I came at this from the other side - when I was young apparently I loved Sunday School and my parents used to take me every week. They are both devout atheists and had no involvement with the local church other than my attendance. I suppose my brother went too, but that is just an assumption.
As far as I recall, I used to blather on at them about Bible “teachings” I had received but they never tried to dissuade me from my beliefs. When I grew out of them they simply allowed me to stop going. When I asked them for a note to excuse me from religious studies in high school they happily provided it.
I used the same principle with my kids - they both became involved in church groups for a while, but I didn’t question what they believed if it didn’t interfere with normal life. And they were having lots of fun doing good stuff with pleasant people.
They both lost interest after a while due to the overbearing religiosity and stopped going.
Agreed. I don’t see why people have got it stuck in their heads that God and science have to be either/or. I believe in God through science. Just because you understand how a hammer works doesn’t mean that you can’t believe in the carpenter swinging it.
That, in effect, is what I’d tell my child. There’s no reason both can’t be true.
There actually IS a reason for it - I forget how the logic goes, but it’s not just a simple matter of the Church retaining power. If I can remember who told me, I’ll ask them again.
Tell the kid that you will tell him / her what you believe, but that it is just a belief, and the kid should make up his or her own mind. Then tell the kid what you believe.
And I am telling you that a 10 year old has the mental capacity to understand that just because humans evolved from other animals does not mean that God did not put those animals there (through other evolutionary processes) and set in motion the events that caused said evolution.
I was taught this in a Catholic school when I was younger than 10.
When me child aks me, I’ll say, “The first thing Tak did, he wrote himself. The second thing Tak did, he wrote the Laws. The third thing Tak did, he wrote the World. The fourth thing Tak did, he wrote a cave…” and by then she’ll be so confused I’ll have a hearty laugh and send her to wash up for dinner.
Because critically reading a book is harder than just reading it literally. You have to think to read a book on anything above a literal level. Some people don’t like the kind of thinking that you have to do to read a book metaphorically. Some kids like to read but hate having to interpret books for high school English class.
It’s so much easier to say “God wrote this book, everything in it is literally true, anybody who believes it is going to heaven, and anybody who contradicts anything in it is an evil person who is trying to destroy our faith and who is going to hell”. This has the additional advantage, for those who don’t like to think, that you don’t have to try to understand what the heathen unbelievers are saying with their Big Bang theory and theory of evil-lution. You know they’re wrong, so why bother? (I’m not saying all fundamentalists think this way, but I am saying not having to think is part of the appeal to some of them).
A friend of mine who used to be a Fundamentalist Christian and who was a Young Earth Creationist for about 6 months told me it was something like that. It was comforting knowing that there was Right and there was Wrong and if you believed the right things and said the right things, you were Right and no one could take that away from you.
A few years ago, we had some Fundamentalists who hung out on this message board. One whom I used to argue with in particular really did believe questioning things was sinful and she had no urge to do so. I got the impression that to her, my curiousity and inclination to ask questions was willful, deliberate misbehaviour.
I have been confronted with this a couple of times with my son, now 12. We read a lot of mythology books (Greek, Roman, Norse) when he was 10 and younger, and I always pointed out when myths had the same themes as stories in the Bible.
So when the question came, I told him, “The Bible was written by people who didn’t have the same understanding of the natural world as we do now. Just like the Greek and Roman myths, which were a way of trying to make sense of the natural world, the people who wrote the creation story in the Bible described creation in a way that made sense to them.”
Fortunately, he has never attended a church or Sunday school where The Bible was interpreted literally.
Geez, I didn’t even have to go to Sunday school for this; I went to separate schools in Ontario (a parallel public school system for Catholics) and we were taught that God created the earth, and that the earth was created billions of years ago, dinosaurs, etc. etc.
I was probably in first or second grade when we talked about dinosaurs for the first time. I don’t recall it being a problem.
indian, you need to get some facts straight yourself before you accuse other people of not telling people the truth about the world. You claim:
> From school the child learns that earth was formed by " big bang" and that
> earth is 12.5 billion years, and dinosours lived on earth and so on…
I don’t know where that 12.5 billion years came from. The age of the universe is 13.7 billion years. The age of the Earth is 4.54 billion years.
You also say:
> In this board, there was mention about kids being taught "dinosours being
> Jesus’ babies !!
and then:
> It was jesus’ horses not babies !!
You didn’t read the thread where this was discussed very carefully. It was specifically pointed out in that thread that no creationist has ever used the term “Jesus horse.” That was a joke made up in a Saturday Night Live “Weekend Update” segment.
big·ot /ˈbɪgət/ [big-uht]
–noun
a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion.
ig·no·ra·mus /ˌɪgnəˈreɪməs, -ˈræməs/ [ig-nuh-rey-muhs, -ram-uhs]
–noun, plural -mus·es.
an extremely ignorant person.
We were doing web searches and researching in the library in Grade 5 (10 years old). The kid will likely understand something along the lines of “the Bible account of Creation is meant to be a metaphor”.
If I were to be truthful and helpful to my child, I would have to say that the version with the Big Bang and the dinosaurs and so forth is our best understanding, and that it is “true” except that various details gradually get corrected and clarified as scientists continue to work on it, and furthermore that the Biblical version is just nonsense.
I have to agree that it is disingenuous to pretend that religion and science are not in conflict, that they correspond to different magisteria, that it is inexcuseable to answer truthfully about religion.
I think that religion is the most evil thing that has ever visited humanity, and while it’s hard to say with much confidence I’d have to guess that if it weren’t for religion we would have eliminated cancer and war 10,000 years ago.
