Comments on: Will Our Children Be Clompliant Atheists Or Independent Thinkers?

By: baker

baker — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 22:31:52 +0000

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

By: Angela Stoll

Angela Stoll — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 04:18:39 +0000

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.

By: Ed Darrell

Ed Darrell — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 04:38:01 +0000

Hey! You still there? No posts for a while - you okay?

By: Todd Barton

Todd Barton — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 14:20:09 +0000

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.

By: Hifi

Hifi — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 23:42:18 +0000

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 .