From the Mouths of Babes
I was raised Catholic. I went to Catholic school up until the 8th grade. I went to church 6 days a week during that time, each weekday morning before school and of course on Sundays. I stopped being religious almost immediately upon starting public high school. My wife is Jewish. Her mother was Jewish and her father was Catholic. They celebrated Christmas. She didn’t get much in the form of information about her religion.
When we had children, we agreed the children would be raised Jewish, after all their mother was Jewish. I can’t say I didn’t have any trepidation about this. Deep down in the recesses of my brain were implanted the seeds of fear; fear of eternal damnation.
Even though neither my wife nor I are particularly religious, we still wanted to give our children some basis in religious understanding. We went through several periods where we tried to teach them some religion, but we never got very far. So my children have a basic understanding of what religion is, but they’ve never been fully indoctrinated. There’s been no brainwashing, no drubbing of the same dogma repeatedly until it settles deep into your psyche.
What would happen if a young adult, say 14 years old, having not been exposed to the teachings of organized religion, were to start reading some of the ancient texts on which religions are based? I found this out one day, quite by accident.
My 14-year-old daughter’s softball coach was getting married, and we were invited to the wedding. It was a Catholic wedding, very traditional, so we arrived in church and took our seats in one of the pews. With time to kill before the wedding, my daughter reached for a bible from the little slot in the back of the pew in front of us. She stared at it for a bit, and opened it up.
My daughter is very bright. She is a straight A student, she plays the piano beautifully, she is athletic, and has some talent at drawing. I’m not trying to pump her up; these are merely facts.
As she read through Genesis, my curiosity peaked. What would she think of it? She has a basic understanding of the solar system, and perhaps the Milky Way. She knows there are literally countless stars in billions of galaxies in an ever-expanding universe (we’ve watched the Discovery channel). If I had to guess, I’d say she read somewhere between 5 and 10 pages before putting her finger on her place and looking up at me. “Dad, have you ever read this?” she asks. “Yes, a few times. Why?” She shakes her head slightly and says, “It’s like, crazy.” I just nodded and she read a bit more before putting it up. To my knowledge, it’s the last time she’s read any of it.
Reasonable people may disagree, it happens all the time. But it is fascinating that when an educated young adult, with at least some knowledge of the world in which she lives, opens the Bible and begins to read, she finds it to be almost laughable. Like a fairly tale perhaps. Yet across our planet, human beings live their lives wrapped up in this dogma. They live in fear of the devil, in fear of sin, following ancient rituals and in some cases, dying for their beliefs.
I find organized religion to be among the oddest of human behaviors. People who have almost no knowledge of the universe in which we live, because it is truly overwhelming to consider, honestly believe they know not only who created the universe, they also know the mind of the creator. They believe they know what the creator wants us to do, how the creator would have us live our lives. Many claim to speak for the creator, to interpret his words from the ancient texts. Some go so far as to say the creator has spoken to them directly. To top it all off, they believe mankind was made in the image of the creator of the universe. This seems awfully presumptuous to me.
Driving my daughters to their softball practice one day, they confided in me they were scared. They were distraught about their lives, about what it was all for, about what happened when they died. These are very likely the same things that brought about the creation of religion in the first place, many years ago. I told them that no one really knows, and if anyone told them they knew, they were lying or confused. I told them not to worry, because everything was exactly as it was supposed to be. They should look around at nature and it’s wondrous beauty and be amazed they were a part of it. Be happy, breathe in the fresh air, feel the sun on their faces. I had them look up at the clear blue sky with just a wisp or two of cloud. “Isn’t it beautiful?” I asked. “Yes” was the only answer. They smiled and I could see they had no worry on their face, no fear behind their eyes. I wish someone had told me that as a child.
Suggested Reading:
![Recommend [howjoeseesit]](http://s3.amazonaws.com/arkayne-media/img/logo-recommend-me.png){kind=logo}
