Discussing religion with kids

Goaters said:
So my 5 year old at school is starting to be taught religion and specifically Christianity. So with this it obviously raises questions for me - an atheist - the sort of response I should provide. He is asking to pray before bed and wants to visit church etc, which obviously I can't object to but equally am fairly uncomfortable with.

An emphasis on critical thinking though is also important. If you raise your children to be skeptical as a general rule, it shouldn't be necessary to go out of your way to have them treat religious claims skeptically. They should end up doing that on their own anyway. Skepticism and critical thinking are attitudes which should be cultivated across a broad range of topics, but again age comes in to this.

So, for parents who are not religious how do you broach the subject? Do you say you don't believe or just go along with it until your child comes to a certain age where he can more form his own opinions?
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I told my grandson from day one that there was no such thing as god. He's 9 now, has learned about different religions, and thinks they're all daft.
 
domalino said:
Yes, no one is claiming the Babylonions invented daytime and nightime.

They did invent splitting each into 12 segments though, which you now live your life around. That's why you start work at 9am and not sunrise. We change days at midnight and not dawn.

The only reason it's 12 and not 10 is 6000 years ago people used to count using the 12 segments of your fingers.

The point is, just because something is 2500 years old doesn't mean it's irrelevent or wrong.

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That’s been embellished since though, has the Bible? No.

Eight-hour day - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
Mr Kobayashi said:
That’s been embellished since though, has the Bible? No.
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Yes of course! The bible was written and added to constantly. Old Testament dates from 500-100 BC and New Testament was settled on in 419 AD.

That's just in terms of adding more stuff to it, in terms of revising its meaning and adding new interpretations? It happened throughout the years up to 1940s.
 
ZenHalfTimeCrock said:
I would agree with so much of this.

Your first sentence made me think of several examples from this year alone (apart from what has been going on in Iran): the repeal of Roe v Wade in the USA (which was undoubtedly fuelled by religious sentiment)
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Actually not necessarily. Jon Ronson recently did a great podcast on this. Catholics were anti-abortion for religious reasons, and until the mid-80s (if I'm remembering the dates rightly) the evangelical movement didn't want anything to do with the debate. What actually got them to join it wasn't a theological argument, but an opportunity to oppose feminists who were arguing for all sorts of other things that they disagreed with. Since feminists were also the group that was counter-protesting Catholics, evangelicals were able to be easily manipulated to be pro-life simply by showing the opposite argument to be the feminist one. (Of course you could have an argument about whether this counts as religious sentiment, but I don't think it does, even if their reasons for opposing feminists in the first place were religiously-based).

In many ways it's the same as stuff like anti-maskers during covid. It's easy to analyse because it's an issue that absolutely nobody had an opinion on before 2020, and yet when it became an issue, surprise surprise, you could pretty much divide people based on which groups they already belonged to. In the English-speaking world, right wingers were anti-mask and left-wingers were pro-mask. Not because there's anything in left or right-wing values that would cause that opinion, but because that's why 'my side' believes about this issue. Those are the views I get social credit for espousing.
 
domalino said:
Yes of course! The bible was written and added to constantly. Old Testament dates from 500-100 BC and New Testament was settled on in 419 AD.

That's just in terms of adding more stuff to it, in terms of revising its meaning and adding new interpretations? It happened throughout the years up to 1940s.
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Do you mean manipulated to seat whichever Zealot happened to hate a certain person?

It’s now redundant as anything meaningful has been incorporated into more relevant and less incoherent literature.
 
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Mr Kobayashi said:
Do you mean manipulated to seat whichever Zealot happened to hate a certain person?

It’s now redundant as anything meaningful has been incorporated into more relevant and incoherent literature.
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Indeed. Principles that Aristotle first described over 2000 years ago are still relevant to camera manufacturing today. But his claim that men have more teeth than women isn't taught in dentist school. When something isn't a religion, you can keep the good bits and dismiss the incorrect bits. When something is a religion, there will always be someone who insists that it's all worthwhile, important and should be followed, even the bits that are demonstrably wrong or harmful.
 
ZenHalfTimeCrock said:
As a retired teacher of Religious Studies, I am obviously going to disagree. But not for the reasons that you might think.

First of all - though I am only referring here to teaching at the secondary rather than primary level - quite a number of colleagues I worked with were atheists who just happened to be fascinated with religion as a social phenomenon or were attracted to the philosophical and ethical aspects of the subject. So there is not much danger of indoctrination.

Secondly, one of my own university teachers, John Bowker, wrote in the preface to one of the earliest GCSE textbooks that religion was worth learning about because of all the evil that had been perpetrated in the name of it. That’s a pretty good justification in my view.

Thirdly, the subject does tend to get taught in a manner that encourages critical thinking and intelligent scepticism. A quick look at any GCSE or A level syllabus will reveal that. Often, in the terminal GCSE examination itself, the most marks are awarded for questions in which the candidate has to critically evaluate statements such as ‘There are no convincing reasons to believe in God’, or ‘People who claim to have religious experiences are hallucinating’, or ‘There is no good evidence that we survive death.’

Fourthly, although secularisation is happening in some places, the world is still, rather unfortunately in my view, as furiously religious as it ever was in others. So from that point of view it can’t really be avoided.

Plus, people do seem to still yearn for what might be abstractly referred to as the transcendent, some kind of realm beyond the ego, even if they only achieve that through taking drugs, watching City humiliate United, or going to an event like Glastonbury.

Am currently reading Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan’s book Faith, Hope and Carnage, in which Cave admits that he might have devoted a lot of energy to reflecting on a being that does not exist, but that faith (tempered by a lot of doubt) got him through the death of his son, still sustains him and continues to inspire his songwriting.

And Christopher Hitchens actually said something similar before he died, admitting, ‘I’m a materialist…yet there is something beyond the material or not entirely consistent with it, what you would call the Numinous, the Transcendent, or at best the Ecstatic…It’s in certain music, landscape, certain creative work; without this we really would merely be primates.’

Should add that I am in no position to make much sense of what Cave and Hitchens are on about as I have never had an experience of anything like that, though I do find music, art and literature to be transporting in a non-mystical sense.

Fifthly, doing an A Level in Religious Studies is one of the best ways to be introduced to atheistic thinking these days, namely, that of luminaries such as the wonderful David Hume, Bertrand Russell, AJ Ayer, Jeremy Bentham, JL Mackie and, of course, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

In fact, one of the best and most resolutely sceptical philosophers around at the present time is a guy called Stephen Law, who often does workshops for sixth-formers. He is actually the author of a book called ‘Believing Bullshit’ which I once contemplated making one of the official textbooks for my A Level students, as the idea of their parents and fellow pupils stumbling across them reading it had a certain subversive appeal. Unfortunately, there wasn’t quite enough overlap between the content of the book and the syllabus that I was teaching at the time to justify that decision. But anyway, here he is in action:



I used to show that to my Year 9’s.

Finally, if Religious Studies was removed from the curriculum, there is a danger that the extremist and sometimes barking mad beliefs that some kids get from home would go unchallenged and would be left to incubate.

There is also a danger that - at A level - if they are studying History, English Literature, Art or even Economics, that a lack of knowledge of religion might leave them a bit of a disadvantage.

For example, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations is as much a work of theology as it is of economics, something that would have been immediately apparent to its first readers but is scarcely appreciated now.

Having said that though, it wouldn’t bother me if the name of the subject was changed to ‘Philosophy’ or ‘World Views.’

As far as primary school kids are concerned, I don’t see any reason why they can’t be introduced to a bit of critical thinking even at that age, as there are books and courses designed to specifically do just that. See here:

P4C in the UK

P4C in the UK
www.philosophy-foundation.org www.philosophy-foundation.org

Pete Worley’s publications are really good for that as they are aimed at kids from about 5 upwards.

Anyway, this post is far too long. So will leave it there. Off to cook dinner and listen to Ghosteen again.
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That’s a great post mate with some really interesting points for people to think about, I say that as primarily an open minded (for want of a better phrase) atheist (weird thing happened with a mate years ago, which was, well, really fuckin weird and made me/us think).

Thanks for taking the time to write it.
 
If I was explaining religion/mythologies to a child; if they are old enough, or once they are, I’d show them some of the following programmes:

Universe: God Star (The Sun)

Wonders Of The Solar System: Empire Of The Sun

A Perfect Planet: The Sun

Wonders Of The Universe: Messengers

I’d explain religions/mythologies and god as the end of a very long line of story telling that started out with early homosapiens looking up at the sky and the world around them and seeing how the Sun changed, affected and provided for all the animals including us. How the Sun was deified and then how other celestial entities joined the Sun in stories with gods or personifications attached to them. Over time, these stories became widespread, over more time these widespread stories, the deities and personifications, stories of natural events and disasters that happened in the world all became what we see as the stories on the books of religions/mythologies.

Some other good programmes are:

Operation Stonehenge: What Lies Beneath

Stonehenge And Archeoastronomy

They show how, from much further back in time than the times of the Torah/Bible/Quran, humans have been making a big deal about the Sun and the other celestial objects in the sky and the seasons. Holidays/festivals that we still have today (that the Christian church changed all their holidays/festivals to line-up with) are all to do with the different points in the sky at different times of the year of the Sun and the stars/constellations.

Understand that religions/mythologies are not real stories, the people in them are not real, the prophets and angels and demons are not real, heaven is not real and the deity is not real. They are fictions, and the root of it all is scientific.
 
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I'm With Stupid said:
Actually not necessarily. Jon Ronson recently did a great podcast on this. Catholics were anti-abortion for religious reasons, and until the mid-80s (if I'm remembering the dates rightly) the evangelical movement didn't want anything to do with the debate. What actually got them to join it wasn't a theological argument, but an opportunity to oppose feminists who were arguing for all sorts of other things that they disagreed with. Since feminists were also the group that was counter-protesting Catholics, evangelicals were able to be easily manipulated to be pro-life simply by showing the opposite argument to be the feminist one. (Of course you could have an argument about whether this counts as religious sentiment, but I don't think it does, even if their reasons for opposing feminists in the first place were religiously-based).

In many ways it's the same as stuff like anti-maskers during covid. It's easy to analyse because it's an issue that absolutely nobody had an opinion on before 2020, and yet when it became an issue, surprise surprise, you could pretty much divide people based on which groups they already belonged to. In the English-speaking world, right wingers were anti-mask and left-wingers were pro-mask. Not because there's anything in left or right-wing values that would cause that opinion, but because that's why 'my side' believes about this issue. Those are the views I get social credit for espousing.
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That's very interesting (really like Jon Ronson but didn't know about the podcast). The impression that I formed was based on reading Carol Sanger's book About Abortion that looks at the history of the abortion debate and specific cases post-Roe v Wade, and also an older book by Malise Ruthven on fundamentalism.

In the 1980’s and 90’s, a fundamentalist anti-abortion Christian organisation called the Army of God were responsible for 8 murders, 41 explosions and 173 arson attacks at abortion clinics. Richard Dawkins interviews one of them here (it's only four minutes):



Also, back in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina struck the city of New Orleans in Louisiana with devastating effects, some pro-life Christians saw this natural disaster as a punishment from God because Louisiana has 10 abortion clinics and 5 are in New Orleans. The shape of the Hurricane was also compared to a 6 week old fetus.

So that's what prompted my remark. But it sounds like Ronson is going back to when the Moral Majority was formed and attempts were made to get evangelicals to vote for Reagan.

All fascinating, of course.
 
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