I don’t know. Perhaps it depends what you mean by indoctrination. Indoctrination, for the record, is not terribly effective. If the doctrine is true, it shouldn’t be fearful of other approaches.
The real power, often abused, is not indoctrination, but institutional power.
Yeah, indoctrination usually implies uncritical learning about beliefs, and I was using it in an artificially narrow sense about learning in general.
Indoctrination is one of those trigger-words nowadays, like “duty.” Historically, it just means to teach - perhaps with the emphasis of making sure such teaching is fully internalised. Only more recently has it acquired the meaning of “the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.”
Yet even if we accept the second, stronger definition, it seems to be a fact that we indoctrinate our own children not only in everything that we regard as essential to their health and survival, but also in every aspect of our own worldview.
Under the first: “Don’t cross the street on your own…” “Never get into a stranger’s car, even if they offer you sweets…” “Have you cleaned your teeth yet?” It’s possible we may sometimes explain the reaons if asked, but below a certain age, it’s pure reflex: “Don’t bite your sister!!”
Under the second, we teach them not to steal or be cruel, without giving them a course in the moral justifications, not giving them the choice of doing either to see from experience whether it’s a good idea or not. We put them in the car or on the school bus from Day 1, without ever encouraging them to criticize our choices, or offering tham a 4am rise and a long walk.
And all that is because children will develop uncritical beliefs about life, and if we think about it at all, we prefer them to learn from us rather than the paedophile on the corner, the flat-earthers on the Internet, or (in many countries) the totalitarian dictator whose face stares down from every wall and TV screen.
As for religion, not only is it such a crucial part of parental identity and worldview that not teaching it as basic would actually be impossible, but it is as well to remember that “no position is a position.” Leaving a hole in a child’s character doesn’t give them the option of filling it rationally later - it just leaves them hollow.
Yes, ‘free-thinkers’ indoctrinate their children, too.
I propose the following:
Faith = Belief + Action
Scenarios:
The Action does is not necessarily a physical one. Trust is faith as a mental behavior, one that we can test ourselves with on an anxiety scale.
Ah, yes I might have got that wrong:
So maybe faith=belief, faith+action=saving faith?
Or maybe:
Does that work?
I’m not sure it does, quite. Faith isn’t something you put on a shelf and are willing to use when the need arises. Going back to the fatherhood analogy, the faith and trust are always there as an active, functioning foundation. (Foundations are not really passive – they are always load-bearing.)
I agree, but don’t some situations test our faith more than others?
Absolutely, but that doesn’t mean it has been inactive or dormant – maybe it just becomes more evident. And Paul speaks about our refinement and strengthening through testing, so there’s that, too.
In fact, if it is dormant, perhaps it isn’t really faith at all. We should be being obedient (including doing good), seeking the reward of Father’s smile, and not because we have to earn it to remain his children.
So would you say faith is like an ongoing attitude, more than something passive or dormant, but less than an actual action?
Much more than an ephemeral attitude, I would hope. I again appeal to the father-child relationship. The child has an abiding and solid faith that his father will protect him and do him only good. Human fathers disappoint, so the prototype is really the Father God and only Son relationship, and the human father-child relationship is the flawed analogy. But in the God to human relationship, he is still the perfect Father.
It’s not our perfect love! It is our Father’s, and he only does what is good for both him and us. As I’ve noted before, the most frequent mandate in the Bible is “Don’t be afraid” or one of its several variations – “Be anxious for nothing”, “Fret not”, etc., so whenever I catch myself being anxious about ANYTHING, I can go crawl up on Father’s lap even when court is in session in the throne room, so to speak, and his strong arms will comfort me and shield me.
I would say belief is thinking something (a statement, fact, or whatever) is true.
Faith is tied to confidence in the belief. If we believe something strongly we are said to have faith in it. We can “measure” faith by seeing in action - situations where faith is required to do something. For example, a very high measure of faith is if I put my life on the line based on confidence in a belief (“I have faith that my car will not fall apart as I’m driving down the road at 70 mph”).
So what then are beliefs and confidence in those beliefs (faith) based on? Well, most people at Peaceful Science, I suspect, put reason high on the list. Logically consistent, empirically verified, parsimonious, and so on. But we also know that people often base belief and faith on irrational, emotional, coincidental, and at times silly reasons. Ask any college admissions counselor about why 18 year olds pick the colleges they do 
I think the point to me is that we need to be as self-aware as possible and also to put faith in it’s proper place. I think, generally, we are more sensitive to people who have misplaced faith (i.e. to much or to little confidence) than misplaced beliefs, and yet much of the language around origins and theism is focused on correct or incorrect beliefs.
I take some exception to your inclusion of ‘coincidental’ in your list, because most (all?) of God’s providence involve ‘co-instances’ to one degree or another. They may not be the basis of faith, but God certainly uses them to get our attention, and any number of conversion accounts involve them.
I was looking briefly in Eric Metaxes’ book, Miracles, which I read several years back, looking for co-instants accounts to use here as examples (I didn’t find any quickly, but I know they’re there) and ran across this page of an important kind of evidence for God:
One notable example:
The reason so many people regard genuine conversions as miracles is because of the dramatic changes often witnessed in the lives of those converted. As I’ve just said, Chuck Colson went from being a tremendously prideful, hyperaggressive political zealot, to someone humbled and humble who served the poor and the disenfranchised with all of the talents and energies he had once used to claw his way to the top.
I’m using “coincidental” here in the common form that would be compatible with providence (or not). I was just trying to say that “reason” isn’t the only way we form beliefs.
And that is where I made the error of thinking that Faith required an Action. I stand corrected. Thank you, this has been a very helpful conversation for me.
So I end up back where I started with William Lane Craig’s definition of faith: “Faith is trusting in that which you have reason to believe is true. I had Faith in Atheism because I believed it to be true, and I had great Trust and Confidence in it. My Faith in it could be measured by the actions I took based on it. After my (miraculous?) conversion experience I no longer trusted atheism to be a good description of reality, ergo I lost my faith in it.
