Bear With Me

Somebody once asked if parents really have the right to choose their child's religion and not (for instance) the government.

At first, it seems such a strange question that it's hard to answer it. It assumes that a religion is something you choose, the way you might choose a football team to root for, or a coat you put on for a while and change it. It is a strange idea, considering that any religion worth its salt (and also Secular Humanism) gives an explanation for the big picture, and your opinion on Everything (as Chesterton said) affections your opinions on everything. So a better question would be why parents have the right to decide what a child will be taught.

The second thing is that the question ignores the fact that each child is de facto under the guidance of his parents. If you wanted to change that, you would have to take the child away from his parents. Thus, the question should be, "Does anybody have the right to teach a child something the parents disapprove of?" If so, then who and why?

I would point to one fact that supports the right of the parents.

If you live anywhere near the country, it is common to see small birds attacking big ones. For instance, you can see red wing blackbirds chasing a crow, or even a pair of crows driving a hawk. Why are these animals attacking something much bigger than themselves and (in the case of the hawk) able to kill them in a fair fight? Because the birds are parents, and they are protecting their chicks.

The BBC reported today that a father saved his three-year old daughter, who climbed over a
fence into the bear pen in a zoo; both were mauled by the Asian moon bear, but the father saved his girl by climbing into the pen and lifting her out. I don't know if I would have the guts to face down a bear to protect my son, but I do know that I'm a hundred times more likely to do it for my boy than for any other child on the planet.

The point is that parents are the ones who can be trusted to act consistently in the best interest of their children. How many people would go hungry for a day so that the 7-year old boy down the street can eat? How many people would wear their clothes to rags so that they can send a stranger's child to college? But this is the sort of thing that parents naturally do for their children.

Therefore, a child's father is more likely to tell the truth to his child about the little things and the big things. The government, on the other hand, sees your child as a statistic. They may willingly sacrifice your children for their own ends, such as promoting sexual license or weakening their minds so that they will be unable to see through the official propaganda. So you see "African-American" politicians fighting vouchers that would help black children escape from substandard government schools; if they got a good education, they would no longer look to the "African-American" politicians for salvation. The children are sacrificed to political expediency.

There are indeed cases where the parents have abused their children, but it is simply an observed fact that fatherhood and motherhood are a powerful incentive to work for the children. It is also observed that politicians are generally not to be trusted to put the interests of other people ahead of their own power.

So yes, parents have the right to choose their child's religion. Nobody else can be trusted.

TTL