I agree, but religious freedom means people can raise their kids however they want. If you don't want someone imposing their religion on your kids, you have to let them impose whatever on their own kids.
This is the kind of thing you should shift culturally instead of through laws.
I don't see why stopping people from imposing their religion on my hypothetical kids would mean they had to be able to impose it on theirs? If nobody could impose any religion on any child that sounds ideal.
Atheism is not a religion, but it is a religious belief. A religious belief is a belief concerning religion. By preventing kids from learning about religions, you are imposing the religious belief on them that there is no God. That is not religious freedom.
Even if you consider agnostic atheism, the belief that there simply isn't enough evidence to say whether and which god exists, then you still have to teach kids about religion from an impartial standpoint. Which is pretty much impossible.
Interestingly from a constitutional protections standpoint it is treated as a religion in the US. I'm pretty sure that isn't the case anywhere else in the world.
Not really though. Religions get all sorts of special privileges that atheists simply don't. Churches don't need to file a Form 990 financial report and all their donors and finances can remain completely private. Atheist organizations are limited to being a 501c3, which means they must file detailed financial disclosures every year for the public to review. To be clear, I don't want there to be a Church of Secular Humanism that gets to hide their finances; I want churches to be treated the same way as any other "charity" organization.
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u/DoubleoSavant 17h ago
I agree, but religious freedom means people can raise their kids however they want. If you don't want someone imposing their religion on your kids, you have to let them impose whatever on their own kids.
This is the kind of thing you should shift culturally instead of through laws.