CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
Profile continued . . .

ARCHIVES!
My Eight Year Old Daughter Came Out as an Atheist

Friday, September 02, 2011

this entry brought to you by the prunes, "rockin' the mic"


My daughter told her mother the other day that no, she doesn't believe in God any more. My wife has struggled with her faith for as long as I've known her, and when we had Celest she wanted to start going to church again. It was something that I didn't want to join her with, and while I felt bad about it, I just couldn't do it. I've talked so poorly about churches, at the time I was going through my own soul searching with atheism after years of being a pretty active agnostic, and I wasn't comfortable going to a place when I actively did not believe what they were teaching. It seemed disrespectful to be in a place where everyone around me believed in these things, just so I could be, as Jack puts in Fight Club, "a tourist".

Michelle was pretty keen on the idea of giving Celest options, though, to expose her to God, and to Christianity, and talk with her about it and give her honest answers when she asked, but it wasn't very long before something happened at church that made her decide to stop going, not the least of which was her own burgeoning atheism.

The point is that we didn't stick with the Jesus thing very long with Celest, and she learned some, but it was never something she was exposed to for long periods of time. Michelle became an atheist a few years ago, and while Celest said that she still believed in God at the time, really, my daughter deciding she was an atheist a few years later was about as inevitable in this family as a child her age "deciding" she was going to accept Jesus as her savior in a family of Born Agains. It wasn't something that we forced on her, it wasn't something that we even encouraged her to do, in fact, we told her we wanted her to make up her own mind. But frankly, atheism comes up a lot in this household, and her mother and I have long, drawn-out discussions about it; it was inevitable that just living in the same house as her parents that this would happen sooner or later.

Michelle and I were just watching a video not too long ago about a group of Christians yelling at an atheist family (in a parade no less!), "How dare you do that to your children? You can believe whatever you want, but it's disgusting you would bring your children into it."

And obviously a perfectly reasonable response would be, well, of course this is the way it is. A Christian family would be expected to raise their children in their religion, so why wouldn't an atheist family want to raise their kid atheist?

But a more important topic came up recently.

Celest was hanging out with two friends, one from a pretty devout Catholic family, and the other from a Jewish family, and the Catholic girl informed the Jewish girl that there was no way for her to get into heaven.

And while I know people, Christians even, who would scoff at that, this is a perfectly mainstream belief. By definition, Jews do not believe in Christ the Messiah, and even though Jesus himself was a Jew and he was a rabbi and his teachings were very obviously meant to inspire other Jews on how to be better Jews, the most popular and oldest surviving interpretation of Christianity is that only in believing he is the Messiah will you go to Heaven. Believing that a Jew will go to hell because she is Jewish is absolutely mainstream. Anyone who believes that Jesus Christ is the Messiah and also believes that Jews will go to Heaven is either part of a non-mainstream subsect of Christianity or is, more likely, rationalizing, to get what she knows about modern society to fit with what are obviously barbaric beliefs.

And you know what? It's a barbaric notion that never even occurred to my daughter. Celest came home upset, not just because someone thought this, but she didn't even know why someone would think that.

It's for this reason that I don't give a shit what people think if they find out my daughter has declared herself a non-believer, whether they think it was us that convinced her to do it, that she only thinks that because we are her parents, or what have you. My daughter does not look at someone and automatically believe that they will burn in hell for eternity because of some nonsense they were taught by their parents who, for some reason or another, can ignore huge parts of their religion without realizing the entire thing is nonsense. And whether or not it was her own thoughts or because of us that she came to that conclusion, it's still something I'm proud of.
------



with love from CRS @ 1:37 PM 

0 Comments:

Post a Comment