To ask the nursery about grace?

[Stangirl]

My DD (2) attends a nursery 2 days a week - since last October. I am very happy with the nursery and love the way the staff are with the kids. DD seems very happy there.

They just had a Mother's Afternoon where the mums were invited in to attend a music and movement session, facepainting, playing, tea with the kids. I went along and it was lovely apart for one thing - one of the children was asked to say grace before the sandwiches and said a few words thanking god. I was shocked by this as I had believed them to be non-religious - teaching and celebrating all festivals etc but not active worshipping. As an avowed atheist I am quite perturbed.

Would you ask them if this is usual and if they are teaching them grace?

I don't think schools teach it as a fact-unless church schools and they give fair warning.

I think ' it isn't in the least hard for a dc' is a bit of a blanket statement. For a young, naturally compliant child, it can be very hard if they somehow feel 'naughty' for not believing.

The very fact that christian worship is a statutory requirement in schools and you have to opt out of it implies that being a Christian is the norm. It is just "bizarre-^ that anybody thinks this is OK!

I think Christianity is probably as diverse as Atheism exotic?

"It is only hard if parents have the idea that they tell their DC what they believe and the DC will comply."

I don't agree with that either. I have no intention of lying to my DC about the fact that I don't believe in god(s). That fact alone would be enough to cause conflict (in my DC, maybe not everyone's) if they were then told in school that god/Jesus DID exist.

The "opting out" thing sends the message that it is normal to be a Christian and unusual not to be. That is simply not a message I think we should be giving our children.

exotic - atheism's pretty simple. It means what it says, simply that you do not believe in a god or gods. Beyond that, obviously atheists also think lots of other things, but there's no badge you get, or core set of beliefs you have to sign up to to be allowed to call yourself one.

I was wondering about starting another thread to share experiences of how I became an atheist (not why - because that's obvious, namely I realised that I didn't have faith).

I spent many years wanting to have faith, but never managing it. This used up a lot of my adult years and caused me a lot of personal distress. Not because of my parents drumming christianity into me as a child - I was in the choir and they rarely went to church whereas I went most weeks by my choice. I did go to a CofE primary school, and then a comp which I can't see was complying with the requirements of the education acts. Nevertheless, at some point I picked up the deep-seated belief that - in this country at least - good people were christians. And I wanted to be a good person. In my working life (public sector fwiw), this was reinforced as I have met many intelligent, caring christians, who are in my estimation very good people.

I had an almost physical experience - which sounds very like descriptions I have heard of people who have found faith - where I suddenly realised that, for me, the answer was that I didn't believe. Then I was freed up to set out on a journey to figure out what being a good person meant to me.

Now, I think everybody has to go on that journey, and it will not always be smooth. But I was stalled for literally years because of this cultural christianity. I'd rather give my DS an easier start in life.

exotic - your experience of religion in community schools is different from mine and mine is probably different from others. I have seen and heard teachers use God's name, Heaven and Hell and the Devil in their attempts to control behaviour, I have heard Christianity taught as 'our religion' in RE, in assembly children have to put their hands together, chant Dear God, blah blah blah Amen. It is not a benign influence in all situations and there is no 'law' on how Christianity is presented in community schools (depends on the current HT and governing body) - this needs to be changed so parents know, or have a good idea, before choosing a school for their children.

"It is not a benign influence in all situations and there is no 'law' on how Christianity is presented in community schools (depends on the current HT and governing body) - this needs to be changed so parents know, or have a good idea, before choosing a school for their children."

Exactly - because even if you DO get to the bottom of how Christianity is presented in your child's school (and that would be a difficult thing really, unless you attended every assembly and RE lesson), there is nothing to say that a new incoming head or governer might not change things the following year.

IsItMeOr - your story illustrates perfectly what I was trying to say about how it can be difficult for a child / adult who has had it drummed into them from before they can remember that being a Christian = good, and therefore (by default) being a non-Christian must = not good. Even if no one has ever explicitly said that.

Nobody will ever tell me why they think that presenting Christianity as the social norm at a state school, and anything else as an exception is a good and fair thing to do.

Nor will anybody tell me why education is the only state funded service that you have to be at least a nominal Christian to fully access.

at Bonfire. I was hoping by sharing experience, it might help some of the theists to understand where we differ and where we don't.

In my mind it's the simple fact of faith where we differ. [Theists have it, atheists don't]

Probably agree on the basics of what makes people good. [Golden rule]

Then differ again on why we know those are the things that make people good. [Christians think from Bible/God, humanists from handed down wisdom over the generations]

And then agree again on wouldn't it be lovely if we could live in a world where everybody is free to work out and embrace their spirituality, where all answers (which do no harm to anybody else) are equally welcome and valued by society. [Tolerance and respect]

I do wonder if the problem with collective worship in schools that you probably get the daftest things happening in the places where nobody's actually a very good Christian, but they just do what they did when they were kids, rather than what is accepted as good Christian practice now. In my experience, practising Christians are generally very clear that they don't really want people going through the motions (e.g. turning up in church solely for weddings, baptisms and funerals). I suspect there is a fair bit of collective worship in schools which would not be popular with either practising (as opposed to cultural) Christians or atheists.

Sorry for long post. It's very interesting to hear what other people think about these things, and have the chance to explore where there might be some common ground.

I think we have some great examples of cognitive dissonance by the believers and some very acceptable logic by the atheists. Once upon a time the faith card trumped all others, but society has changed and bullying people to accept that a belief system is the status quo no longer holds. In the absence of empirical evidence for the existence of a god I'm afraid all you're left with is are a few sometimes quaint, sometimes delightful and sometime horrific books of myths. Having had the experience of growing up going to a C of E school, then 30 years later laying in a bed in a cardiac intensive care unit after a stroke and being told I probably had less than two weeks before my aorta "blew like a garden hose" from my vastly enlarged heart, I went through the logic, waited for the revelation and came to the conclusion that I was quite secure in my atheism. When I died I would return to the same state I was in before I was born... ie. nothing.

In Australia our state schools are strictly secular, but of course with so many seats swinging on a few votes it seems our politicians have decided it can't hurt to mention a bit of Christian belief. It might just get them over the line. So our Liberal (=Conservative) Party has allowed pastors into schools in some areas, however parents have final veto on student participation. In fairness to those pastors during our times of flood and bushfire over the last few years those pastors have been able to provide great emotional and practical support to students, but I'm inclined to think they are quite probably just fine people who happen to hold a faith, and were they Muslim, Hindu, Rastafrian or atheist they'd be just as good examples of the best of humanity.

Amen to that PoppaRob

Whatever people believe, the state should be secular.

An interesting blog here by the way :) Hours of fun reading, and increasing outrage that people let religion determine so much.

"I'd be equally furious if they made him thank God before every meal."

Why? Why is it such a big deal? I have far more important things to worry about.

"I went through the logic, waited for the revelation and came to the conclusion that I was quite secure in my atheism."

That's very interesting PoppaRob. My (very religious) MIL is utterly convinced that anyone close to, or threatened with, dying suddenly starts believing in God. I have told ther that this isn't the case and no atheist will suddenly start to believe in a higher being. She won't believe me though.

Bunbaker - it sounds to me like your MIL has that mindset that people 'straying' from God's path are like naughty children who will be brought back into line as soon as they're scared enough. Like having the 'fear of God put into them' .

Bunbaker, my dear old Mum is the same. She sees one's religion as being like a stamp of ownership. Any time my atheism comes up she says "But you were Christened C of E so of course you're Christian" and she's sure I will recant on my deathbed. Apparently I wasn't all that close to dying according to her - 12.5cm left ventricle, resting pulse of 220 and Ejection Fraction of 12%.... um... sorry Mum, but I was fucked very unwell.

I completely understand the cognitive dissonance involved in turning one's back on a long and sometimes deeply held faith. To someone like my Mum at the age of 90 if she doesn't have her faith then she doesn't have a lot to fall back on as she approaches the sharp end of life. It's simply easier and less frightening to believe. I know this will seem harsh to the theists, but to me abrogating responsibility to some cosmic Jiminy Cricket is a lot more frightening. I neither want nor do I need a god to oversee my life.

And I just added that to the wrong thread... bugger! :)

PoppaRob - interesting to hear about how the schools and politics work in Australia too. You often hear about schools in the USA being secular but not much about Australia (that I have come across, anyway).

We have what you in the UK generally call "faith schools" which are independent so receive some government funding on a per student basis. The school, receives the same funding as a state school for each student, but infrastructure costs etc. are paid by fees. However well over half the schools in Australia are state schools which are entirely funded by state and federal government with parents paying a fee to cover books, stationery, excursions etc. When my daughter attended state schools the fees were a few hundred dollars a term, unlike the thousands paid for independent schools.

at "cosmic jiminy cricket"!!
I think what made me start losing faith was the stuff about god's son/prophet/incarnation that almost every religion teaches.
These were real human beings!!
Linguistics, history and archeology bear them out.
Once that bulwark of faith erodes it's very hard to believe in, for lack of better phrase, a cosmic jiminy cricket.

I don't think I had an actual 'atheist realisation moment', it's just something that properly sunk in as I got older.

Tons of religion (mainly Protestant-based, I suppose) at school, from nursery to end of secondary. But no actual active church-going, ever, never felt any desire for it. This wasn't the case with a lot of the people I went to school with though, quite a few of them seem to have ended up (surprisingly to me!) being fairly religious.

I always associated talk of God, Jesus etc with being bored/uneasy at school - something that I ought to feel, rather than anything I actually felt. These days, hearing people preaching / talking 'meaningfully' about God just makes me shudder inside a bit. I have never felt any of the comfort that religion is supposed to impart.