Let me check…
I’m a boy!, I’m a boy!
My discussion about the grieving mother and her son ended with my previous post. The one you quoted was directed squarely at you, trandallt. Did it not ever occur to you that, say, START also has religious beliefs? As do I, and several other posters? And when you call those beliefs superstitions and lies and untruths, you are showing disrespect for our religion. That is arrogance. And when you chew him a new asshole for not showing tolerance to the mother’s atheism, while saying that our religion is nothing more than a lie, that is hypocrisy.
I think START only made a minor faux pas - it would be extremely difficult to bring up a child without having the child ever hear about Heaven and Hell. However, my concern is a little more general than the presence/absence of such locations. It is NOT appropriate to discuss any religion with a child unless you know what the family’s beliefs are, and regardless what those beliefs might be. It’s the parents’ responsibility to indoctrinate their child as they so choose.
You were not intentionally attempting to convert the child since you assumed the child was from a family that believed in Heaven, but your error was that you should not make that assumption, and your actions given that the child wasn’t from a believing family were a conversion (albeit a failed one after the intervention of the mother).
I’m confused–why is it “disrespect” and “arrogance” to disagree with your religious tenets, but it is not arrogance or disrespect for you to do the reverse?
Good point, except to note that as the mother her views should have more weight than anyone else’s–he’s her kid, after all. However, I’m going to stick up for the theists. A 7-year-old who’s lost her dad is not, IMO, remiss for hoping to see her father again in Heaven. A sensitive, caring person would not disabuse the child of her comforting delusion anymore than he would tell the child that Santa isn’t real.
I think it’s fair to say that most, if not all of the non-theists in this thread would being saying exactly the same thing if someone had told a grieving child of Christian parents that his father was not in heaven or had indoctrinated the child into some other afterlife pardigm (e.g. reincarnation). The issue is not the specifics of what was said but the OP’s mistake (albeit a well-meaning one) of intruding upon the religious/philosophical upbringing of a child without knowing what his family’s beliefs were.
[QUOTE=START]
The concept of heaven, be it Christian or otherwise, is a religious one, and one that the mother obviously did not want you to introduce to her son.
What situation are you pitting, exactly? That the man died? That the son was upset? Or that the mother corrected you in front of her child?
This is a fair restatement of your sentence,“If heaven is not real, he would not know it until after he was dead.” If heaven is not real, how does anyone know anything after he is dead?
it is intolerant to complain that the mother did not want you to speak to her son about his father being in heaven. Such a belief is contrary to how the child is being raised, and you should respect that.
And now I’m confused. Where exactly is “the reverse” going on?
You don’t believe in the existence of God. I do. But your belief or lack thereof, in and of itself, doesn’t show disrespect for my religion. I don’t agree, but I see it as nothing more than that – a disagreement.
But when y’all come in with loaded words, like “lies” and “superstition” and “myth,” that’s where the disrespect comes in. And please don’t insult my intelligence further by claiming that there are no negative connotations to those words, because y’all know damn well that there is. You can almost see the sneer and the little flecks of spit forming on the computer screen.
When I come into one of these threads (as, for whatever reason, I’m apparently fated to do for eternity) and use loaded words like “heathen” and “blind” and “faithless” and “worldly” and “hedonist” and whatever other terms the more easily agitated like to apply to atheists, then you can accuse me of hypocrisy. But I don’t use those words, because I don’t see an unthinking, self-deluded idiot on the other side of the computer screen. I see someone who has put thought into his beliefs and has, for whatever reason, come to a different conclusion.
Or, I dunno, calling our belief in an afterlife a “comforting delusion.” Seriously, do you not see how this is patronizing and insulting? Is that “sticking up” for us? By calling us deluded and that our faith in a higher power can be equated with a child’s belief in Santa Claus? No offense, but I think we theists might need a better defender.
A Jewish person? ;j
START–even if your attempt to bring the kid some comfort backfired, you succeeded in bringing some comfort to me. Being an agnostic pagan deist Jew, never really bother to think about whether there is an afterlife or not. I just assume that there isn’t one. Anyway, I lost my father this summer. I miss him terribly. And until this thread, it never occurred to me that there was a possibility that I might “see him again.” Maybe heaven does exist. I tend to doubt it, but it would be sort of cool to die and find Pop there waiting to tell me some stupid joke. 
But you fail to see that to a rationalist, there is no difference between faith in gods or in Santa Claus. You believe in something that is not real. There are no gods, devils, spirits, or any other invisible entities that control our destinies, or at least there is no convincing evidence for that hypothesis and plenty of evidence against it. For example, a tsunami that kills hundreds of thousands of innocent people is not consistent with the existence of an omnimax deity (“omnimax” being shorthand for “omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent”).
The sad fact is that the only way for an atheist not to draw your ire is for us to deny that we are atheists, to go along with your POV or risk being called intolerant for speaking up against your theology.
Although I am not sure what religion you profess I suspect I in fact have very little respect for it. As I see it, organized religion is perhaps the single most impediment to enlightenment in the world today, as well as the propogater of unspeakable crimes against humanity. What I respect is your right to believe whatever you want to believe. As I said before, anyone’s right to witness stops at my doorstep. I was speaking from my perspective, if I had a child in that situation, and what I perceived to be the mother’s perspective. I did not mean to accuse START of maliciously lying. I do believe that it is a lie to tell a child that his father is “having a great time in heaven”, especially when he himself seems so unclear on the concept.
“I was telling Patrick about the universal kind of Heaven that you go to if your a good person not witnessing to him about the Christian Heaven you go to if you accept Jesus Christ.”
I’m not even sure what this means. Is there a Christian sect that acknowledges a separate heaven for good people who are not Christians?
As for “tearing him a new asshole”, I’ve certainly seen much worse around here. I thought what he did was wrong and I told him so.
Could someone explain how maybe having the child believe that he will see his father again someday after death is a bad thing?
Comfort isn’t bad.
I just don’t get it.
Thanks “Green Bean” , now you got me thinking that some day I might get to hug my Mom again who’s passed on nearly 40 years ago.
I was so emotional that I completely screwed up the bolding tags :smack:
I got called “patronizing” for expressing this very thought. I don’t think
God is real, but if people need to believe to get through difficult times, I’m not going to fight them.
I didn’t mean it to be patronizing myself. Its a 7 year old; if he was 15, I would feel differently.
Making up a story about “Heaven” to make a kid feel better is fine…if you’re the parent. Once again, the issue her is not specifically what was said, but in undermining what a parent wanted to teach her children.
And frankly, it’s not necessarily a kindness to tell a kid he’ll see his dad again if you don’t know that to be true.
In this situation a teenager from the neighborhood who doesn’t know the family very well has taken it upon himself to provide religious instruction to a grieving child, contrary to that child’s mother’s wishes. If he believes in this reunion but then comes to disbelieve it later in life, he will have lost his father a second time. START had no business introducing the concept of heaven in that setting.
Yes, I do see your points, I was only thinking of the comforting it seemed to give the child. I agree its up to the surviving parent to comfort them.
But why not? Sure, the idea of personality surviving the death of the brain is exceedingly unlikely, but if belief in the afterlife gives a bereaved child hope, then it would be churlish in the extreme to take that from him/her. People need a bit of fantasy in their lives to give them faith in the more useful intangibles. To quote Pterry,
BTW, I discovered that my 2nd favorite Pratchett site is run by Rjung.
(bolding mine)
No, there is no convincing evidence for that hypothesis. My belief in God doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny and fails according to the scientific method. It’s not a hypothesis. It’s not science. It’s faith. I strongly believe that science has no place in religion and vice versa, but I also don’t believe they’re mutually exclusive.
Which is all just preamble for my real point: you don’t have to see a difference between faith in God or belief in Santa Claus. All you have to do is recognize that some of us do see a difference. You know that there is no God. I know that there is. You can’t prove me wrong; you can only state that there is no evidence. I can’t prove you wrong; I can only state that I have faith.
So what’s left? To keep on saying that the other person’s wrong and ignorant and is destroying society as we know it? Or just give the other person the benefit of the doubt and assume that they’ve got something that works for them and everything’s copacetic as long as we don’t get all up in each other’s business about it?
That’s simply not true. You don’t have to deny that you’re an atheist. You just have to acknowledge that other people are not, and hopefully that they’re not ignorant or wrong or liars for not being atheist. Why the obligation to speak up against my theology? You and others have mentioned the evil acts of people in the name of organized religion, over and over again. But why is the belief itself so offensive? Why is it necessary to knock down something that we find value in, even if you think it’s wrong?
This is going to sound like a cheap-shot analogy I know, and it’s a lot more base than I like to get in religious or philosophical discussions, but I’m in the middle of gay arguments and religious arguments simultaneously and it’s the first analogy that came to mind: Over the past few months I’ve been put into the position where I’m having to explain the whole homosexual attraction thing to straight guys. Now, do I need for him to be attracted to other guys before he can understand me? No, he can stay as straight as he wants. All I need is for him to acknowledge that the attraction is real to me, and not call me a faggot because of it.