Right to be not brainwashed
Non-physics 11 mins read
In this post, I will argue that no parent has the right to brainwash/indoctrinate their children into a religion, and it is the duty of the government to do everything to make sure that no child is brainwashed. When they become adult, then they can read all religions and believe in whatever nonsense they want, as everyone has the right to freedom of religion. But children must be protected as they are easy to brainwash.
If this right is adopted worldwide, all religions will disappear in a few generations.
Introduction
Many things which were considered to be morally acceptable centuries ago are now considered to be crimes like, for example, slavery. One such morally bad thing which is currently considered as acceptable throughout the world is brainwashing innocent children in the name of religion.
As is evident from the above statements I am against cultural relativism. In my opinion, combining negative utilitarianism with rights is the best among current ethical theories.
It is quite obvious that the reason why the majority of people in the world believe in religion is childhood indoctrination. Once children are brainwashed it will be hard for them to come out of those delusions compared to those who are brainwashed after they became adults. If an average human had never heard about religions until he became a grown man, he would see how silly, immoral, and unscientific religions are. The same person will probably believe in it sincerely if he was brainwashed from his childhood that it is true.
This is why you can easily guess a person’s religion from their geographical location.
> 99.99 % of religious people do not know any good arguments for why they belive the metaphysical claims of their religion. They use circular arguments like my god is real because my book says and my book is true because my god says it. These people are not proper religious people but merely victims of brainwashing. Lets call them Improper Believers. Sure, there are people like William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga, etc., who have decent philosophical justifications for why they believe in Christianity, and they are certainly not Improper Believers. But even these people were brainwashed into believing in Christianity from their childhood. So, I can only consider them as Decent Believers and not as Rational Belivers. Because if they were not brainwashed from childhood, I think they wouldn’t have done this “post hoc rationalization” of what they want to believe. Sure, Craig might say he wasn’t very religious in his childhood and rarely went to Church, but he was still raised in a Christian family, and his mind was tainted with the indoctrination, even if the indoctrination in the West wasn’t as high as it is done in poor countries like India and MENA, etc.
“Theology is the post hoc rationalization of what you want to believe.”
When it comes to Hinduism and Islam, the situation is even worse. At least, Christianity has many Decent Believers who are mostly philosophers like William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga, etc, even if there are no Rational Believers. I watched many debates by atheists with Hindus and Muslims and I have not even found any Decent Believers. They merely repeat the arguments made by Christian philosophers without even properly adapting them to their religion.
Responsibility of family
Parents and relatives are the people who generally teach children about their religion. The biggest problem is that they teach these as if they know that these things are 100% true. Even if they want to teach these things they should always tell children that they believe in these things and they are not sure if these are correct. They should instead mainly teach the type of knowledge which is almost certainly true like mathematics, science, history (not religious pseudohistory like “Ancient India was technologically advanced to the extent of being a nuclear power”) etc.
Bertrand Russell started his book The Problems of Philosophy with “Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?”. The answer is most probably no. (If I haven’t included “most probably”, that sentence itself will become some knowledge). Not even mathematical statements are absolutely true. To show that a mathematical statement proved using an axiomatic system is absolutely true we need to prove the consistency of that system which cannot be done due to the second Gödel’s incompleteness theorem (We can prove the consistency of a weaker theory like Peano arithmetic with a stronger theory like the ZFC set theory. But a skeptic will not be impressed by that. What a skeptic wants is the opposite, but unfortunately, Hilbert’s program is impossible). I agree with Russell’s statement-“Skepticism, while logically impeccable, is psychologically impossible, and there is an element of frivolous insincerity in any philosophy which pretends to accept it”.
You may say that in my view they should teach nothing as there is nothing that is absolutely true and anything including mathematical proofs and scientific theories are true only if you believe in the consistency of mathematics and the validity of the scientific method (Science assumes 1) methodological naturalism, 2) consistency of mathematics and 3) Induction. See the problem of induction, which is not completely solved by Popper’s Falsifiability). My counterargument is that it is quite obvious that belief in the consistency of mathematics and the validity of scientific method is a lot superior to belief in some old religious book written by people who knew nothing about the universe we live in and that is what I meant by the “almost certainly”.
Responsibility of government
Government should be careful when it is creating textbooks for children. They should not add religious or mythological things which not only don’t have evidence for but also have large evidence against their credibility. Government should also add a chapter in children’s curriculum which explains to them that they should not blindly believe everything they hear from their parents and others and instead they should question everything logically. If instead they are forced by the government to learn by heart some dogmatic things to get marks in exams they might unknowingly believe them as true.
Government should consider the Right to be not brainwashed as a basic human right and it should change the education system such that even the people who were brainwashed by their family will become normal.
Example of government’s failure in my childhood
When I was in 10th class we had an abridged version of Ramayana in our Telugu textbook divided into 10 chapters. The last paragraph of Ramayana in the 10th textbook says that Rama ruled Ayodhya for 11000 years. The same thing is there in the original Sanskrit version also (Source:Balakanda sarga 1 shloka 97). It also says that Rama’s father Dasharatha lived for 60000 years (Source:Balakanda sarga 20 shloka 10). This is utter nonsense but I had to write them in the exams. Our teachers taught as if they really lived that many years. Recently I remembered it after seeing my younger brother reading that.
When I was in 11th and 12th classes we had similar nonsense in our Sanskrit textbook, like how Bhagiratha meditated for 1001 years without eating and drinking, how Krishna magically made Kuchela or Sudama a wealthy man because he was a devotee (their relation ship is very weird how can you be a big devotee of your childhood friend even if he is the supreme being of that fictional universe? In friendship there should not be any superiory or inferiority complex).
These types of ridiculously false lies should be removed from the mandatory curriculum. Religion should not have any role in education or politics.
Example of Heisenberg & Ramanujan
There are many people who are way too smart to believe in religion, but they still believed in it anyway. I can’t think of any reason why they were religious except that they were brainwashed in their childhood. This brainwashing probably forever impaired some part of their rational capacity. They are still rational people in their own field, but when it comes to theology, they are very irrational.
For example, Heisenberg was a devout Christian. He rediscovered matrices to discover matrix mechanics because he didn’t know that mathematicians had already studied them until Max Born told him. His matrix mechanics was the first proper formulation of quantum mechanics. He is definitely smart in physics. But in theology, he was very irrational. Christianity is wrong, but was he at least a proper, consistent Christian? No. He met with many Hindus and was simping for Hindu philosophy. This is something against the Ten Commandments.
“In 1929, Heisenberg spent some time in India as the guest of the celebrated Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, with whom he had long conversations about science and Indian philosophy. This introduction to Indian thought brought Heisenberg great comfort, he told me. He began to see that the recognition of relativity, interconnectedness, and impermanence as fundamental aspects of physical reality, which had been so difficult for himself and his fellow physicists, was the very basis of the Indian spiritual traditions. “After these conversations with Tagore,” he said, “some of the ideas that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense. That was a great help for me.””
Srinivasa Ramanujan was a mathematician who had no formal training in pure maths but had discovered many things, several of which had already been discovered, and he rediscovered them. G. H. Hardy recognized his research that he did in isolation, and between 1914-1919, Ramanujan went to Cambridge to study and do research. He died in 1920. So, only for 5 years, he was not isolated from mathematicians.
“Paul Erdős has passed on to us Hardy’s personal ratings of mathematicians. Suppose that we rate mathematicians on the basis of pure talent on a scale from 0 to 100. Hardy gave himself a score of 25, J. E. Littlewood 30, David Hilbert 80 and Ramanujan 100.”
He was definitely a very highly intelligent guy. According to Hardy, he was the most talented mathematician of their generation with 100 score, and Hilbert was the second with 80 score.
I can’t fathom that he was genuinely a devout Hindu. He discovered stuff and deluded himself into thinking that the minor local Namagiri goddess had revealed mathematical results to him. She is not even the relevant goddess; she is an avatar of Lakṣmī (goddess of wealth) and not related to Sarasvatī (goddess of knowledge). If he hadn’t been brainwashed into believing in Hinduism in his childhood, then he would have never believed in this nonsense. Why didn’t this goddess make Ramanujan’s family rich in his childhood, which would have solved his medical issues for which he suffered lifelong and died young in 1920? Is that goddess stupid? Her literal duty was to give wealth as the goddess of wealth, and she didn’t do that and instead gave him mathematical equations in his dream.
“While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing.”
Neither of these 2 great people would have been religious were they not brainwashed from their childhood.