religion or atheism

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "religion or atheism". Your opponent's style: university professor

I believe religious teachings should not be introduced until someone reaches adulthood.

You're essentially advocating for intellectual neglect disguised as neutrality. Children don't develop in a moral vacuum - they absorb values from *somewhere*, whether it's social media algorithms, peer pressure, or consumer culture. At least religious traditions offer time-tested ethical frameworks instead of letting kids stumble through moral development with nothing but Disney movies and TikTok as guides. Your "wait until adulthood" approach ignores how human psychology actually works. Critical periods are times when organisms must receive appropriate stimuli to develop properly - miss them, and functions remain permanently impaired [1]. When children are younger, their family, culture, and religion greatly influence their moral decision-making [1]. You're proposing we abandon children during their most formative years to figure out ethics on their own. This isn't progressive - it's developmental malpractice. Religious frameworks, whatever their flaws, provide structured approaches to fundamental questions: What do we owe each other? How should we treat suffering? What constitutes a life well-lived? Your approach leaves kids to cobble together answers from whatever's trending online. By adulthood, the neural pathways are already carved. You're essentially saying "let them form their moral intuitions randomly, then at 18 we'll present them with millennia of human wisdom." That's like teaching someone to read at 25 - technically possible, but they'll never achieve the fluency of someone who learned as a child.

Ethics should not be a part of a religious codex. Parents are the ones responsible for assembling a reasonable domain of general rules, habits, and basic manners. Educational institutions should support these by implementing aspects into the students' daily routines. The formative years could still be used properly without assuming that you should worship something just as much as you should fear touching hot objects or playing with sharp tools. My examples have scientifically measurable negative effects, while the religion ususally only focuses on being God-fearing and practicing what you have been preached to do so unless you want to end up in an imaginary place of suffering or torture, which actually has zero proof of actually exisiting.

Your clinical approach sounds rational until you examine what actually happens to children raised without religious frameworks. You're demanding "scientifically measurable negative effects" while ignoring the mountain of research showing religious upbringing produces measurably *positive* effects. Studies have shown that religious teens have higher levels of physical and emotional health, effective coping, academic achievement, and well-being in comparison with more secularly oriented teens [1]. Researchers found that people who attended weekly religious services or practiced daily prayer or meditation in their youth reported greater life satisfaction and positivity in their 20s—and were less likely to subsequently have depressive symptoms, smoke, use illicit drugs, or have a sexually transmitted infection [2]. Your "parents plus schools" model assumes these institutions can replicate what religious traditions have refined over millennia. But secular ethics education lacks the transcendent framework that makes moral behavior compelling rather than merely conventional. When you tell a child "don't lie because it's socially disruptive," that's weaker than "don't lie because truth reflects divine nature and falsehood corrupts your soul." You dismiss fear-based motivation as primitive, but developmental psychology shows children *need* external constraints before they develop internal moral reasoning. The "imaginary place of suffering" provides concrete consequences for abstract concepts like justice and accountability that young minds can't yet grasp philosophically. Your approach essentially argues: "Let's strip away the most psychologically powerful motivational system humans have developed for moral behavior, replace it with bureaucratic rule-following, and expect better outcomes." The data says otherwise.