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CHAPTER 1
Teaching Religion
Teaching religion to your children is no easy task, especially for an atheist. Of course, religion should be taught, because it is such a major part of our world culture regardless of what you believe. But how do you begin? On what religions do you focus? And how do you properly teach that some people actually believe in talking snakes without ridiculing those people in front of your child?
It is important to remember that these are works of fiction and should be taught as such. We do not teach Greek mythology as "maybe true." We treat it as the fiction we know it to be, and modern-day religions are really no different. Even if a deity of sorts was to be discovered, I think we can easily agree it would not be anything dreamed up by any of the world's religions.
It is easy to think that by rejecting religion wholly you are doing your kids a disservice and indoctrinating them as atheists. You're not. You are not going to teach them about Zeus, carefully not mentioning that it is mythology. This also goes for all the world's religions. If you know something is made up, call it made up. The Bible, the Quran, they are a farce. Teach them as such.
As stated before, even if a magical man appeared in the sky tomorrow proving he was the creator of all things on earth, this would not change the fact that religious books are myths. Anthropological and historical evidence prove this. So now that we have got that out of the way, let's discuss some good ways to teach religion.
I was taught one religion, my parent's religion. I was taught a little about other religions, mostly other forms of Christianity and a little bit about Judaism. This is not the best way to teach a child about religion, and I would not recommend it.
Teach all the major religions, Catholicism and other forms of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and you can work in the extras like Mormonism and Scientology later. Don't overwhelm your children, start from simple beginnings. Much of the Torah and the Old Testament are the same, so you can easily start there and cover Christianity and Judaism, providing information a bit at a time. Maybe a weekly chat. It doesn't have to be overly formal or school-like. Use examples from the news and the outside world to explain why things are happening and why or how people's beliefs play into these events.
This is also a good time to talk about creation myths that have been debunked through scientific evidence. Each religion and all cultures have their own creation story. It is important that children know this and understand that they are in fact myths. Understanding them and how they were debunked is a great tool for understanding how science works. Teaching religion and teaching science will often go hand in hand, from creationism, contrasting what we actually know from the DNA record and fossils with the Adam and Eve myth, to the great flood and the archaeological and geological evidence that has disproved a great flood of this biblical proportion.
How religion came to be and why it still exists is also an interesting discussion. If these stories are fake, why are they still around? Shouldn't we have grown out of them, or should they not have died off like previous religions?
I think the short answer here is yes, and eventually religions like Islam and Christianity will die off. If you really think about it, they are not that old in comparison to human history. Yes, they are old, much older than previous religions were when they died off, but religion is now more ingrained in our culture than ever before. This makes it much harder for it to just die off naturally, although we can see that it is doing so, as each year fewer and fewer people embrace a religious affiliation. The "nones" (people who check "none" on a census form next to religion) comprise the fastest growing "religion" in the U.S. That is inspiring.
Ancient cultures could not explain natural occurrences the way we can today. They did not have science or the scientific method. The sun rising and setting was beyond their comprehension. Earthquakes, storms, and all sorts of natural disasters or wonders confused them, so they made up stories to explain what was happening.
We can still see this today, for example, when less-than-honest religious leaders blame natural disasters in the U.S. on things like same-sex marriage or abortion. For some reason, they believe that when their god doesn't like same-sex marriage, the best way to tell us is to kill hundreds of people in a tornado in the Bible Belt. Nothing gets a message across like killing those who worship you!
People are scared of things they do not understand, so it makes a lot of sense that ancient people would have created good forces, such as gods, to protect them and bad forces for things they were afraid of or knew to be dangerous. What better way to prevent children from exploring dangerous areas or going into the dark than with stories of evil beings?
These ideas make sense, as does their growth. Christianity was part of a power grab. How better to control Rome than to unify everyone under one belief and one set of "holy" rules. It was never an accident that many of those rulers who learned to harness the power of religion also seemed to have a direct line to God himself. This convenient fact most certainly helps when enacting laws, given that they come directly from God.
Explaining this helps show how religious myths move and evolve from culture to culture. It enables us to understand how something untrue can so easily continue to be believed, as it develops and morphs to fit with the norms and morals of different societies.
Then there are some bigger subjects upon which to focus when discussing religion with your children. Teaching that religion exists is one thing but diving into what adherents believe and why those beliefs are harmful is another.
Many of us we were taught to not discuss religion or politics. These seem to always be taboo subjects. In more recent years, this taboo has been stripped away when it comes to politics, and it seems everywhere you go politics is being discussed, with everyone wanting to share their opinions or analysis. Yet religion has managed to position itself so that people still feel it is out of bounds.
The idea that religion is untouchable is crumbling, and we can pass this torch on to our children. Some of our children may grow up to be religious or simply indifferent to religion, not identifying with it but feeling no particular desire to speak out against it. However, they should always feel comfortable speaking about it if they wish, just as they should about all bad ideas.
Religion needs to be on the table. We have the right to critique, praise, or criticize religious actions at any time and for any reason. This starts by teaching our children about religion, its place in the world, and its history. It also starts by not promoting the idea that certain things should not be discussed.
We are at a turning point in the world, a point where more and more people are leaving religion behind. With each new generation, more children are being raised in houses that do not attend church or discuss religion, even if the parents continue to claim to believe in such gods.
This presents us with a unique opportunity to raise children who are able to think critically and question assumptions. While it is great to think about parents not forcing a religion on children, they do them a disservice by ignoring it or just accepting it at face value. These children will not be equipped to question such ideas when they are inevitably presented with them. They are at risk for simply accepting a stated belief as fact. This is exactly what the religious leaders around the world want. We should not give this to them.
Teaching religion does not come easy, but there are many reasons we must. There are numerous beliefs intrinsic to religion that should be broken down: Heaven, Hell, sin, ideas about sex, faith, and the physical and mental abuse that comes along with some of the fundamental (and sometimes not so fundamental) beliefs of various religions.
We are going to explore these different aspects of religion and break them down to better understand them. It is that understanding that we, in turn, will pass on to our children, which will gradually change the course of religious domination, not only in the U.S. but around the world.
My goal of changing how the world thinks about religion is not to make people stop believing in a god or gods. I care little about what people privately believe. However, I care deeply about what they do with those beliefs. If their religious beliefs teach intolerance and hatred, are used to support war, genocide, female genital mutilation, honor killings, or laws that protect or honor such rituals or beliefs, then we have a problem, and I will stand up against every such instance and fight it with every means available to me.
This is a battle that can be won with education. No blood need be shed to rid the world of such beliefs. They will fall victim to reason, logic, and evidence. These beliefs have a terrible weakness, and that weakness is the power of the human mind when used to its full potential.
It will not be a bullet or a sword that kills religion, or even kills God; it will be the rational mind. These poisonous ideas only exist in the minds of those who hold them to be true. By raising generations of critical thinkers, we begin to weaken this virus that infects the minds of many people. Reason can be looked at like a vaccine. With reason, you teach a child to block and combat such ideas and introduce them to different ways of thinking and processing information.
This is a good time to note something that is very common in the atheist community: the idea that religion is a mental illness. It is not, and claiming it is insults those who suffer from real mental illnesses. It also suggests that we could cure someone of religion with medicine. We cannot and will not. Religion is not a disease in the medical sense. It is in the social sense, and just as we call faith a virus knowing full well there is no actual virus, religion and faith are ideas that exist in the mind and are cured through rational thought, reason, and logic.
Many people suffer at the hands of religion, and some may have underlying mental illnesses that allow religion to take further advantage of them, but would anyone reading this who used to be religious claim that they used to have a mental illness? I doubt it. Most often the people who are told they have a mental illness are those who do the unthinkable or are so blinded by faith they reject obvious evidence. A parent who lets their child die or be abused in the name of religion may have their own set of mental issues, but it isn't religion. Religion was the driving force that preyed on those mental issues and guided their ideas about how to care for their children, but not every time. Many parents who have let their children die of curable diseases in the name of Christian Science and faith-based healing have not suffered from known mental illness, but their ability to reason had been destroyed by religious brainwashing and indoctrination. They don't necessarily suffer from a mental problem, but they suffer from a lack of reason and are unable to tell fact from fiction, because they were raised in a way that robbed them of that ability, usually at a young age. I raise this because I do not want people teaching their children that those who believe religious claims have a mental illness. I would prefer that they believe religion is what it is: a socially constructed belief system that can lead people to do very terrible things. It is a social construct that can and should be destroyed, but it is not an illness.
When logic, rationality, critical thinking, skepticism, or any other form of questioning is applied to religion, it begins to fall apart at the base. Religion will not tumble if we only aim for the top. We must go after its groundwork. We must start in the very basement of these ideas. With each brick we remove, the foundation becomes more unstable. If we can destroy the foundation, the rest will crumble under its own weight. This is where victory is won. This is how we begin to change the world.
Just as Rome was not built in a day, religion will not fall overnight. Our children will be lucky if they are the ones to witness its demise, but the deconstruction starts now.
Religion is easy to discard. It offers nothing that humanity does not already have, and anything good that comes from religion is pure coincidence. The Bible offers zero moral guidance that did not exist before religion and that could not exist after. So while I respect the rights of individuals to have any beliefs they please, I see no reason to offer these beliefs any respect and absolutely no reason to allow them a place in public policy.
When politicians allow their religious beliefs to dictate any form of public policy, there is a guarantee it will result in the oppression of and discrimination against those outside of their belief system. This is clearly against everything the Founding Fathers had in mind when they drafted the U.S. Constitution and set forth to create a secular country.
The world we are trying to create for our children has no room for an American theocracy, and it will only be when more parents stand up and say enough is enough, do their best to educate our children on religion and its harm, and raise them to know it is okay to question and criticize these beliefs without fear that we will set a course for a future that sees the religious reign of terror eradicated. One day people will look back and tell stories of their ancestors who believed in sky gods and took their moral guidance from a book as silly as the Bible.
The LGBTQ communities, minority communities, atheists, humanists, and anyone else who stands outside the religious ideas about what is normal will only be able to claim a victory when our country finally gets off its hands and rebuilds the wall that separates church and state.
Religion and religious belief do not need to be wiped off the planet for this to be achieved, but they do have to be put in their place. That place is inside churches, synagogues, temples, and other places of worship, including your own home, but not in the daily lives of citizens who have chosen to have nothing to do with it.
Religion should be kept far away from our public schools. Many make the argument that it belongs in a theology class, but theology should be a college elective not a subject taught to young impressionable students going through the grade school system. If religion is brought up, it should only be in a historical context. A history class is the perfect place to discuss the explosion of Christianity and the Middle Ages, the crusades, and acts such as 9/11 that were based in religion, because ignoring the religious influence would hurt the student's education.
Prayer has not left our schools. The claim that it has is an outright dishonest statement by the Christian right, which attempts to blame violence, such as school shootings, on the lack of religion in our schools. The truth is that only prayer led by a teacher or staff member has been removed from schools. Students are more than welcome to pray on their own or in groups, but the school's staff cannot lead it. It is as simple as that.
When politicians are debating a bill in Congress, no longer should they be yelling about what the Bible says or their own beliefs. They should only be debating about what is good for the American people. Enough majoritarianism; it is time to bring in an age of egalitarianism.
The Declaration of Independence states all men are created equal, and it is about time we finally realize that we are all equal. If we cannot do this, our country cannot last, and if we do not do this, ours will be a country in which we do not want to raise our children.
It is not the genitals you have, the color of your skin, the income level of you or your family, and most certainly not which mythical being you worship or do not worship that grant you any rights or privileges in this country or anywhere else in the world. What matters is how you conduct yourself, how you treat others, and the decisions you make. If you murder someone, you lose privileges. Not because you are poor, black, or Latino, but simply because you broke a law and acted in a way that hurt someone else's wellbeing and ended their life without consent. No amount of money should allow you to pay your way out of being punished for crimes. Issues like poverty need to be resolved to help keep people out of the dire situations that spawn desperation and the resultant crime.
All too often, we blame the victim of our social inequality. The time has come to put an end to this way of thinking. Religion has taught us that some people are worth more than others. This is a reprehensible message that should be paved over with a new, secular message of a true egalitarian society that puts moral weight on issues that matter and removes the faux moral arguments from things such as marriage and consensual adult sex.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Parenting without God"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Dan Arel.
Excerpted by permission of PM Press.
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