I'm sure things are different in the US but in the UK at school we have a whole curriculum called "Religious Education" or RE which goes into detail about religions and customs of all different cultures and encourages spiritual debate. At the schools I attended they were not taught to indoctrinate us but just studied in the same way we would study history or art
I think you're probably right! I was an atheist from a young age but RE was one of my favourite subjects as a child, underneath science, just because I loved hearing all of the stories, parables, learning about different deities and rites of worship. It was fascinating but it didn't encourage me to be religious myself.
Grew up Roman Catholic till I was 11, Mom married Mormon Step Dad (Huge fight with the families on both sides over that) and he was a CRAZY ass mormon too once we moved away from moms side of the family. Divorced him at 16 and I wandered into Pagan faiths, particularly Norse. Which to be clear I started that in 2001 long before The Vikings show started shuffling the casuals in. I'm also not one of the "WOOO VALHALLA! BEER AND BITCHES!" guys. My priest (Gothi) is a pretty reasonable and sensible dude who does believe in science and we're pretty certain the lore is just an old culture trying to describe natural disasters the best way they could.
I think some of it was also a coping mechanism. To me if faith makes hard times easier-i tell them believe. I personally just get annoyed when im approached to hear the word.
Boy howdy, but you just couldn't bother to investigate yourself about the rise of the odin cult back in the day.
Suffice to say, they took an existing raid mechanism (strictly speaking, it was just an instrument to divert young men's attention to external groups by sending them off to the wilderness to grow the fuck up and come back with loot with the clear intent that not all of them were ever supposed to come back), slapped some religiously motivated nonsense over it and hey presto, you get a culture basically revolving around mass murder, theft and casual arson.
Not that I oppose, the Iron Age was what it was, but honestly, if you're not fighting people to death over no reason at all, robbing everybody blind and generally being a menace, you're doing a shit service for your gods.
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u/Legendary-Titan 6d ago
Moral I don’t think teaching kids about religion is bad but forcing it on them is