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There is no value neutrality. If they aren't getting your values, they're getting someone elses. And since liberalism is a quokka factory producing naive and easily duped hothouse flowers, perhaps religious values aren't so bad after all.
There may not be complete value neutrality, but telling kids you've figured out exactly how the world works and that they have to obey a specific list of rules otherwise they'll burn in hell is very far from neutral. Closer to neutral would be having conversations with them and telling them what you personally believe, but not forcing your values on them.
Liberals do that too except 'burn in hell' is substituted for by social ostracism and killing their reputation right here, right now.
That's wokeness, not liberalism. Wokeness is highly illiberal.
Sure, if by liberalism we mean something that doesn't exist anymore and has been supplanted by wokeness in practice.
Classical liberalism is larval wokeness, or more precisely, wokeness came into being to profitably exploit liberalism. There's no reason to be extra careful about terms here, both are very bad news.
There’s always a reason to be careful.
For example, I really really disagree that classical liberalism is bad news. It outcompeted most other ideologies for good reason. History gave us plenty of examples of the kind of ideas which profitably exploit totalitarianism, and they’re much worse.
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Strongly disagree, classical liberalism and wokeness are opposites. Wokeness imposes a universal moral value system, it tells you how you must act and think. Liberalism is about freedom to act and think however you want as long as nobody else is being hurt by it.
Well I think it's fair to say that the illiberal side of the spectrum is winning. Currently the culture war in the west is dominated by two puritanical ideologies, wokeness and conservatism, competing with each other. But that doesn't mean liberalism doesn't exist anymore as a concept. We can always go back to it.
All moral systems are by necessity universal moral systems, because that is, at the end of the day, what the word "moral" means in this context. To a first approximation, all moral systems allow "freedom to act and think however you want as long as nobody else is being hurt by it." There is no objective definition of "hurt" available, nor will there ever be one, nor can a given definition be kept stable over long periods of time.
From the frame you are using, Wokeness and American conservativism are both isomorphic to Liberalism, the three being differentiated only by mutually-exclusive definitions of morally-significant harm. You yourself have already posited that Christianity "hurts" those who adopt it or are exposed to it, which seems like a perfect illustration of the problem; "hurts" by what definition, on what criteria? Why those criteria and not others? Why your criteria and not mine? Liberalism begs these questions while providing no answers within its framework, and so people recognize that under liberal structures, the least-cost alternative is to establish their own answer through socio-political dominance. Hence, Wokeness and Conservatism.
We cannot get back to the prior liberal order, because that liberal order depended on ignorance of the subjective nature of morally-significant harm to exist. Now that this subjective nature approaches common knowledge, liberalism devolves into an incoherent tautology: "We should tolerate good things and not tolerate bad things." Sure, everyone knows that. The problem is that we have no common definition of which things are good and bad, and likely never will again.
Obviously people can't be protected from all harm. When I said that Christianity hurts people I meant more in the sense that viruses or natural disasters hut people. It's nobody's fault in particular that Christianity exists, it's a mental parasite whose purpose is to perpetuate itself. It's inevitable that such mental parasites will exist.
When I said that people shouldn't be allowed to hurt other people under liberalism, I meant in a literal sense. You shouldn't be able to use force to coerce other people, or restrict their freedom of speech or bodily autonomy.
Because I said so. At the end of the day morality is subjective, and it's about who has the most power to enforce their beliefs. I hope that liberalism can build up that power, and then use it benignly. Of course there is no objective reason why freedom, bodily autonomy, and free speech are correct.
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"No enemies to the left" typical American liberals and progressives passively keep quiet while extremists and the woke wage culture war. Then fight like cornered animals when conservatives push back. Wokeness is indeed illiberal and modern self described "liberals" are its chief enablers.
Not of course principled classical liberals. But they are an endangered species with little in common with modern common "liberals".
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What if you actually believe that the options are Christianity or Hell?
That said, if aren’t to some degree enforcing your values, they won’t take them seriously. Why should a kid believe that you really think pornography is bad if you don’t have any enforcement of rules against pornography? They won’t.
And that's why religion is so dangerous, you can justify anything with that. If I sincerely believed that I might burn in hell for eternity if I didn't do something, that would be a very strong motivation. A much stronger motivation than any human should ever have. That's what makes people strap on bomb vests.
Well maybe they would be convinced if you had a rational argument for it. If people need external consequences to know that something is bad, maybe it's not actually a big deal.
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Stop taking the bait.
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