People don’t just hold these beliefs about death and the Bible and the bearded guy in the sky (who loves kids dunked in water at birth by priests more than he loves other living things).
They also often send their kids to sunday school to contaminate them with these beliefs, instead of waiting for their kids to grow up enough to adopt the beliefs if they make sense to them.
If sending the kids to Sunday school makes the lives of the kids better than not sending them to sunday school, then why not? There may be better things to have your kids do on Sunday, but it’s probably better then having them watch TV all day.
(I’ve never been to Sunday school, but the people I know who did don’t seem particularly worse off)
I’ve been to sunday school, at several churches, when I was a child. I also “taught” sunday school when I was a teenager. In all cases, it was a glorified daycare blessed with the halo effect of God: a way to make parents feel virtuous about leaving their kids somewhere for an hour on Sunday while they have coffee and cookies. This was perhaps valuable as parental stress relief, but it wasn’t a particularly great thing for the people actually in sunday school. If anything, it was kind of boring, and got everybody fidgety from being cooped up in a room.
So, yeah, if you’re looking for things to do with children on a Sunday morning, may I suggest hiking, or reading, or playing somewhere, or anything but sunday school? It’s not horrible, but I would characterize it as intensely meh.
Training kids to tolerate intensely meh experiences, especially when there’s no obvious gain from them, may be unhealthier than is obvious. At least in my case, I think it’s done a lot to build a habit of killing time.
It’s not clear to me that sunday school systematically makes kids’ lives any better, and the epistemic danger seems real enough.
For instance, the guilt-trip nature of the doctrine of “original sin” strikes me as a clear harm when inflicted upon children, who do not have the intellectual resources to receive it critically.
It’s one thing to tolerate people who choose to have certain beliefs. It’s another, more difficult, to tolerate people who actively foist these beliefs onto the more vulnerable.
People don’t just hold these beliefs about death and the Bible and the bearded guy in the sky (who loves kids dunked in water at birth by priests more than he loves other living things).
They also often send their kids to sunday school to contaminate them with these beliefs, instead of waiting for their kids to grow up enough to adopt the beliefs if they make sense to them.
If sending the kids to Sunday school makes the lives of the kids better than not sending them to sunday school, then why not? There may be better things to have your kids do on Sunday, but it’s probably better then having them watch TV all day.
(I’ve never been to Sunday school, but the people I know who did don’t seem particularly worse off)
I’ve been to sunday school, at several churches, when I was a child. I also “taught” sunday school when I was a teenager. In all cases, it was a glorified daycare blessed with the halo effect of God: a way to make parents feel virtuous about leaving their kids somewhere for an hour on Sunday while they have coffee and cookies. This was perhaps valuable as parental stress relief, but it wasn’t a particularly great thing for the people actually in sunday school. If anything, it was kind of boring, and got everybody fidgety from being cooped up in a room.
So, yeah, if you’re looking for things to do with children on a Sunday morning, may I suggest hiking, or reading, or playing somewhere, or anything but sunday school? It’s not horrible, but I would characterize it as intensely meh.
Training kids to tolerate intensely meh experiences, especially when there’s no obvious gain from them, may be unhealthier than is obvious. At least in my case, I think it’s done a lot to build a habit of killing time.
It’s not clear to me that sunday school systematically makes kids’ lives any better, and the epistemic danger seems real enough.
For instance, the guilt-trip nature of the doctrine of “original sin” strikes me as a clear harm when inflicted upon children, who do not have the intellectual resources to receive it critically.
It’s one thing to tolerate people who choose to have certain beliefs. It’s another, more difficult, to tolerate people who actively foist these beliefs onto the more vulnerable.