Malibu said:
Bob, no one is objecting to instructing kids about morals and offering several frameworks to ask discussion launching points or even practical do this advice. What you are trying to say that seems bizarre to the rest of us is that this is somehow imposing morality on Children, and you object to that or you object to it being done in a way that it is not explicitly Judeo-Christian.
As a concrete real world example, my daughter's 1st grade teacher teaches the kids how to do breath work as a calming strategy when they are overwhelmed. The source code for that is Buddhist contemplation, the practical value of just breathing when you are frustrated is not specifically religious at all.
Yeah I wouldn't allow my kid to participate in that. Yoga. Same thing. Or any eastern religious practices. I'd have a problem with that.
We have to decide on broadly what the good is, and that ends up being what governs our attitudes about things, what is permitted, and what's not allowed in society. It would be nice if we could say "it's fine if you want to copulate with people of the same sex in your house as long as it stays in the privacy of your own home" or we can use something everyone agrees is debased, like bestiality. In my view, that kind of behavior does harm the person who engaged in it. And by extension everyone else, because now you have the KIND of person who does that walking around in society, voting, maybe teaching kindergarteners. Those people haven't developed virtuous habits. Vicious habits beget more vicious habits. It's never limited to one thing. In a lot of ways we're formed by the habits we develop. This is something we all have to battle with in our own lives. And our children especially are raised to a big extent by their friend groups. Should you have the right to give your kid a phone with unfettered access to the Internet and send them off to school with my kid? People will disagree.
Not everyone agrees on what is virtuous. We have to choose. Any choice, no matter what, is an imposition on someone's freedom under most Americans' conception of freedom. This is the part you're struggling with, and I admit I don't really understand how you can say that teaching morality to children that doesn't derive from Christianity, but a worldview that makes positive claims about the non-existence of a creator, isn't imposing a completely different moral framework than Christianity? Why wouldn't I have a problem with it? I think it's great when some other system of philosophy stumbles onto a particular truth that overlaps with mine. It doesn't mean there aren't other parts of it that are problematic, and if it's a materialist religion, it has no answers to questions about why we should or shouldn't do particular things because doesn't give a satisfactory answer about what our purpose is.
I don't agree with most of the people on here that government is inherently bad. I think one of the jobs of people who have been put into a position to govern is to encourage people to do the good, and so I don't think it's possible to effectively govern and be agnostic on that question.
ETA: what's the difference between practicing Buddhism, and doing the things that Buddhists do to practice Buddhism?
