OK atheist parents - how do you deal with The God Thing?

[Bibulus]

DH and I aren't believers but we don't make a big thing out of it. We made the decision early on to be as neutral as possible in the way we talked about religion with DD, i.e. 'some people believe this, some believe that....'

She prays at school, she knows all about baby Jesus and his mother Mary, although she's probably a bit sketchy on the details of it all and has barely ever set foot in a religious building.

Anyway, this evening she asked to visit the local churchyard, so we had a little walk around, and she was asking lots of questions about the people buried there, why people brought flowers to them etc. Then she wanted to go into the church, and it was open so we poked our head in.

DD was spellbound by it - she said breathlessly, 'why is it so pretty in here mummy?' and asked a million questions about how you talk to god, what does heaven look like, who are the pretty ladies with wings on the wall.....! Then we got collared by the vicar, who was very pleasant and sweet to her and showed her round the church which enchanted her even more.

Am now regretting taking her in there a bit! I didn't want to ruin it for her so I haven't said anything to undermine the idea of god or praying or heaven. Now she is sitting next to me on the sofa practising praying. DH will do his nut!

So anyway, I'm interested to hear how other non-Christian, non-believing parents handle all this stuff?

Could you take her to a Buddhist monastry too... no God yet they pray etc... balance it out, explore as many religions as you can, and the way you do things as non believers.

Thanks for that sciencelover. It's rare to see someone acknowledge another's point [respect]

My take on this Lot story would be to do some good in-depth reading of 2 Peter, the NT letter that calls Lot 'righteous.' What does 2 Peter mean by righteous? How do other Christian / Jewish writers in the same sort of time period see Lot? Is the writer of 2 Peter's take on Lot unique, or is it quite common for the time? How does Lot fit into the wider stor of what 2 Peter is about? And how do other Jewish / Christian writers treat other figures from the Hebrew Bible (e.g. Balaam was seen as the ultimate baddie round about the time that 2 Peter was written). So, from all of that, I'd ask, are there other voices in the Bible saying something different about Lot / other figures? What do the church fathers do with 2 Peter (i.e. how is this received in the unfolding Christian tradition)? And how does it fit in with later ideas about what righteousness is?

All of which would take a while! and most people just don't have the time / inclination to do all that hard graft. But I do think it's important that some people do it, that we think carefully about the words of the Bible and try our best to understand them as well as we can. Only then can we start to answer these questions properly.

Let me save you a lot of time, then

Lot is described as a righteous man not only in the Bible but also in the Quran, which also goes on to say Lot was preferred over other men (or some such I can't be bothered to look up now)

I'd want the Mishnah and the Targumim too, Cote, and to compare the Hebrew of Genesis with the Greek translation of it, I'd want to read Philo on Lot, and the early church fathers....this all sounds like hard work! But 2 Peter is a bit out there, and I think it needs careful handling.

Google is our friend, I heard

You can do all that research, if you like, and then accept that your holy books call Lot a righteous man despite offering his virgin daughters for gang rape to a mob.

to save the butt of a male guest wasn't it? (who would also have been raped!) thus preserving the hospitality laws.

as after all, his daughters less important than any male guest.

IIRC. haven't googled.

Holofernes: thanks for the link to Texts Of Terror, which I might well hunt up and read when I have some tie. However, no matter how much research you do into Lot and his daughters, there's not going to be an explanation that isn't 'These bucketheads all considered women property, not human beings.' That's one of the core principles of all the abrahamic religions anyway. One of the purposes of religion has always been to increase and consolidate men's power over and ownership of women, by insisting that babies are not grown in women's wombs without the influence of their imaginary male friend, and the fact that women gestate and bear babies makes them inferior and it has to be done under male control or the world will end.

Yes, unfortunately a lot of that's true, SGB, and Trible certainly doesn't hold back from discussing those issues. The question then becomes, is this religion irredeemably sexist, or is there possibility of development from within? The fact that we now read the story of Lot with disgust says that yes there is the possibility of change and development from within. So it's a kind of variation on the bigger feminist issue of how change comes about, whether we have to dismantle society to put it together afresh, or work for change within existing institutions. Wrt Christianity, I'm a Christian because I believe it to be true, and truth to live by, and because (without wanting to sound overly naff) I really, really love Jesus. And thisay be naively optisyic, but I do believe that churches have to develop and change for the better. Who knows, might have the first UK Anglican female bishop within a year or two.

Edgar - apparently that bit about the male guests is ambiguous. It says that a crowd of people came to Lot's door wanting to "know" the male guests. We don't know if they just wanted to have a nosey and see who they were or whether they wanted to rape them. Apparently the interpretation that they wanted to rape them is the foundation for the belief that Sodom & Gomorrah were full of men having homosexual sex and thus the subsequent centuries of persecution of homosexuals. Whoever wrote the story of Lot has a lot to answer for, imho:-)

I know someone called Lot.

random<

but it is just one of those Old testament stories that show the mores of a very different culture....(in a slightly confused fashion changed by repetition)

What worries me about so many religious stories is that, okay human morals change...we develop and get better. But what of god's morals? God is supposed to be the be all and end all....so how is it that god's morals are changing?

God kills all the first born children of egypt....we would like to think humans are better than that now...how can god not be?

God only sends visions to his prophet when he sleeps in the bed with his child bride.....we would like to think that humans would protect a 9 year old child from rape...how can god not only condone it, but reward it?

So I think you are left with a) the books have it wrong or b) god was wrong to act that way and hence...well not really god... c) there is no god.

..or d) progressive revelation, i.e. God is made known through history and through specific times and places, which means that God's being made known is bundled up with the development of human history.

As an aside, it's easy to point out the shortcomings in OT morals, because to us they're blatant - but what will future generations say of us? 'They did that to the environment? They really didn't care that they were destroying the planet with their short-termism and selfish greed? And they called themselves decent???' And other such stuff - our shoretcomings will be just as blatant.

i don't think anyone is going to over-claim much for the morals of this particular age, other than it is as it is now and will probably change....

still less that we could draw a line in the sand and say 'yes, now and forever this is how people should always behanve'

Yes, which means that if belief in Godcan be sustained at any time, in any place, we'll always be faced with the same problem. How is God made known? If the incarnation (the 'word became flesh') is true, as CHristianity believes it to be, then God always runs the risk of being mis-represented by fallible humans. I think that that's a risk that God takes.

entropygirl - I'm with you on all the rest of it but just need to say that while Mohammad married her at age 8, the marriage wasn't consummated until she had her period (12?) which was perfectly normal at that period (there being no arbitrary law defining the end of childhood at age 16)

I just don't get why allegedly intelligent people want to waste, not only their own time, but the time of other people, on trying to comprehend all this crap as though it were real when it is obviously made up by human beings, partly in pre-scientific cultures looking to explain things like birth, death, cyclical seasons, gravity and electrical storms but far more importantly as a means of social control. That's why half the mythology is about birth/death/renewal and common to all the myth brands and the rest of it is a series of wierd taboos which are either about preserving the power of the priest caste or just instilling obedience.
Sure, all the mythology's moderately interesting, whether it's Greek, Roman, Norse, Islamic or CHristian. But it's all the same shit really and there is no reason whatsoever to have any more 'respect' for one than for all the rest.

Is that a genuine question, SGB, or just an anti-religion rant?

I think you know the answer to that HolofernesesHead! She is the one person who would make me want to find out about religion-certainly I would if I was her DC-she makes it sound so powerful and exciting!

No, I really don't know the answer!

SGB - I actually agree with you there. The only reason I know all that is because I was born & raised in a Muslim country, and while thankfully that was a place where people weren't stoned to death for saying they don't believe in God (or I wouldn't live to tell the tale) it meant I had to sit through several decades of RE.