Will Our Children Be Clompliant Atheists Or Independent Thinkers?
Some days my seven-year-old daughter believes there is a god. Hers is a god of lost pencils and favorite foods. On other days, when said god doesn’t come through to grant a wish, she announces, “I guess I don’t believe in god anymore.”
To read more, follow the link to this week’s article in the Humanist Network News. Feel free to write a letter to the editor in response. Or come back here if you’d like to comment on my blog.
I wanted to thank everyone for the great response to the previous post about Parenting Beyond Belief. It was great to see so many links back to my posting and to the book; so many purchases, even multiple purchases, and gifts to local libraries! Awesome.
Somebody asked which of the magazines and stores are rejecting the book. I contacted Dale McGowan about this. So far he is waiting to hear the specifics from the publisher. Once he gets the information I’ll be sure to update you so all the interested activists in this readership can start writing letters.
Here is a positive review from Library Journal. This is a publication that is instrumental in getting libraries to purchase copies:
McGowan, a professor, freelance writer, and novelist, has collected essays from some of contemporary secularism’s big names, e.g., Richard Dawkins, Margaret Downey, in support of those nonreligious American parents who seek to “articulate values, celebrate rites of passage, find consolation, and make meaning” sans religion. Contributor Ed Buckner writes that secular means “not based on religion” rather than “hostile to religion.” Though a few entries do evidence anger or resentment, it is clear that all of these astute essayists have thought carefully about God’s nonexistence. Most of the 30-odd contributors recommend imbuing children with the ability to think well independently; when pressured or rejected by real and figurative institutions that tend to favor the religious (e.g., schools, scouting, holidays), parents are advised to stick to their nontheistic guns. The book considers parents as pedagogues, recalling Deborah Stipek and Kathy Seal’s Motivated Minds: Raising Children To Love Learning. Engaging and down-to-earth, this collection balances the scores of religious parenting titles shelved in the average library and is highly recommended for large public libraries and parenting collections. — Douglas C. Lord, Connecticut State Lib., Hartford
Thanks for your interest, everyone! Don’t forget to stop over to HNN for a little reading.
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April 20th, 2007 @ 4:42 pm
Noell,
There is no more reason to create an environment within which your kids can give religion the benefit of the doubt, than one in which they can consider the virtues of owning slaves. Parents teach right and wrong. Yes, right and wrong as you know it. Perhaps the demons of your authoritarian religious upbring have made you shy of assuming that kind of responsibility. (I have to say letting the kids go to church to be fair to religion seems bending over backwards to a point of contortion.) But teaching children your conclusions and inviting them to improve on them is what parents do.
Take a lesson from another area of life and parenting: There is healthy food as you know it and healthy food as it really is. Now, do you need to be a genius nutritionist before you can allow yourself to impart your well-considered, scientifically-based conclusions? Is there any reason at all to allow your kids to wonder if food advertising in kid’s media may be another option?
As parents, we can only go with what we know. Yet, to withold what we know and let kids work out it out themsevles sound nutritional principles or, say, the rules of traffic safety because you are afraid that what you know might not wholly conform to what are the complete facts, well, obviously borders on criminal neglect.
For athiests, this is not to say we must indoctrinate kids with simplistics: “Science good, religion bad.” Rather we give them our wisdom – and if we are clever educators we lead them to it as we led ourselves.
Here’s how it works in our house, we read world mythology. Imagine: there is nothing, bar nothing, that can skewer religion like reading page after page of the silly notions that people far and wide have believed about where things came from and how they work.
A favorite example is the Chinese myth that relates how the sun and moon were cast up from a riven diety’s eyes, and how humans originated from the fleas that jumped off his body. Right up there with talking snakes and magic apples.
As works of pure imagination, in the vein of Dr. Seuss, my kids love to have these myths read to them. And when I remind them that before people knew anything about how the world works everyone thought it was all true, they think its hilariously idiotic.
When my kids’ grandpa talks to them about god, they excitedly volunteer, “Oh, yes, we read about all the gods!” The when they put it in its place like that the conversation doesn’t even get started .
April 24th, 2007 @ 7:20 am
You mention that you still have beliefs several times in your article. I would argue that anyone who bases their life stance on reason, logic, evidence and critical thinking (please forgive the redundancies) doesn’t have the equivalent of traditional beliefs. Rather, they have a trust in the probability that something is correct, which really indiciates that they “understand” or even “know”.
Beliefs hold that something is always 100% true. I’m careful to regularly remind my kids that not many things are 100% true and that, if we believe something is, then we probably aren’t thinking critically about it. Instead of taking somebody’s word for something, we should do our homework on it so that we can understand it for ourselves. Of course, I told them it’s OK for now to take my word on most things until they have the skills and experience to do so themselves and that I promise to be as accurate as possible about everything I tell them, including saying, “I don’t know” or “I’m just guessing here, but…”.
Along those lines, I’m not hesitant to point out that the evidence for any god, miracles, etc. is non-existent, that it’s scarce for Jesus even having existed, and that it’s human nature to claim something is evidence – and ignore anything contrary – when we want to believe something is true. That’s not instilling them with my “beliefs”, that’s just explaining to them what is real…probably.
July 22nd, 2007 @ 9:38 pm
Hey! You still there? No posts for a while – you okay?
September 28th, 2007 @ 9:18 pm
Today I was listening to Richard Dawkins (author of the God Delusion) on YouTube, and unbeknownst to me, my 10 year old son was also listening from the other room. He crept into the room and said “Mom, what are you listening to?” I told him I was listening to an interview of an author. He said he had been listening to the guy talk about God. I think my son has had his eyes opened today. He said to me “If you don’t believe in God, then it makes you not afraid of things like vampires and ghosts.” Wow.. I guess I never thought of it that way, but it is very true. An unbelief in God is also an unbelief in all supernatural things, specifically devils, evil beings, ghosts and spirits. What a gift to give a child, to allow them to let go of their fear, let go of belief in an unnatural being to comfort an unnatural fear.
November 13th, 2007 @ 3:31 pm
You have good points with the way children are raised. I wrote a short piece on a compromise between atheism and religion and feel free to check it out.
bakersmind.blogspot.com
October 18th, 2009 @ 6:57 am
Again, You don’t have the right to tell your child there is no GOD! Just like you don’t have the right to tell your child there is no Santa Claus. Let your child decide for themselves. Good parents allow their kids to choose for themselves. It’s bad to pressure Jesus down your child’s throat and it’s also bad to pressure Agnosticism down your child’s throat. Let the children decide for themselves.
There is a 99% chance your baby is going to run into friends who go to church all of the time and perhaps might ask them to go with them. I guarantee you they will go because they never been there before. I heard so many stories like this in college and this is how people who grew up in non-religious homes convert into Christianity.
Your agnostic belief will cause your child to be curious about what others believe. Just the same as children who grow up in Christian homes can rebel and say they don’t believe in God. So don’t pressure your child.
November 20th, 2009 @ 7:09 pm
Hi everyone! I’ve been reading your blogs for a while now, but have never commented. At work for the first time today I told my friends/co-workers I was Agnostic. I believe I actually said “kinda Agnostic”, lol. I live in a very small, conservative, religious community in Texas. I was raised Christian. My Mother is Catholic, Father Baptist. I wasn’t raised in a very strict religious household like my Husband, but it was alway implied that we believe in God and Jesus. I had my daughter baptised Catholic when she was born and attended church off and on. I’ve always felt like a hypocrite in church. I could never get my head around it and always worried that I was a bad person or Mother because I couldn’t force myself just to have “faith” that everything in the bible is true and not look at it logically. For the last 3 or 4 years I’ve done a lot of soul searching and realized I don’t need religion to be a good and moral person. Today was the first time I really said anything to anyone outside of family that I am agnostic. It was what I expected. “I should be worried about my eternal soul.” “I should be worried about my daughter’s.” “I just haven’t tried a church or religion that works for me.” et cetera. Of course they told me they aren’t judging me and love me, but it is still upsetting to have to defend your beliefs to your friends. My daughter is 10 and says she believes in God. She knows that I really don’t, but am open to any logical evidence that God exists. That gets her thinking, she comes up with some pretty good evidence and then I give her my thoughts on it. I can practically see her brain analyzing both points of view. She knows that I support her in whatever she believes and that my love is unconditional. I never tell her that God does not exist. My hope is that I am raising a young woman that will think for herself and not base her religious beliefs on what others are going to think of her.