Posted on Feb 18, 2015
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While I was at Balad, I got into a conversation with a Major about schools. I told him that my wife and I were planning on home schooling our kids. He then said something that deeply offended me, though I didn't say so at the time. He said that he didn't think people should be allowed to home school their kids, "Unless it was for religious reasons". This impacted me deeply, and got me thinking about how we view religion, especially in the military. While I am not an atheist, I have beliefs that I hold very dearly which are not religious. Those beliefs would have been given zero weight if I brought them up to my leadership, asking them to make exceptions to policy. On the other hand, when someone brings up a religious belief, they are frequently given exceptions to policy (like wearing ashes in uniform on Ash Wednesday, the ability of Sikh doctors to grow beards, etc). Why should religious beliefs trump non-religious beliefs? Doesn't this violate the Establishment Clause in the Constitution?
Religion
Standards
Edited 10 y ago
Posted 10 y ago
Responses: 3
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I ran into that whole religious home-schooling rabble (yes MY TERM) while in Germany. The idea of DoDDs secularist must have been somehow frightening. My partner --who brought over our kids (all pre-DADT repeal) home-schooled, but instead of going it alone, partnering with the Christian community, we used our school district and a distance-learning protocol. Home-schooling in Germany is Verbotten in almost all cases. The big exception is when someone is covered under the SOFA agreement. We have our son in a public Charter school that uses a Montessori-like philosophy. He constantly tests high and the normal standards don't fit him well. Home-schooling might be have been a consider for a situation similar to what you described. And kuddos about the whole "irrational based superstitions." I feel the same about Iron Age myths.
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In general, there haven't been too many people who have been killed or had the urge to kill someone else over homeschooling. Additionally, you're probably not going to have an overwhelming fear that you will go to hell if you don't homeschool your kids. That's why it's different.
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SSgt Thomas L.
So the fear that my kids will get a substandard education, be subject to parents who want to eliminate science based education in favor of creationist superstition, and be in physical danger from deranged lunatics with automatic weapons, not to mention physical danger from the other students doesn't measure up to the fear people have of an imaginary man in the sky putting them in fire when they die. Nice.
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Religion is one of those words that means a lot of different things to different people. Ask an evangelical if an Atheists devotion to science is religious and most will say it is... ask an Atheist and they will most likely say exactly the opposite.
If you are wanting to home-school your kids, which is an incredible amount of work, you probably have some very deeply held beliefs that IMO would probably qualify as religious. You hold a particular set of beliefs and values... that even though they are not part of any organized religion, you put into practice.
If you are wanting to home-school your kids, which is an incredible amount of work, you probably have some very deeply held beliefs that IMO would probably qualify as religious. You hold a particular set of beliefs and values... that even though they are not part of any organized religion, you put into practice.
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SSG (Join to see)
So let's say they were specifically talking about you, do you understand how some might see that as religious?
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SSgt Thomas L.
Saying that science is like a religion is really and truly denigrating both. A desire to understand the physical world by way of experimentation and observation of facts is NOT the same as taking a mythological story to heart and believing it as fact without any type of physical evidence. Science is an epistemology, religions are teleologies. Very different things.
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SSG (Join to see)
I'm not saying that science is like a religion, I'm saying that some people have what can be interpretated as a religious devotion to science. Nor do I believe that religion requires one to take a story to heart and believe it as fact... I, and many other religious people see our stories as more allegory than fact. That said, the point was to emphasis the extent to which the word religion can mean different things to different people.
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