Well, it looks like jerkish behavior when you’re replying with that to a thread intended for God-believing parents, to whom you do not belong.
My experiences mirrors Solfy and Nightrabbit’s (only I am a believer). My parents were and are very casual about their religious beliefs, and they don’t really mention them. I don’t, either, but the more I learned about science, the more I believed.
It is not that hard for a kid that initially believes in God, and whose parents are not Creationists, to get that the story of Creation is not to be taken literally.
When I first became a Baha’i, about 12 years ago, one of the things that attracted me to the Faith was the tenet that “When religion and science disagree, it is because there is something we don’t yet understand” (Abdul-Baha, from his Paris Talks, IIRC). The Founder of the Faith specifically taught that science and religion can agree. So that is how I present it to my kids when they ask, or have asked questions. My 8YO specifically has a lot of questions, because her best friend is being raised by a mother that is a YEC and Biblical inerranist (sp?). So my 8YO hears a lot of stuff from her friend about the earth being 6,000 years old, and dinosaurs and man living at the same time, and all kinds of literal-interpretation-of-the-Bible stuff.
So, I explain to her what I believe, and why, but that some people believe different things, and that our Prophet preached the value of “independent investigation of truth”, and that means that as she gets older, even if it means she decides she doesn’t agree with me, she’ll have to figure out for herself what she believes.
> 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.
You think that cancer and war would have been eliminated in 7,991 B.C. if it weren’t for religion? Could you explain exactly how that could have happened?
>Well, it looks like jerkish behavior when you’re replying with that to a thread intended for God-believing parents, to whom you do not belong.
This is a fair point. It is common for people other than the invited ones to comment in a Web discussion forum, but certainly they may not assume it would be welcomed.
>God /= religion.
Yes, there are distinctions, but the two are sufficiently interwoven that to regret one is often to regret the other, and to embrace one is often to embrace the other. Perhaps it would be cleaner to use the broader category of “the supernatural”.
>You think that cancer and war would have been eliminated in 7,991 B.C. if it weren’t for religion? Could you explain exactly how that could have happened?
No. The details of how humanity was distracting itself 10,000 years ago are lost in the mists of time. But, thematically, as a species we have devoted an enormous amount of effort to religion, and I argue that it hasn’t paid us well. How much effort was it to build the Great Pyramid, which functions partly as a religious symbol including in the context of life after death? I think the world would be a much better place if the effort we poured into placating volcanos and half-man, half-beasts and mythic figures in the sky had instead been invested in inventing written language and math and the scientific method and medical research. Investments made thousands of years ago are almost incalculably valuable today.
>No need to derail this thread when we have a lovely Pit just down the road.
Yes, that’s true. If I manage to be polite enough, I think I’ll try to let the God-believing parents get more of whatever they wish out of this thread. I don’t mean to derail this thing, at least, not now that you’ve pointed it out. So, pardon my opinion about what to tell the children, and take it for what it is worth.
When I went to Catholic Sunday School many years ago, the phrase they always used was “God created the heavens and the Earth.” AKA “God sparked the Big Bang.” The creation story in Genesis was mentioned maybe once, as a nice story, that happens before the Big Bang.
I am a very lapsed Catholic (I haven’t been to church on a regular basis in almost 15 years), but that is the one belief that has always stuck with me.
FWIW, this is pretty much the current doctrine of the Catholic church, as it was taught to me in both science and catechism in a religious high school in the 80’s.
When I was growing up, we went to a PC(USA) church. That’s Presbyterian Church, USA. Pretty Calvinist type theology, there. I went to Bible School, got confirmed, and everything. On the other hand, I also got shipped off to Science Museum Camp, Molecular Biology Camp, other kinds of hard science camps.
And when I was absolutely tiny, dad would tell me stories from Indian mythology (something about a roc’s egg and a baby being raised by the roc, no belly button, etc, – is any of this ringing bells?).
They let me borrow tons of books from the library about the folktales and mythologies of different cultures – starting at African traditions clear out to Norwegian and Roman. If I’d found a book under Z, I would’ve read it – I was that voracious a reader as a kid.
Looking back on this, it’s not surprising that I evolved the idea that there is more than one story about “How The World Was Made” and that Christianity was just one more story like that. My parents never really said much at the time about whether to believe church or school, and I don’t know that I ever did ask them.
That’s the kind of attitude I’d like to pass on, should I ever wind up raising kids either by proxy or by blood.
(NB: as my parents got older, they turned to evangelical fundamentalist Christianity and I went agnostic.)
Max Torque-Not fair! You can’t use Pterry as a theological lesson!
My parents sincerely believe that the Big Bang was caused by G-d.
As in “Let there be Light” was the trigger for the Big Bang, then, you know stuff evolved and we got here evetually, and Genesis is a nice way of simplifying all that for a bronze age tribe in the middle of the desert.
*If * I had a child with this question, I would sit him down and explain something about the nature of adults. I would tell him that there are a lot of adults who either don’t think their hard-held beliefs through critically enough, or that they hid their doubt by strongly professing to believe something. And just because they tell you they know something, it doesn’t mean that they’re right and everyone else is wrong. I would then explain that you can upset both groups of people by asking them to really examine their beliefs.
In the case of creationism, one is left wondering where did God come from? Many believers will tell you that God has always been, and he didn’t need to come from anywhere. This is difficult to accept because human beings all have the sense that things exist on a timeline, so we want to know what came before, since in our lives there’s always been a before.
And in the case of the big bang theory, we run into a very similar problem! Where does the matter that created the universe come from? If you ask a believer in the Big Bang where the matter came from, they might tell you it’s from the **energy ** in the universe. But where did the energy come from? This is difficult to understand too because we know that things come from somewhere, just like how we struggle with the concept of space being infinite and having no end.
In both cases if we go back far enough we have to admit that we’re not entirely sure where things, be it God or energy, came from out of nothingness. Being able to believe in them anyway even though we can’t know everything is called faith. It’s okay that we sometimes have to rely on faith in an idea to believe something, because right now some things are beyond human comprehension. Right now you can decide which one you believe in more (or believe in a combination of both, which is what I lean towards), which is what everyone else does. Maybe someday we’ll figure it all out and people will have to reexamine their beliefs, but not right now.
For the sake of argument, I’ll assume the information coming from the science class is somewhat more accurate than the example provided, and focus on a general “God created the universe.” and “Science has discovered these things.” issue.
Given that the universe is the wrought product of God, spoken into being by God’s Will alone, scientific study of how reality works is as much study of “God’s Word” as reading a religious text. Probably more so, actually, as religious texts have a tendency to be corrupted by their human handlers over time. Dinosaurs, accretion of the pre-solar disc, common ancestry, inflationary phase expansion, et al. aren’t a problem… that’s just the way God Did It.
Parents are not required to “explain” this issue to their kids in order to be good parents. Your job is to give them the tools to figure it out, and the freedom to explore. I think presenting an unknown entity as a fact can cause a thinking child a great deal of distress if they don’t see the god thing that their parents swear is there. Kids generally don’t like to disappoint/disobey their parents.
I agree. I am convinced that the 6 “day” creation is a mistranslation. I dug deep into this once time on my own. The word “day” in the original text was a vague term also used for “span of time.” Basically the same word was used for any length of time. The chronology of the biblical account of creation is scientifically accurate, so nothing learned in school is “wrong.” It could be broken into six phases, and be scientifically accurate.
This is where “traditions of men” taint the church and we get rabid debates about the age of the Earth. The tendency to insist that science is “wrong” is the churches biggest downfall. All because of the refusal to look for the way new discoveries fit into ancient texts. This is why I restructured my faith years ago and based it solely on the Bible, completely disregarding traditions, regardless of how long they’ve been around.
Please do this. I remember being in a similar quandary when I was about six. The major shock to my system wasn’t the fact that the universe was 12 billion years old (or whatever was the estimate at that point), that it was made in a Big Bang, and that God didn’t exist. Heck, same difference, I was six. The major shock was the realization that some adults will tell you utter nonsense and pass it off as truth. I’m still reeling from that one, I think. Only thing is, I had to figure that out for myself, because no adults around me, especially not the parental units, would admit it, and metaphysical debate was never on their repertoire. I was looking at all grown-ups in a funny way for a long time. I guess I still am, even now that I am one myself. I think I would much rather have gotten that message from someone I could love and trust. It would have made it easier to process.
Rather a large number of people believe that both intertwine quite well. (I don’t pretend to speak for them, as I see no evidence in one of these concepts. But I do like to point out that the two concepts are not mutually exclusive.)
