any other venue. I have also attempted to avoid disparaging your personal religious faith, but I seem to have failed at that.
My apologies.
You did not understand me but I thought, you would. That frustrated me and I used the wrong term "appreciation". I was talking about the un-specific objects in a household, either laid out or hanged on the walls. A kid cannot make anything of them, since it lacks the intellect at a young age (speaking of toddlers and pre-schools) to fully understand objects in an abstract way. When an object is not used as something practical, like a tea pot or a knife, which it will understand slowly but surely because its parents are using them daily, it will jus accept those objects as something normal but nothing what disturbs it in particular.
For the adult, a religious figurine or Jesus on the cross, has a specific meaning and in that sense I said "specific". For the child, it doesn't. Until it starts to ask questions.
You are right that when parents start wanting to explain their inner world to the child, they are going to fail since, for a kid, there is no God and there is no invisible entity to whom one can "talk". Adults make the mistake in wanting to explain these objects, way before the kid is ready for it, while it is enough to just have them there and use them in front of the kids eyes, like sitting down to pray (putting themselves in a meditative state) in the presence of that object.
These objects are just helpers to get into the posture of meditation/contemplation. The signs of religion are therefor made distinct from daily busy life, in order to make it easier for the adult to help him to get out of his usual habit into a more contemplative one. From my point of view, that is also, what churches are for. To interrupt the busy week with a contemplative Sunday morning. I am not of the notion that humans are all and always capable of being so disciplined, and if they are not able to sit down and take their times to reflect on other than daily tasks, they need the socially available space where everyone sits still.
It is the specific objects and, for example, table prayers, which will eventually catch the kids attention. Then it will start to ask why its mother or father do that and have these objects and what they are for.
Now, here comes the sensitive part and the skill of the parent how much information he shall give to a kid. And I agree, kids from pastors or priests are often rebellious because of the inability of the parent to let the kid come to its own conclusions but to interfere. The best thing, from my point of view, is to answer as little as possible or give very simple answers (appropriate to the kids age). If a kid does not stop to ask, you simply use the means to distract it and lead its attention to something else. One day, it WILL understand. The sooner, the less the adult forces it to have to understand.
But even the force parents use, like ordering them out of bed on Sunday mornings, does not hurt the child. It's annoying, yes, it is not something one understands, yes, but the wider meaning of having visible signs of separation between profane every day life and spiritual life I do not under estimate. It is one form of discipline and I am strongly convinced that every kid needs discipline (and I think you do not misunderstand that term and how I mean it).
Of course, you could say that you can do without all of it and you'd be right. Which I would describe as "exceptional".
I do understand discipline, and strongly encouraged my kids in it. I also understand ritual, and also used ritual and prayer when raising my kids. I probably talk too much though.