Debate: Is it okay for a public school to put up pro-atheism posters?
Side: It's not okay

Okay, I've got some time now:For your first segment, the part starting at "I didn't put that forward very well," and ending with "about that on my view," fair enough. I suppose I don't have a lot of faith in people either, but I still think it's worth trying to teach them, as at least a few would likely pick it up."I'm curious how you might approach that, while still holding to the view that indoctrination more broadly isn't fair or right."Let me try: I think indoctrination is morally wrong (I don't believe in objective morality (in that sense anyway), so maybe that's a bit hypocritical of me, but I see it as my subjective opinion) and I want to try to avoid it happening. At the same time I also want to 'indoctrinate' people to think critically, to defend them against indoctrination. It's kind of like the problem where people say there's absolutely no possibility of absolute knowledge, it's a bit self contradictory. Thinking about the question more, indoctrination is to teach one to accept (or reject) a belief uncritically, so teaching people to accept beliefs (or reject them) critically would be the opposite of indoctrination. Perhaps the teaching of critical thinking skills is best done along with the teaching of other things - I'll use an example as I'm not sure how to explain it: In a physics/science class, a teacher teaches the class the basic formula: v= d/t. To do this, they don't just show the students the formula, but they carry out a basic experiment - rolling a ball down a slope with a stopwatch or something (technically, this would only give the average velocity (the ball accelerates) from v=d/t, so this is a bad example and now I'm getting sidetracked, but you get my point). They would then be teaching students to accept the belief critically, by testing v=d/t to see if it works, and therefore not indoctrinating them. With methods like this, I don't think that teaching critical thinking skills counts as indoctrination. I think that the only thing that can be taught without criticism is criticism itself, there's no other way. Maybe you could criticism critical thinking, but that would be circular. An alternative way to get around this problem is to just say that, according to my moral beliefs, the good of indoctrinating people with critical thinking outweighs the bad of indoctrination itself, although this might lead to the old slippery slope situation, where you could then try to squeeze other things in. Also, for all of my examples, they already use things like rationality, maybe the act of critical thinking is rational itself? I'm kind of batting ideas about here, as you may be able to tell."(Basically, my preceding question again...)"I'll refer you to my preceding answer then."I don't believe that society exists"Could you maybe give a short reason why you think this, I won't debate you on this but it would be interesting to hear your opinion. In what way does society not exist? (You could just link me something if you don't want to explain."It isn't necessarily the case that social welfare is only or best achieved through egalitarianism" I see that egalitarianism isn't necessarily true, I suppose all people aren't equal, and maybe some deserve better opportunities. Perhaps realization of this would benefit society if that's the goal, more efficient allocation of resources?. I think for now, I'll stick with the goal of getting what's best for society, and I realize now that egalitarianism ins't necessarily the path to that. I also acknowledge that there is definitely egoism in what I personally want - for example, I personally value things like scientific exploration, and might rather see that funded more than things that will directly help people. (You might have seen that in my "should we look for aliens" debate.) At the end of the day though, I would (in a hypothetical situation) probably vote for someone who wants to increase net social welfare over someone who wants to fund NASA more, even though I personally might prefer the NASA option."It presumes a certain intrinsic value to reason and science that simply doesn't exist. " Fair enough, I see your point in this paragraph."Taking a positive stand for any thing, reason and science included, is to preference that thing relative to other things. That's not egalitarian. It's preferential. And coming from the government, it's indoctrination."I think I can somewhat refer you to what I said earlier, about teaching critical thinking as a means of evaluating what students are learning in school for why it might not be indoctrination, at least in the way I gave the example of (the v=d/t thing). I see though that it isn't egalitarian, but as I said in the part before this paragraph, I now see why egalitarianism mightn't necessary for social welfare."we can practice double standards and refuse people who disagree with us access to the same avenues of action by denying that we're taking them and then faulting them for being oppressive tyrants"I see that such a thing would be possible, but as you know, I wouldn't want to do that for my personal moral reasons.