Atheists with kids.

In My Humble Opinion
81

I like a phrase I read somewhere that said something like

It seems overly simplistic, but the idea is that there’s not (or IMO shouldn’t be) a “special” respect for religion. So in the same way that I wouldn’t mock someone because they like a different color than me or something, I won’t automatically mock someone for his/her superstitious beliefs, but if the subject comes out in a conversation I won’t hide the fact that I think the idea is ridiculous, like bigfoot or the loch ness monster.

I don’t have and I don’t plan on having kids, but if I did, this is the way I would raise them. It seems healthy to me. It comes down to "you shouldn’t silence your opinions because they may offend someone, but at the same time, you shouldn’t actively and unprovoked try to offend anyone, for any reason.

82

I’m not sure, but your quote sounds like it comes from Ambrose Bierce - but I’m too lazy to search.

Lack of “special” respect is a big problem for believers. I was posting in alt.atheism when the idea of the Invisible Pink Unicorn was invented. The IPU was designed explicitly to address special pleading - specifically that the IPU was really no more or no less absurd than God. But believers have an absolute fit when it is brought up these days. You see, God is just different and the IPU is not respectful!

83

If I had kids, I would teach them that religion is a load of BS. Santa and the Easter Bunny are generally harmless diversions. Religion is harmful, and I would not consider myself to be a good person if I willingly taught my kids they could believe in any crap they wanted. For the same reason I’d teach them to look before they cross, not take candy from strangers, I would teach them to distrust religion and point out its errors and contradictions

84

We are an atheist and a deist.

We raised an atheist and an agnostic of the “don’t know, don’t care” variety.

The atheist is a practicing Unitarian Universalist who is being taught to respect all religions (well, except Scientology :slight_smile: We try, but some things just seem to be beyond human capacity)

85

I’m a parent and a Christian (former Roman Catholic, now Episcopalian) so perhaps have nothing on topic to add.

But the most influential person in my life was my grandfather, who was a staunch atheist. I grew up in a nominally Roman Catholic family but until I was in my 20s I mostly agreed with my grandfather, who was a brilliant man. He did not hesitate to share his views that religion has caused more harm than good in the world and that humankind would be better off without it.

What he never did say or suggest is that everyone who believes in God or is religious is an idiot, because my grandfather would never have said something he knew to be untrue.

My friends who are atheists don’t tell their kids that either; I would think that a parent imparting such demonstrably false information to a child would have some hard questions to answer the first time the kid meets a religious person who is not stupid.

86

We call our home a secular household.

We have friends across many (and no) faiths simply because they were the most fun people to hang with. The kid went through a scathing phase of anti-religion when she was about ten, but she always respected the people she was with and kept it to herself when in their company.

But then again, she’s a redhead and according to some of the kids at school, she could suck out their souls at any moment. She absolutely encourages their beliefs in that case.

87

I’m agnostic/athiest whatever. God isn’t something I spend a lot of time thinking about.

My kids are young adults and are both basically athiest, I didn’t teach them anything except good morals and expected behaviour. I was happy for them to do voluntary religious education in primary school so that they’d get the view about religion, but both asked to pull out after some time. They didn’t want to do it.

What did the children say to others when “God comes up”? Again, not a usual topic of conversation.

To paraphrase someone else’s comment, you don’t need to teach kids to be athiests, you just don’t teach them to be religious.

88

I am betting that most of you are young people. I am older and my generation was big on religion. I am the oddball being an atheist but I See more young people not believing in the supernatural God

89

Liberalism is the key. When we spend our lives arguing that certain things are just, even if they are not tradition, and we overturn tradition in order to form a more perfect society, then we are already in a mind set of questioning tradition and authority and looking for better answers than our parents.

When you accept the idea that slavery is abominable, then you look at the parts of the Bible that endorse it and go, wow… this book contains either falsehoods or a God that is less moral than I am.

When you accept the idea that gay people shouldn’t be murdered for being gay, you look at the Bible and go… wow. More falsehoods, or an even less moral God.

When you accept that rape is a crime against women, and find that God endorses it and promises the opportunity to rape when you conquer your enemies in the Lord’s name, then you understand that the Bible was written by men who wanted to conquer other human tribes and rape their women, not a holy God.

Even if you accept the idea of a Holy, sinless God, you must reject the Bible as a factual account of that God. And you understand these are just fables, like greek myths, and they are not the source of morality that humanity needs.

Once you’ve let go of the fairy tales, you see there’s no evidence that would lead you to conclude there’s one god, two gods, many gods, or any other supernatural beings. This leads to agnoticism.

More and more people feel this way, but still identify as Christian. But they don’t take the Bible as literal truth and they don’t go to church. They think for themselves, and their answers regarding morality come from human philosophers. They’re secular humanists in all but name.

The less butts in the pews, the better we all are.

90

I was raised Catholic. VERY Catholic.

Over the years I went from hard belief to…essentially athiesm today.

My not thought well out plan was to let themother of my children infect them with the religion of her choice. However, though she claimed being religious I quickly saw that she really wasn’t. Turns out she never was religious only said she was if it somehow was brought up.

So, 2 kids raised by essentially atheist parents. Religion was just something that wasn’t brought up and, if it was, was just discussed like any other topic.

  • My older boy when he was 15 suddenly developed an interest in religion. He started asking me about Catholics. I talked with him and offered to go with him to mass. He accepted but after we went a couple of times and he asked a billion questions decided it wasn’t for him. He has never brought it up again, If he had stayed with it, I would have supported him on it. He is near 30 now and it has never come up. Religion holds no interest for him.

  • My daughter, however, started asking religious questions around 11…and let’s just say they weren’t ‘nice’ questions. They went on the order of “Dad, how can someone be so stupid as to believe that crap?” type questions. Now, my wife and I never discussed religion and certainly didn’t do it ‘disrespectfully’. Her hard, scathing atheism seemed to form out of the blue.

I did dig into it because her attitude…bothered…me a bit. Not sure why. Maybe because I was brought up very Catholic and was a hard believer at some point that a nugget of faith remained…I don’t know. I rapidly found out how she formed her opinions. She always loved magic books. Harry Potter and the like. Well, part of my wife’s family are very religious and really believe Harry Potter is written by the Devil himself to subvert children. (No not kidding). Well, at family reunions she would hear this and came to the conclusion that all religious people are crazy.

This came to a head one day when she liked a boy ( a couple years ago at 15-16) but the boy went to church. I tried to tell her it was ok…it’s really ok…that doesn’t make him bad :D. She agonized over it for awhile then turned him down. She told me she just couldn’t find someone that believed in a God attractive because that meant he was “really stupid”.

So today while she doesn’t bring it up much, beware the person who does because she lets her feelings be known when it does while my son just changes the subject.

There is a n of 2 for you OP :slight_smile:

91

Thanks for sharing that, Duck.

I have a similar problem with dating fundamentalists. While I don’t consider them stupid, I do consider them to be stubborn and lacking critical thinking of self. It’s very unattractive.

92

I certainly don’t plan to mock religion, not least because my wife is moderately Christian (well, she was raised Christian but I think she is growing out of it).

She wanted our daughter to be christened, which I went along with, but agrees that she can make up her own mind about religion and certainly won’t be dragged into church other than for weddings etc. If she asks, we’ll just tell her different people belive in different things, which is fine, as long as they don’t hate other people because of what they believe.

But I think it’s several orders of magnitude easier to be an atheist in the UK than in the USA. Religion just doesn’t come up in day-to-day life very often at all here. Nobody expects people to go to church, and the kind of anecdotes I read on here about co-workers being horrified to discover people are atheist, or taking them to task over it in public, are unimaginable here.

The whole concept of religion depresses the hell (ha!) out of me though. It’s 2013, for crying out loud. Shouldn’t the human race have grown out of this bullshit by now? I’d love to see an alternate-reality Earth that never developed religion and see how much more peaceful and advanced it might be without dogma and religious hatred holding us back. But that’s another thread…

93

Oh, the world would still be full of assholes. Being an atheist doesn’t mean you automatically become a decent human being. It just precludes you from being an asshole for religious reasons.

94

Very true. But many people who start out as decent human beings turn into nutters when they get teh jebus. Of course that might just be human nature and they’d turn into nutters for some other reason anyhow.

I’d miss the churches, though. Religion did get some great architects.

95

We’d also have lost a lot of early knowledge, both back then and these days (as in, knowledge we have now about what the world was like). We might not have had the Crusades, but we wouldn’t have had The Venerable Bede, Gildas, Adam of Bremen…

We wouldn’t have had the myths and legends of the old faiths, either. No Poetic Edda (and thus no Thor comics), no Greek myths (and thus no Wonder Woman or God of War video games), no Egyptian myths (so no Abbot and Costello meet the Mummy)…

“But Foolscap, secular writers and artists would have filled the gaps they left!”

Same goes for the Crusades, voice of dissent in my head.

96

This came to a head one day when she liked a boy ( a couple years ago at 15-16) but the boy went to church. I tried to tell her it was ok…it’s really ok…that doesn’t make him bad . She agonized over it for awhile then turned him down. She told me she just couldn’t find someone that believed in a God attractive because that meant he was “really stupid”.>>>

My daughter turned down republicans for the same reason :wink:

97

I was raised a Baptist and went to a private Christian school. However, I never truly felt religious. Fear of hellfire kept me compliant for years. I had a hard transition into public school around seventh grade, and vowed I would never let any kid of mine go through any Christian brainwashing crap. My family, however, grew more devout as the years passed, and by the time I was a teenager, we clashed regularly on the topic. I still have a lot of resentment about having religion forced on me.

So, when my kids were little, I enrolled them in a private Christian school. :smack: At the time, I just thought of it as a good school with small classes, and probably would have referred to myself as an agnostic. I let them know that I didn’t believe all of what they were being taught in school, although Grandma and Great Grandma did. We didn’t attend church, except for Easter and maybe Mother’s Day.

Eventually the kids moved on to public school for financial reasons. Aside from Vacation Bible School or sporadic church-going with the grandmothers, their indoctrination was over, and appeared to have done little damage. As for myself, I became an atheist, and no doubt said many rude things about Christians that I should not have said.

These days both kids identify as atheists and we all struggle with the respect issue sometimes. Obviously I did a less than ideal job with their upbringing, but feel it’s still a work in progress.

98

Keep in mind people’s online depictions of dealing with religion are often sprinkled with a generous helping of hyperbole. It really depends on where in the US you live. I live in Silicon Valley, and haven’t been subjected to the kind of religious harassment other people describe. Oh sure there are churches, and religious people, but I guess because where I live is so diverse both ethnically and culturally everybody has their own thing going, and there isn’t this dominant majority trying to shove it down everybody’s throats.

99

I live in Kansas, which is becoming increasingly religious, with a strong evangelical and/or fundamentalist bent. It has permeated state government, and one’s job in the executive branch of state government could certainly be in danger if you were overtly atheist or agnostic. There’s even pressure in some executive branch agencies to go to the right church. With very minor exceptions, no politician could possibly be elected here if he/she wasn’t openly churchy.

100

Religion is the root of all evil…god gets all the credit and none of the blame. Children need Santa Claus, adults need god.