For not wanting my children to ‘learn’ Christianity?

[AmusedLemur]

I use learn loosely, I don’t mean learn, I mean be spoken to about God as if it is fact, when I myself do not believe.

context

I am an atheist. My husband was raised by a very catholic family, however he himself is not a practicing catholic (he doesn’t attended church, never prays, etc)

He says he does believe in a God, but it’s not something he lives his life by / he thinks about too regularly.

This has never been an issue for us because mainly we’re on the same page. Yes he will take his mother and father to church on Christmas Eve, but that is as about as religious as he gets.

Let me preface this by saying I have an amazing relationship with his family. I love them. We got married in a church to please them, and when we had our baby (Gia - 2) we got her Christened so they wouldn’t worry.

I have no problem with them talking about their love for God in front of me or anything like that. But, Gia is now of an age where she is taking things in. And they tell her that God is the reason she is here, to be thankful for him, he gave her life and everything she has. More has been said, but I’m not there when it is, so I’m not entirely sure what.

For a 2 year old, she obviously believes when her Grandmother tells her this and so comes home and asks me if I’ve thanked God, tells me she loves him, and so on and so forth.

I don’t want to correct Gia by saying God isn’t real, because it’s her choice to believe. But am I being unreasonable by not wanting my in laws to teach her that God is real from such a young age?

You are assuming that the child themselves is going to be satisfied with 'Because it meant a lot to your grandmother.' They may be. But they may raise other questions. Why did it mean a lot to her? If you are an atheist, wasn't it difficult to allow a ceremony to go ahead that you think is meaningless. What if there is a god? Can I speak to granny about it?

It's the OP for sure. Granny just needs to go to confession and all sorted there.

Look on the bright side. Lots of fab school options in a few years. I've any number of mates who forgot they were catholic until they saw the state of their local non-catholic option....

I'm a born again Christian who went to Catholic school from the age of 3 to 18. Religion was jammed down my throat so much that I totally turned against it and what I know of the 120 girls in my year, it has the same effect on them too!

I was in my 30s when I had a very transformative experience with Jesus that I couldn't quite equate with the religiosity of my youth, and it actually surprised me because it felt so different from what I thought Christianity was about. When I told people who had been through my school about my new faith, they were all, without exception, all different forms of dubious and confused. I can say with a great deal of certainty that our exhaustive Catholic upbringing produced a cohort of people with a passing faith in something, ranging from agnosticism, New Ageism to atheism. People get worried because they think that their child will be brainwashed when they are taught about God from a young age.

In my experience, I actually had to unlearn a lot of the contextless dogma I had learned in order to properly embrace Christianity, which came into my life very organically.

So, what what I've learned; it makes little difference. Most people who really take their faith seriously have had a very real life experience that changed them, not because their grandparents made a few comments about God when they were children.

IMO granny is a rather old-fashioned Catholic 🙄

Catholics do know that the Church has always accepted that the righteous before Christ (who died in original sin) were able to attain heaven after the Resurrection, so this teaching clearly accepted that God makes exceptions to this rule.
While man is bound by sacraments, God is not.

I'm glad you posted, the cobblerscat, as I was just about to make the same point. Catholics do NOT believe that the unbaptised baby goes to Hell. Another misunderstanding (slur?) that has been mentioned a couple of times is that the dichotomy is between Christianity and believing in Evolution. Catholics have no problem accepting the theory of Evolution.

I wouldn't put up with this.
We tell our children that we definitely do not believe that God is real and that we are not Christians.
We tell them it's up to them what they believe. Ages: 4 and 6.

I think if you've married into a very Catholic family this is just something you have to accept. My husband is Turkish living in the UK and was raised Muslim but doesn't practice. I was brought up Christian but don't practice that either :o DHs family in Turkey are very religious and from when our kids were babies and we were there on holiday DH's mum would be talking about Allah and teaching the kids prayers to recite. I felt a bit uncomfortable with it at first as we had agreed to bring the children up with an understanding and tolerance of all religions and that they would be free to make their own choices. Honestly it wasn't worth worrying about. We just explained that was what their grandparents believed and to be respectful and ask lots of questions and get as involved as they wanted to. The kids are late teens now and look fondly on the things they shared with their grandparents, but neither of them have chosen to follow a religion (yet) As hard as it is I'd advise you try to relax about it, it's a great opportunity for your little girl to learn about different beliefs in a loving setting x

I assumed OP was exaggerating for effect with the whole ‘granny needed a baptism to save baby from bad fire’ shtick.

The concept of purgatory for unbaptised babies went out with the ark a while ago.

Presumably you didn’t get married in a church and baptise your kids there either?

@Butchyrestingface The concept of purgatory for unbaptised babies went out with the ark a while ago.

I think you mean "limbo".
Limbo was never an official teaching of the Church, as The Catholic Encyclopedia, published in the early 1900s, makes clear. But it was a common theological opinion for a good number of years.

Yes, I’m using them interchangeably but I know it’s limbo - just wasn’t sure this would be familiar terminology for the heathen (joking, OP!).

Limbo had fallen out of fashion by the time I was a child back in the dark ages so I’d be surprised if OP’s MiL truly believes her grand daughter’s soul was imperilled for the want of a baptism. She may of course have SAID it for the purposes of emotional manipulation.

If you’re planning on having any more, OP, don’t baptise them. It’ll be harder to maintain your Switzerland position the more kids you let her frogmarch you into dipping in the holy water.

OP, when are these grandparents telling your DD this stuff?
My DC had religious GPs but were only usually in their company when I was also there. Or their DF. Actually my DPs were very respectful of my beliefs (humanism) - as I was of theirs- so my DC learnt that GPs went to church, believed in god etc but were never told BY their GPs that 'jesus loves you/god made the world' etc. If they ever had I would have said 'yes, kids, that's what Granny thinks, lots of people do, in fact people believe all kinds of different things' etc
what I'm wondering is how these GPs are having so much unsupervised contact with a 2 yo that she is coming home stating what she has heard as fact?

I'm an atheist too but I think you are worrying too much. My child went through a stage of "I believe in God" aged 2-5 years I think from just having heard through nursery/school, but we don't practice religion so it didn't stick. When he would ask me to explain about God, I would talk about what others believe, explain that I don't believe God is real, but emphasise the shared moral values / lessons about gratitude etc. And he would usually say "I believe in God" and I'd just say that's okay. I went to a CofE school myself and attended some church etc (though my own parents aren't religious either!) and truly I value having a bit of background knowledge and Christian influence in my personal philosophy, even as an atheist.

If your in laws are frightening your daughter or giving her the impression that you are wrong/bad/sinful then that's where I'd draw the line. But I wouldn't necessarily cause an argument over asking her to thank God. You could just explain it is a good thing to be thankful, and ways to do this if you don't believe in God.

The outcome of taking my two DCs to a CoE church semi-regularly has been two atheists. They're able to come up with sensible arguments for their beliefs, and they also have an understanding of the dominant religious culture of our society so I'm happy with that (they're also exposed to a variety of other religions at school in addition to RE teaching)

Children will make their own minds up in the end anyway, and before that you just say "some people believe this... some people believe that... grandma believes this... I believe that... what do you think?"

Who are your daughter’s godparents, @AmusedLemur ? Is it your PiL?

Ask her, not really, what if there isn’t, sure.

I took @BumbleBeegu 's post to mean, very fair-mindedly, that she understood how an atheist would feel about someone telling their child that God is real, because she as a practising Christian would feel the same if someone told her child that God isn’t real.

You have accepted a catholic husband, his parents obvious faith, catholic wedding, a christening and just now there is the decision to cut off the child from all that in such a destructive, artificial and forced way. Kids are not stupid and they will find their faith despite what adults tell them

.

Or the husband accepted that she was an atheist. Why does their faith trump her lack of faith?

Yes, then they go to Uni, a nice Nicky Gumbel church, Alpha course meals and might change their destinations also. No guarantee. Life when hard can give you good material to ponder your faith or lack of it.

🙄🙄🙄

she's not being exposed to wide variety of beliefs. She's being told that God is the absolute truth..

As usual, the fun and games of people thinking they own their kids mental space. Lord, oh Lord

Let's face it, these issues should have been discussed before they got married.

This problem has all been caused by a lack of foresight by the couple concerned.

Mixed marriages ( in a religious sense) tend not to work, IMO, usually because of parental interference.

Which means that if they want they relationship to survive, they need to start actively moderate the parental interference.