“Parenting Beyond Belief” is a collection of essays by famous and unknown nonbelievers. The most compelling chapter is “Death and Consolation”: talking to kids about death when heaven isn’t an option. The Unitarian minister Kendyl Gibbons recommends such phrases as “No, honey, Grandpa won’t come for Christmas. He died and is dead for always.” And then she recommends rituals that bring Grandpa back in memory. The editor Dale McGowan has received some heat from hard-line atheists who say he’s too accommodating to organized religion. “I’ve had a few atheists look me in the eye and say, ‘Come on, when you’re dead, you’re gone. What’s the big deal?” But McGowan, father of three, prefers a gentler approach. “I don’t think the way to handle it is to say, ‘Suck it up and go to bed’.” Parents on both sides of the culture war will find this book a compelling read.
Many atheists should be commended for consistency in their beliefs. Life is the product of random chance. There is no goal to life and no purpose to human existence. In death the individual ceases to exist and returns to the nothingness from which it came.
They should share this freely with their children. According to their worldview this is the truth and we don’t want to lie to our children do we?
#1. YOu are right enough, and yet, there is something ghastly, something brutal, something – what’s the word I want? – alien? a-human? in such parent instructions. I understand that you were being sarcastic, but this seems to be too weak. Children are naturlly materialistic, but their sense of wonder at the world and its dark ways opens doors to them intuitively that an atheist has tried to close. When a pet dies, and the child buries the fog, the cat, thecanary, their intuition tells then that something more powerful than the sun and the rain and a parent has occurred, and they sense another world, they see it darkly, and it is for hits reason they ask their parents what this means. LM
So “parents on both sides of the culture war will find this book a compelling read”, eh?
I rather doubt that.
Larry, I was being blunt on purpose. If they can’t tell their children this then maybe they should reconsider their worldview. If they do believe this then they should revel in the bliss of nihilism. Better a child should grow up knowing the futility and useless of life than learn it later, right?
I’m interested that, given the prominence of vacuous and enfeebled theologies in the public arena, atheists feel as though they need any help. I’d be inclined to think that trivialized theology is doing the work for them.
Br. M, I mistook your point. I quite agree. If atheism is indeed the truth, then the children should be told precisely that. I wonder, Br. M., what the children would do. Would they grow up even more atheistic than their parents? Or do you suppose that the sense of another, invisible life, something beyond mere eyes and eyes, something rooted in the ancient emotions perhaps, is hardwired, and they would eventually see through their parents biases? Can parents put their childrens’ eyes out, if I may put it that way, so that they will be blind forever? I wonder and wonder. LM