Absolutely. That’s why I specifically said religion instead of just Christianity. If you think it’s harmful to your children’s health and well being, then the only responsible thing to do is keep them far far away from that noxious shit.
:dubious: Uh, yeah. If they’d had bad experiences with Judaism or Islam I would totally respect that choice. Wouldn’t you?
What an odd gotcha. You have weird ideas about what people think.
As an addendum to my last post, I was raised in a liberal, loving church. I always asked lots of questions and had doubts, and my ministers never got angry about it. They talked with me, and admitted they had doubts and questions sometimes too. When I was taking the classes my church required before baptism, I had a lot more questions than the other kids in the class. Rather than tell me to shut up, my minister took special time after class each week to sit with me for about an hour and discuss all the things I wondered about. As far as a “religious upbringing” goes, I had about the most gentle one possible.
So even though I left the faith, I don’t have a whole lot of negative personal experiences with Christianity. There are definitely some awful, damaging sects (I mean, I would NEVER allow my kids to go to a Southern Baptist Church) but my overall feelings about it are that it’s a decent group of people who believe stuff I don’t. So, yeah, I don’t care if my kids are exposed to that.
However, had I grown up in a very conservative religion or sect that had a long-lasting, damaging effect on my psyche, I would probably have a completely different reaction to the whole thing. If my mom had joined a more conservative denomination, there’s no way on earth I would have let her take my kids to Sunday School. And if all my exposure to religion had been like that, I may very well have taken a way more hard-line stance on the whole thing. Religion can be insanely damaging to people; I don’t blame folks who want absolutely nothing to do with it.
This is me as well. My 4-year-old daughter has started asking questions, and I tell her that lots of people believe the stories about God and about Jesus’s miraculous birth and such, including her granddad, but that we don’t.
She recently told me she knew that God wasn’t real, because we’d gotten a book about holiday stories (including Jesus’s birth) from the library, and it was in the fiction section. QED :D.
Honestly, if she grew up really religious, I’d be sad about that. But it’s her life, not mine, and my job is to raise her to make her own decisions. She’ll know what I believe, and she’ll know that other decent, intelligent people believe other things.
I like the crust. Does that make me a socialist?
Keep them away from is different than keep them in total ignorance of.
If you’d been mauled by a lion would you never take your kids to a zoo?
I think the danger inherent in this method of protecting kids from harmful things in the world is that you actually leave them a lot more vulnerable to them.
I’m not suggesting that you leave them on the doorstep of the church once a week but they should know that religions exist and the good and bad impacts they have on the world.
I don’t have children yet. I’m an “avowed” atheist, and a fairly anti-religious one at that. That is to say, I’m kind of near the Der Trihs side of the religious spectrum. I frankly see very little positive about religion and think society as a whole would be much better off without it.
However, that being said, I’m not going to try to insulate my future children from religion. I want them to be able to experience and make their own decisions. I will always encourage them to be skeptical and question things, and I will explain why I believe what I believe.
I was raised in a conservative “non-denominational” sect of Christianity, constantly had to hear about how evil homosexuality was, etc. In general, I hate all of religion because I think they are either outright evil and a blight on our existence, or they are hypocritical in the extreme.
I have no kids, but I still want Cheesecake.
SKALD OWES ME CHEESECAKE!
I drive my kids to the various cancer wards and we visit the advanced-stage patients.
j/k. I have no kids.
I had specifically addressed Christianity, which is where I was coming from.
I post on another board that has an “Atheists and Agnostics” forum, and there are some posters who do not allow their children to play at the homes of children from (for the most part) Christian families. These children are allowed to come to their house.
I’m saying I understand the attitude, not that I do it myself.
And I see many more religious nut jobs do this than I see atheists. But then I’m in the religious capital of the US, so my experience with religious nut jobs is more extensive than my atheistic leanings allow.
ETA: You may hear of the reverse more often too because these people feel it’s their duty to run around and convert everyone, so going into places like an atheist’s home would be right up their witnessing alley.
I can’t think of anyone I have known personally who actually did this; I do know of Christian families who HS’ed, but they did it for other reasons and their children had many opportunities for socialization.
There is a craft store in my old town, and the owner, herself a devout Christian, had no idea that people like this existed there until some of them started bringing the children to her store for “socialization”. These kids didn’t know basic math, didn’t have an age-appropriate knowledge of current events, etc. but they DID know the Bible inside and out, and that was pretty much it. She was quite shocked.
I have some relatives who aren’t religious, pro or con, and they had to HS a child for a couple years because of some special needs that could not be addressed by the school district. They simply used the school’s curriculum and taught her at home.
I know I would. They all suck.
Considering this is no longer the 17th Century and I’m pretty certain the youth centre is not run by Independent Baptists, religious preaching/evangelism aimed at children virtually never involves hellfire and brimstone and instead looks toward the positive side of the Gospel (ie God’s love for us and His goodness and so forth) and this includes most conservative/evangelical denominations as well.
Even if some kid says something like “You will go to Hell”, it is not particularly different, to the child emotionally in the long term than being called a “faggot” or a “retard” or any similar epithet so common in the playgrounds of our nation.
And some people have been so damaged by drugs/alcohol/sexual immorality that they’ll do anything to prevent the same damage from being inflicted on their kids.
Both my kids are grown now - and atheist - so my strategy seemed to have worked.
First, set a good example, which means not being embarrassed or defensive about not having any religion.
Second, reading Genesis with the kids when they were old enough. pointing out the internal contradictions and illogical bits.
The not anal part came from not having a fit about them going to church youth activities when they were in junior high - or in the case of the older one, temple youth activities. They were too old to be brainwashed at that point.
Mostly, teaching them to think logically and scientifically (my wife and I both think this way.) I know someone will object that religion can be logical and scientific - if so, please give me a logical justification for got belief that does not include faith. I’ve asked for year and got bupkus.
You’d think so, but it happens.
That was why I sent my kids to a preschool that had a no alcohol and no (hard) drugs policy. Even a few little airline bottles of vodka would result in expulsion, even if the kids parents didn’t really mind!!
I know someone who was so damaged by that shit as a child that, in his mid 40s, he still has regular nightmares about it, is in therapy over it because he can’t shake the harm it’s done and is just generally a basket case over it. All due to how it had no particular “long term” affects.
So? What’s you’re point? We’re not talking about any of those things.
Shit, I wish the Presbyterian preschool we sent our kids to had thought of that!
However, not having revenue from the bar would probably have caused the tuition to go up.
So? You think religion helps with this? No such thing as an alcoholic priest?