Don't scare the children

I was at a friend's house the other day, and I saw a book on the table, titled "My First Book about God". One of his children is 4, so I assumed (rightly) this book was for her. We had never talked about religion before, so this was one of those awkward moments -- the kind I never leave alone. I know him well enough that I was pretty sure he wasn't a fundamentalist or hard-core evangelist type. After a few gentle questions, the following facts came out:

* He's somewhere between atheist and agnostic

* He and his wife used to do some low-key Episcopal type church-going, but it dropped off

* His mom sent the book for her granddaughter

* He's going to give the book to his daughter, because it's the right thing to do

So my question was, why would you impose a belief system on your child that you don't even believe yourself? The answer was instructive. Aside from grandparent pressure and social norms (we live in a community that is probably among the most 'secular' in the US, there would be no social pressure at all) the real reason he won't tell his daughter what he actually believes is that it is simply too depressing.

He asked me to imagine the following conversation. Say one of his or his wife's parents died (God forbid). Can you say to a 4-year-old, "Grandma died, and that's all there is to it. She's gone forever. Her body will decompose, and everything that made Grandma Grandma will fade away with her. Get used to it!" He thinks not. Instead, we say "Grandma has moved to a special place, where she will be happy forever! She really misses you, but one day you will see her again, and everyone will live happily ever after!"

Put that way, the impetus behind humanity's attachment to religion becomes pretty obvious. I've spoken about this before. Here's a paragraph from this blog, from a while ago:

"...Who can explain the death of a mother to a five-year-old, without the urge to give at least a little comfort? Imagine if you will, this scenario in a landscape of unremitting difficulty, disease, death, violence, and random acts of natural destruction. Now subtract all that we have learned in the last few thousand years; go back to a time when everything around us was a complete mystery. Who among us would not see the forces of nature as powerful gods? Who could possibly come up with the idea that the mother's death was meaningless; that the force of her being has simply vanished; that she lived a life (paraphrasing Mark Twain) where she was of no consequence, achieved nothing, where she was a mistake and a failure and a foolishness? Could you say that to your child, even if you believed it with every fiber of your being?"

This is a problem for atheists. It's just a terrible belief system to impose on a child, from a selfish, feel-good perspective. It's philosophical Ferber Method (wiki it). Let the kid cry herself to sleep, knowing that life is meaningless. It's character building!

-ap