You’re an outlier. Children overwhelmingly adopt the faith of their parents, rather than an alternative.
Nonsense like social mores, courts, legal & education systems, property rights (which some believe to be nonsense but that is another matter), contract, marriage & inheritance laws, blah blah blah.
Much like society itself.
I’m guessing you’ve never encountered a Jesuit or scholar of Halacha or Sharia?
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Richard Dawkins, I think? published some interesting analysis of this.
I’m not really sure of what point you’re trying to make. That laws, for example, aren’t real? The laws and norms of most societies are not underscored by some faith in a supreme being. The things you list are demonstrably real. They require no faith. If you commit murder, you will be tried in a very real court, against a very real law and thrown into a very real jail. However it IS a matter of faith as to whether some supreme being will also judge you and cast you into hell.
False equivalence. Participating in society does not require one to be convinced of fantastical ideas with zero evidence.
Religious scholars can indeed argue with great conviction. But they are arguing from a premise that is, by definition, one of faith and without challenge. I’ve seen these people debating with people like Hitchens and Dawkins. They are often surprisingly poor in their arguments, even if one accepts their flawed, non-falsifiable faith-based, premise.
If the answer to the question:
“What would it take to change your mind?”
is
“Nothing would change my mind - I know I am right. I have faith.”
then the discussion is perhaps interesting but pointless.
Demonstrable and verified religious miracles would cause me to change my mind on the “truth” of religion (that is, the truth of whichever one “won”. They can’t all be right). What would it take for you to renounce your faith?
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It certainly is something that Dawkins has asserted.
https://www.richarddawkins.net/2015/02/dont-force-your-religious-opinions-on-your-children/
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What if I told you that all Barbie dolls wear a hijab, if you put a hijab on them.
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Many religious systems don’t work that way at all. When you use phrases like this as conclusion (or use Jesus as an example) it shows that you have a limited understanding of the subject matter. But since you quote Dawkins below that’s no surprise. This isn’t being backhanded, Dawkins himself has a poor grasp of the subject matter beyond the Christian zeitgeist.
But society of any type requires social conditioning to function. Not false.
Faith is not the point of using logic for jurisprudence which is exactly what Halacha or Sharia is. Your previous point was about logic not faith.
I can’t speak for Islam but I can tell you that for Jews we don’t adjucate law based on miracles, quite the opposite really as illustrated by a famous Talmudic story
And
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It’s a ban on covering one’s face in public, specifically aimed at upholding a social standard that people don’t get to move anonymously in public spaces and a secular standard that religious groups do not get to exclude and isolate their members from the broader society.
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Nah, I’m nowhere near as awesome 
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Good thing, too. Believing in a sky fairy doesn’t give you any specific insight into worthwhile laws, nor into interpretation of them.
Please… whatever the language it was clearly aimed at Muslim women. The discussion and language around it at the time was all about the Burka.
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Well obviously, since burkas had been the salient reason. This had never come up before because no other group insisted on covering their faces as a matter of ordinary everyday existence.
But I don’t see any problem with targeting burkas specifically. Above the anti-segregationist reasons already given, they are also the Islamic equivalent of rolling coal - a fairly recent signal promoted by reactionary theocrats. Neither the Koran nor the hadiths demand that women cover their faces. The burka and the niqab were invented as a logical endpoint of the philosophy of total isolation and subjugation of women to the men in their families, effectively blocking any contact they might otherwise have with the outside society. Accepting them is tantamount to standing with the fundamentalist elements of the faith and against its moderates and modernizers.
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Which makes is discriminatory. Full stop. The stated goal was to help women assumed to be living under abusive conditions, too.
Because that means that the women who are being targeted, are only further isolated.
I think that’s a BS argument, honestly. If the goal is to “free” these women (and it’s not, it’s to further isolate them) the way to do that isn’t to impose clothing restrictions on them. It just doesn’t follow.
But once again, I’m not sure why YOU (or in this case the French government) get to make this decision for the women in question. You don’t know them and their lives, or why they made the choice to wear a hijab, niqab, or a burka. Could it be because they were coerced into it? Of course. But women are coerced into all sorts of things that they don’t want to do (as the massive wave of sexual harassment claims have been bearing out).
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No it doesn’t. The ban is fully in line with long-standing principles. Burkas were just the first case for which the explicit rule had to be adopted.
I’m pretty sure there the French code contains no explicit prohibition for widows jumping onto their husbands funeral pyre. But if Sati were to become widespread in France through Hindu immigration, explicitly banning the practice would hardly be discriminatory. (Although some of the women could surely be deciding to burn themselves alive voluntarily, out of pure love for their husbands, and not at all because of social pressure and ostracism.)
I’m not making rules for anyone. But the French have decided to run their society in a certain way and, just like in the case of every society, that includes prohibiting certain kinds of behavior to maintain some level of cohesion and promote accepted beneficial social institutions.
Why should a government get to make a decision on whether a 13-year-old may or may not consent to sex with an adult? In that situation, I don’t suppose you have a problem with the government stepping in and protecting the child from harm, even though it limits its unrestricted exercise of free choice.
Likewise, the ban ensures that the next generation of young girls will not be forced to suddenly start covering their faces when they reach puberty and as a result, they will generally grow up as fuller, more equal and more integrated members of society.
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Doesn’t make it less discriminitory. You can’t hide behind principles when you pass laws specifically meant to keep some citizens out of the public square.
The difference is that women in burkas or niqabs are not killing themselves. I’d argue that this law would make it more likely that women subject to abuse at home would be MORE likely to hurt themselves instead of get the help they need, because they will be more isolated from the rest of French society. But either way, it’s apples to oranges.
And I’m free to be critical of it.
There are clear soicetal and developmental reasons why this is damaging to young women.
Or perhaps it’s meant to make a group of people feel unwelcome in society, to mark them as different, alien, unfrench, etc.
Yes, because other French women don’t have a single problem in their society do they? /s
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And who designs and implements this curriculum? And how are parents prevented from teaching alternatives? I am asking this question in good faith, because the hypothetical answers I come up with are frightening.
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Also @winkybber, have you listened to yourself? You are making very strong claims for absolute truth, and further, you are endorsing a project of the ideological indoctrination of all children, not just your own. You may very well be right, I don’t know, but stop and think about the world you are proposing and how it will function.
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As I’ve said, the current state of things where the inculcating of impressionable children with the ludicrous beliefs of their parents is common may not be possible to change without treading very heavily on human rights. All I’m saying is that it would be better if it could be prevented. I don’t advocate removing children from their homes, nor some sort of thought police patrolling the neighbourhood. I don’t really know the answer except public debate and education. Removing religious instruction from schools should be encouraged. The teaching of the history of religions, the cultural and socio-political effects, and the psychological aspects should be encouraged, provided that the “holy books” are presented as the fairy tales that they are, and not as some sort of moral authority.
No, it is the religions that make the extraordinary claims. Let them come forth with the proof.
Uncanny! Ibtihaj looks exactly like the doll!
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