And then when they do really believe in it, more often than not rather than “I’ve thought deeply about all the doubts and I can give thoughtful responses to them”, their attitude is more “asking tough questions is a sin”
Of course, even the best possible religious education isn’t going to convince everybody. But when parents ask me if they should worry that sending their kids to Catholic school is going to indoctrinate them in Catholicism, I always reply—based on my personal experience of having spent the majority of my K-12 education at them—that the average Catholic school is more likely to turn your child into an atheist than into a convinced Catholic. And many religious schools of other persuasions do no better
I hear this sentiment a lot, but having been in all sorts of church, para-church, and religious education settings, I've never once seen it for myself. I have stumped many tutors in my life, but not once was I chastised for "sinning." Not that my experience is worth more; it's just still very foreign to me.
What I have seen is a severe lack of religious knowledge in most adults. For whatever reason, many of these people don't have the drive to understand things for themselves. This is strange because if you genuinely believe in what you preach, it should be one of the most important things to get right.
I suppose this isn't much different from other aspects of our current culture, though. Most people seem satisfied with an extremely shallow understanding of things.
It describes my own personal experience. No, no one ever explicitly told me "asking hard questions is a sin". But I was sure made to feel like it was, and while maybe that wasn't consciously intended, I suspect it kind of was intended, at least at a less than entirely conscious level
> Most people seem satisfied with an extremely shallow understanding of things.
I'm shocked by the number of professionals who have extremely shallow understandings. Pick a mental health diagnosis at random. Go looking (e.g. on PubMed) for scholarly debates over the scientific validity of that diagnosis – seek, and ye shall find. But, how familiar is the average psychologist or psychiatrist with those debates? In my experience, many who make a whole career specialising in said diagnosis, have never bothered to even go looking for them
Most serious Catholics I know agree with this, btw.
For example, the N-years-latee Catholic versus atheist ratio among graduated students, and what we would expect it to be from a secular school after controlling for variables like socioeconomic status and parent's religion.
Yes, data is not the plural of anecdote–but sometimes the anecdotes pile up so high, it becomes rather implausible that the data is going to tell a substantially different story.
I don't think they went that far with me, but I did get frustration and telling me to stop asking questions. Pretty sure not being able to answer anything I came up with had me thinking it can't be true.
And this was specifically in a religious education class we did once a week at a church separate from school.
If I could go back in a time machine and talk to a younger version of myself, I think I could give far more intelligent answers to my questions than anyone I asked could.
Back in the Middle Ages, many of the smartest people in society ended up working for the Church. That doesn't guarantee they were right, but they were far from simpletons. Someone like Thomas Aquinas, whether he's ultimately right or wrong, he's a much more nuanced thinker than shallow dismissals of mediaeval scholasticism would suggest. And one can make similar remarks about Jewish scholars such as Rambam/Maimonides and Ralbag/Gersonides, or the great Islamic philosophers such as Ibn Sina/Avicenna, al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd/Averroes and Mulla Sadra. But nowadays, religion struggles to attract people of the same intellectual calibre. Which isn't to say none of them exist, but they are hidden away in remote higher education institutions, and there is a big disconnect between them and your average K-12 religious education teacher. Of course, in the Middle Ages, your village priest/rabbi/imam was unlikely to be anywhere near the level of that era's intellectual giants, but they arguably had less of a disconnect with them too.
https://humanists.uk/campaigns/schools-and-education/faith-s...
Australia has been doing that since the 1960s. State governments fund public schools, federal government funds private schools (the majority of which are religious)
The Catholic Church forced them into it by threatening to close its private schools and send all the students to public ones, thereby overwhelming the public school system. They actually temporarily did that in one small Australian city (the “Goulburn school strike” in 1962), [0] just so everyone knew they weren’t bluffing. Their brinkmanship paid off; although the system funds all private schools equally (both secular and religious), the Catholic Church has always been the largest beneficiary, since it controls more Australian private schools than any other organisation (around 54% on an enrolment basis)
