A recent trend among religious Christians allows children to decide whether to attend church. They must come to their own conclusions about religion, the thinking goes. Jason Stubblefield disagrees:

In all [religious] traditions, people learn to reason by a process of initiation—by living within the practices and beliefs of those traditions. It is only after they have learned the grammar of a particular tradition that they are able to begin reasoning within it. . . . As I contemplate raising my son, my own childhood memories of church begin to stir. I was not always willing to go. I did have some friends at church, and the hope of playing with them made attendance more appealing. However, children grow quickly (as I’m told I’ll soon discover), and my teenage self preferred sleep to Sunday school. While Christianity was in some sense intriguing, church was not. . . . Yet now I reflect on all these experiences as a United Methodist pastor. I am deeply grateful to my parents for taking me to church despite my objections . . . Based on my early church experiences, letting my son “make up” his own mind about religion would be misguided, because that conception of freedom fails to recognize how children learn to reason in the first place. Children do not choose religious identity à la carte, but by utilizing the traditions of rationality that have taught them how to think.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.