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?

"Faith is a personal thing"

... which is engraved into unquestioning children at an age they can't even question it, so that in the future it feels natural to them and they don't want to question it.

The much talked about "God-shaped hole". I never had one. Probably because none was dug into me as a small child. (Honest musing, not intended to offend anyone)

exoticfruits - That sounds terrible

I don't worry too much about what children believe because most other atheists/agnostics I know were religious as children and it was as teenagers/young adults that they began to query it

There is nothing wrong with bringing happiness into my childrens life.
My faith was never dug into me as a child I had a battle through-out my childhood my mother was abusive in many ways and even when i left home at 15 i felt unloved and unwanted i got my life togther and was fine when i found my faith it was amazing it was nothing to do with anyone elses work .
People belive and people do not but i find it very strange that people bad mouth anything they do not understand and feel very sorry for you.

However I have had my question answer which i am very thankful for :)

Sunshine - re " i find it very strange that people bad mouth anything they do not understand and feel very sorry for you."

Was that to me?

No it was direct to anyone its just a way of life I feel its a shame. Children are being stopped from learing about different religions etc not just by parents who do not belive but also from parents who do and do not want thier children exposed to any other faiths. I personally feel its a shame .

I never did the respectful - some people believe this that and the other thing. I'm a proper atheist, I am.

So, I explained that there are a lot of superstitious people in the world who believe in crazy stuff. Then I would list all the major religions and some minor ones and some of the surprising aspects of their beliefs. Like the religions which allow multiple wives, forced marriages and the subjugation of women (the last being common to most religions in fact). I'd also build in a bit about the Flat Earth Society and people who believe in alien abduction. I'd throw in a lot about wars and the ways in which religion has encouraged/provoked an awful lot of them.

I'd then warn the DCs very seriously about the dangers of believing in the crazy stuff or getting caught up with people who believe in the crazy stuff. I would only then say that people actually believe in this and it is rude and offensive to them to be disparaging about their beliefs so probably best not to challenge it.

lol that is actually quite funny in a werid kinda way. Lets hope your children get a better education from school than from you :) Maybe then they might have a chance of being abit more open-minded

I live in a very diverse area - DS will inevitably mix with kids of all faiths. I don't really want him telling them they are crazy at 5. I want him to respect peoples faith just as he should respect peoples culture.

When he is older I am happy to discuss the things that may go on in those cultures/religions that I personally don't agree with.

Ultimately I would like him to decide for himself so that he is confident in what he chooses to believe/not believe

Bibulus I think you handled the church visit very well.

I had not read all the thread but just a few comments about schools.

I'm a Christian and would love it if my daughter became a Christian but I wanted to look and see what people were saying when I saw this in the very active section - hope that is OK!

I wanted to comment I feel it is very much a choice a person will make for themselves - not about education. Just curious as people had commented on what children were taught at school. I can totally understand parents being concerned about what their kids are taught with regard to religion. I was taught very little at school about religion (went to school in the 70s!) and also came from a family where parents did not go to church or pray or talk about religion and pretty much never went near a church except for a family wedding. I became a christian in my teens having met a Christian at school (state school) and going to church and youth club. I guess I just wanted to say I am not sure how much what I learnt at school made a difference.

I found it hard to believe that a 7 year old would have never initiated a conversation about some aspect of faith, and then I reflected that where I live now (Canada) has a totally secular education and we know very few people who go to church so it really might be a total non issue. In the UK I think it would be highly unlikely that a child would not come across Christianity, probably at nursery and certainly at school.

I also think that it is unwise to assume that small children will just accept their parents views on religion/faith if they have come across other view points irrespective of how strong the parental view might be. dh and I are both atheists but dd decided at primary school that she was a Christian and did believe, whereas ds never found the stories (or the priest) particularly appealing and decided at about the same age that he was an atheist. We didn't tell them that people who had faith were crazy however (my parents are pretty devout and my sister is a chaplain so it wasn't really an option, and I don't think it's true in any case) but we did read them lots of different creation myths and stories from different belief systems (including the Bible) to give them more of an idea about the diversity of faith.

Hmm. Well, I am a Christian so when I talk to DS about "mommy believes" I am talking about Jesus.

He does the whole "God made the trees, right?" thing and I tell him that I think that God made the laws of nature so that the trees would grow, etc.

I would think it would be the same for an atheist. :) Just "some people believe, but I do not."

Also we are not supposed to have mention of God in our schools here, so that's a bit different. I remember being very uncomfortable when the music teacher (in the school I worked in) was teaching the children the music notes by saying A and G are "God and the Angels up above" and D was "the devil down below..." I am religious, but we are meant to have separation of church and state! I did mention it to the Principal.

Cote I hope the school respects your wishes not to put DD into First Holy Communion class or whatever but I'd just like to reassure you that I was brought up a practicing RC, went to RC Primary and Convent Secondary - who all educated me so well that I turned out a committed and thoughtful atheist! And your DD has the added benefit of you presenting a more balanced opinion. So don't worry too much about the indoctrination.

Hopefully I really rather like your approach! Unfortunately for us the Crazy people included my (lovely) parents so we had to do the more tactful thing. However I found that both my DC expressed a wish to go to Mass with my parents exactly once, after which they were not at all keen to repeat the experience!

Overall with how to approach this I have found my DC very different, my DS is not a deep thinker and has always disliked R.E. at school because they have the temerity to try and make him look at things like morality, justice and conscience which require a bit of introspection... Whereas DD is much more interested and we have had quite deep conversations from a young age, I think they kicked off with all the dead parents in fairy stories.

CoteDAzur Sun 03-Jun-12 22:41:23

"I'm saying the stories are not factual - earth created several thousand years ago, people created around that time the way they look now,"

Please note that this is not what most Christians believe; it's what a small (but very vocal) minority of (American influenced) Evangelists believe. It is certainly not what mainstream Christians in the UK believe.

If you tell your dc this is an integral part of Christianity, then you are telling stories.

Irrespective of your own beliefs I don't think it is necessary to be concerned that a five year old is experimenting by saying a few prayers! If she were playing in the garden and talking to fairies at that age would you be concerned? I think not! Children need the freedom to develop an imagination. It's a strange world we live in where we're quite happy to let our children dress up as witches and demons at halloween, and yet if they say a few prayers and admire the beauty of a church we feel it's something to be concerned about

I think the atheist thing about 'I believe x and they believe y' is fine to a point...however, I'm reading a Noah story at the moment to DS (there are lots of lovely animal pictures in the book) and can't bring myself to read the bit where, quote 'god wanted to punish the wicked people...[so made] a flood of water to wash all the wicked people away'. Nice forgiving religeous stuff there. I'm also reminded of a friend who, whilst babysitting a muslim child, read her a story about how filthy and dirty pigs are.

Both DH and I were keen on bible lessons as children and then grew up to renounce all that. I'm pretty sure DS will do the same - I have faith my atheist beliefs will hold out to DS's scrutiny when the time comes. But I still have a problem, myself, of telling DS about the 'wicked people'. How do you then field questions like 'am I wicked?', 'mummy doesn't go to church, is she wicked?' 'where do wicked people go to when they die?' These, for me, are the really thorny issues.

My DP and I are atheists and we've done the usual "Some people believe this/that/the other" with her. It does mean that as a result of RE lessons, every now and then she decides that she's Jewish, Christian or (the latest one) Buddhist. I am sometimes appalled at her lack of Biblical knowledge (it took ages to persuade her that Jesus was Jewish) but that's my fault really.

Interesting that some of the posts claim faith in human nature while others worry terribly that children in particular will be brainwashed if 'instructed'.

I don't see this; if that was so everyone I was at school with would still be Catholic, and are they? Are they hell!

And yet you aren't at all worried about the opposite - atheist 'brainwashing' because - in a manner that reminds me scarily of some nuns - some of you are so sure you are right. So frighteningly sure. And if there's one thing I dislike and distrust, it's people of ANY set of beliefs who THINK THEY KNOW.

DH and I tell our two that it's a load of rubbish based on a book with the occasional historical plausibility.

We do also explain that many people do believe in various different things and that we can understand that for some people it gives them a sense of hope or acceptance for some of the crap they have to put up with in life.

We also point out that it's not polite to tell people who believe that we think it's a load of rubbish (sorry if I've offended anyone here by doing so, I am just trying to answer the OP).

FWIW my grandfather was a bishop.

Oh, and RE is an important part of the syllabus if you plan on studying English lit or History (and other things, for DS archeology for example) later on (is what I say to my children).

Some atheists are proposing to try and isolate their children sieglinde from religious teaching, or at least indoctrinate them with their beliefs. But I think the majority are happy for thier kids to find out about religions to form their own opinions....and are quite secure in the knowledge they will almost certianly NOT end up being believers (most people outgrow that belief in magical stuff).

I think OP is just unsure about what to say when DC ask some religious questions. Like I said in my post, what DO you say when DC ask questions like 'am I wicked?'

LeBFG please tell him about the wicked people. Recognising and reconciling the intentions, inconsistencies and storytelling styles within the bible and religious traditions is important, both for would-be atheists, who start to see that these stories were written by certain people, with limited knowledge, for a purpose and for would-be Christians, who need at some point to recognise the differences between vengeful old-testament god and forgiving new-testament god and may start to consider how interventionist their god is.

The Noah story makes no sense without the motivation for the flood, or becomes a much simpler story 'there was going to be a flood, so Noah saved some animals' - but how did he know unless god told him, for a reason? There are many ways to explain it, maybe god was just more vengeful in ancient times, maybe the person writing down the story wanted to scare people or maybe every culture has a creation myth and this is part two of the Christian one. Perhaps it shows that even god makes mistakes and learns from them (those 'wicked people' are gone, so you can't be one of them, you're part of the post-Noah population). Or perhaps, until Jesus came along, fear rather than the example of love was all people had to point to as evidence of the way their belief worked (maybe god learnt about effective management techniques from experience?!).

Glossing over the less pleasant bits just creates confusion and doesn't give your child the knowledge necessary to feed informed questioning later.

seiglinde not everyone brought up in a religion stays there...but a lot of people that leave a religion end up feeling guilty about it. That seems somewhat unnecessary baggage to me...

If you do not artificially expose children to religion then those that find it later will have a wonderful journey of discovery. If you do artificially expose children to religion then those that find they do not possess religious belief will sometimes feel like they are flawed or guilty of something terrible.

It seems to me that the first of those options is the better tbh.

sieglinde: "And if there's one thing I dislike and distrust, it's people of ANY set of beliefs who THINK THEY KNOW."

But what is one to do? Take one's child in turn to the mosque, the synagogue, the C of E church, the Methodist church, the Catholic church, the Hindu temple, the Sikh temple, the Kingdom Hall, and so on, on the basis that any of them might be right?

And perhaps I should have encouraged my DD to go on believing in the tooth fairy because...well, you never know, do you?