Well, Z,Zarathustra wrote:I didn't really see this as a debate thread, or a thread to discuss the meaning of agnosticism or sin. I just wanted to talk about the experience of raising atheist children. There are plenty of other threads where you guys can sharpen your swords, in Rus's words.
Funny you should ask right now ... my 10-yr-old was playing a video game that's probably too mature for him (Left For Dead 2, I think), and he started having trouble going to bed at night. We cut out the violent video games, bought him a nightlight, and it seemed to do the trick.Stonemaybe wrote:A question for you Z, from someone who was indoctrinated as a child.
I have vague memories of occasionally being terrified as a child (usually while trying to get to sleep), due to my overly fertile imagination (and quite possibly, fever). Not by going to hell or anything directly related to my RC upbringing, but by vampires or The Omen or The Devil Rides Out.
I would draw on my RC education to feel safe again - chanting the 'Hail Mary' or some other prayer, over and over again til I fell asleep.
What do atheist children use to get over an attack of the heebie jeebies?
I've always let my kids self-censor. They know how much they can take better than I do. For instance, the Ark of the Covenant scene in Indiana Jones freaked me out as a kid. But my kids thought it was so fake, it was hilarious to them. So I can't use my own experince as a guide.
One of the scariest things I remember as a child was my own parents' fear. They took it seriously that demons could possess you, that demons could appear at any time, that witchcraft was real, that ghosts were real. My kids don't have those terrors. They're scared of real things, like car wrecks and child molestors. Or asking girls out on a date (for the older one). There is enough to fear in the world without inventing an entire realm of spooky nonesense. The spookiest of all, to me, was an all-powerful man in the heavens who could read my thoughts and knew when I was masturbating or any of the other 1000s of "sins" I was supposed to feel guilty about. My kids don't don't have that sense of paranoia.
It looks to me like you're priding yourself on how sophisticated your kids are because they are free of "paranoid...fears" and so on. How much better...
I was saying to you that it's going to backfire. Even Fist is a little better off in that category because he's willing to risk his kids learning what a faith REALLY teaches. If YOU are their prime source ion what Christianity is, then there's a good chance that when they go off to college, they might discover one of the more sophisticated faiths (not necessarily Christianity) and you could find that your children have abandoned your worldview because what you gave them really was too simplistic.
So what sin is does matter. If all he has is your version - which may be widespread, but is not the only version - even in western Christianity, the more traditional faiths do have more sophisticated understandings than what you expressed.
If all you want to do is say how great it is that your kids aren't getting any religious indoctrination (and don't want to hear anything else) then fine. I'd just say (in that case) that you are giving them another form of indoctrination, and run the risk that they may learn that (or come to that conclusion) someday and then it'll backfire.
On self-censoring, I have a different take on your kids being jaded to Indiana Jones. It's not "different personal reactions". It's that they have gotten exposed to a much higher level of violence and nastiness then we did as children, and so are correspondingly more jaded. This is actually a bad thing, because that means their sensitivity to things that OUGHT to shock people has also been lowered. I learned that lesson for the first time in 1991 Moscow, when I saw people simply stepping over bodies in the streets, not bothering to see if they needed medical assistance or anything. The fact is, that they had gotten used to seeing them, and people had become jaded over seeing drunks and people down on their luck and so just stopped having that adrenaline rush to react, to help. I remember one time when I saw one that looked pretty bad and there was a policeman standing maybe 15 yards away. I told him and pointed, and he just shrugged his shoulders. Where I come from (in the old days) it would've gotten (at the very least) a phone call and he would've been hauled away to a drunk tank or the hospital. And being jaded is something I see everywhere. There has always been social sickness, I'm not trying to pretend that things were perfect in "the good old days". But the sheer scale and number of copy-cat crimes, where people first see ideas in fantasy and then put them into practice and then others see them in the news, etc. really multiplies actual wickedness. And we get used to it. "Jerry Springer" would've raised a public outcry in 1980, even, but by 2005 he had become rather run-of-the-mill. Because people, once they begin to tolerate these things (an example of negative toleration), they get used to them. They become jaded where they ought not to be. And that means degradation, not positive growth, of a society.
Adrenaline actually serves a positive purpose and deadening it where it ought to serve its positive function is likely to be disastrous or even fatal.
On "demons, etc..."...
Kids are always afraid of monsters, and this is actually normal and right. Because there ARE real monsters, demons, etc - and I don't even need to refer to either imaginary or real spiritual phenomena - I can speak about monstrous men that kidnap, rape and murder little kids (see above). Fairy tales don't tell kids about the existence of monsters - they tell us that the monsters, dragons, etc can be defeated. The Gospel doesn't invent evil - it tells us that it can (and ultimately will) be defeated.
I won't comment on your characterization of God, except that it leaves out everything of importance.
I don't think your kids have any special advantage for being indoctrinated in your worldview. I think it will eventually backfire. (And that will be a good thing, like I said.)
I recently caught up with a friend whom I hadn't seen in, oh, probably 30 years at least. We grew up together, about a block apart. She was brought up Catholic (7 kids!). My parents didn't go to church at all. She's two years younger than me.
I was thinking in more of a Richard Dawkins end spectrum, but that works also.
