Blind Prophecy

I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately with young mothers who refuse to expose their children to religion. Some of these mothers are committed atheists (which I totally respect), and some are deeply lapsed deists of some kind who are so turned off by their experiences with religion that they don’t want to subject their children to that.

I’m going on record as being against raising kids in godless homes.

I was raised in the Mormon (LDS) Church, and while I no longer consider myself to be Mormon, I don’t regret the values and lessons I learned growing up – such as service to others, courage to stand behind my convictions, and leadership skills. When I officially broke from the church at the age of 16, it was mostly a matter of deeply disagreeing with the “truths” about subjects as varied as homosexuality and race.

(Note: I don’t understand how anyone can respect a religion that believes that whenever God gets mad enough at a group of wicked people, he turns them non-white. For example, blacks are descendants of Cain and Native Americans are decendants of Laman and Lemeul)

When I was in high school, my sisters and I started working for a local Jewish temple. We babysat the children during services, prepared food and refreshments for the social time following worship and generally helped with anything we could like setting up tables and chairs. It was my first close-hand experience with the ways other people worship. I made many great friends and learned a lot about the differences and similarities between religions.

In college, after I got over my atheist period, I spent some time exploring Buddhism, Catholicism, Wicca. I still hold to a basically Wicca belief structure today. Still, I’ve continued to learn about other religions from Episcopalian to Unitarian in the years since then.

And it’s surprisingly easy to continue learning about religion without actually joining them. I’ve never yet been turned away from a meeting because I was simply an interested guest. It just takes a personal commitment on my part to get out there and do it.

Which is why it bothers me that these friends of mine are hiding religion from their kids. When the day comes when I get to raise my own little devils, I’d rather take them to a different church every weekend until they’re old enough to decide if they want to join any of them. There’s nothing wrong with teaching children, even at a young age, to set one day of the week aside for spiritual contemplation and discussion.

By my way of thinking, this is especially true if you want to raise your kids to be atheist. If you haven’t exposed your child to different religions and explained where you find flaws and problems in each religion, they’re going to be walking prey for those religions that proselytize constantly. If the recruiters don’t get them, some future friend or romantic interest probably will. I can’t tell you how many people I knew in college who joined religions for the first time in their lives because they started dating someone of a particular faith.

Anyway, that’s my $0.02 thoughts of the day.

Filed under: livejournal by Jere Keys