A List of Books for Your Skeptical Children and What It Tells Us About Christianity
Here is a good list of books you should read or give to your children. We know believers indoctrinate their children by teaching them what to believe, just as my nephew and his wife do in raising their kids to root for the Green Bay Packers. To see a better approach take a good look at these books. You'll notice they teach kids how to think critically with a skeptical disposition that requires hard objective evidence before accepting miraculous claims in any supposed sacred book. I dare believers to get a few of these books for their children.
On the list is Peter Boghossian's book, A Manual for Creating Atheists. That book may seem to negate what I just said about merely teaching children how to think, but it doesn't. Peter tells me he didn't choose the title. Titles are chosen by publishers to sell books. What he does in his book is to help believers apply the Socratic method of questioning beliefs in order to help them realize they are pretending to know what they don't really know when claiming to know with certainty, or near certainty, their faith is true. This is what Street Epistemology is all about. Peter stresses the need for a skeptical disposition through questioning, just like Socrates did. It is how we should raise our children, given the number of hucksters and charlatans and bogus claims being put forth by others.
So the title of Peter's book isn't misleading since faith cannot survive honest skeptical questioning. If children are raised properly to learn how to think critically with a skeptical disposition that requires hard objective evidence, they will become non-believers or non-theists, that is, a-theists. So his manual for creating atheists is a manual in thinking correctly as rational people should. It's teaching parents who read it to think about religion the same way they think about every other area of their lives. Imagine that!
The fact that he correctly agreed with his publisher to title the book as they did, can be seen by looking for books in defense of Christianity that are just like it, in reverse. I dare say there are no such books. All of them argue for Christianity, a belief system. None of them merely set forth the rules for thinking skeptically and for evidence gathering, which all by themselves should lead readers to become Christians. None of them are titled, "A Manual for Creating Christians" which only includes rules for thinking and evidence gathering along with additional strategies for helping more people adopt these rules with regard to religions, especially seen in his proposal for Street Epistemology. None I know of anyway. If Christianity were true, that's all they should have to do.
On the list is Peter Boghossian's book, A Manual for Creating Atheists. That book may seem to negate what I just said about merely teaching children how to think, but it doesn't. Peter tells me he didn't choose the title. Titles are chosen by publishers to sell books. What he does in his book is to help believers apply the Socratic method of questioning beliefs in order to help them realize they are pretending to know what they don't really know when claiming to know with certainty, or near certainty, their faith is true. This is what Street Epistemology is all about. Peter stresses the need for a skeptical disposition through questioning, just like Socrates did. It is how we should raise our children, given the number of hucksters and charlatans and bogus claims being put forth by others.
So the title of Peter's book isn't misleading since faith cannot survive honest skeptical questioning. If children are raised properly to learn how to think critically with a skeptical disposition that requires hard objective evidence, they will become non-believers or non-theists, that is, a-theists. So his manual for creating atheists is a manual in thinking correctly as rational people should. It's teaching parents who read it to think about religion the same way they think about every other area of their lives. Imagine that!
The fact that he correctly agreed with his publisher to title the book as they did, can be seen by looking for books in defense of Christianity that are just like it, in reverse. I dare say there are no such books. All of them argue for Christianity, a belief system. None of them merely set forth the rules for thinking skeptically and for evidence gathering, which all by themselves should lead readers to become Christians. None of them are titled, "A Manual for Creating Christians" which only includes rules for thinking and evidence gathering along with additional strategies for helping more people adopt these rules with regard to religions, especially seen in his proposal for Street Epistemology. None I know of anyway. If Christianity were true, that's all they should have to do.
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