Ok short version - My wife, who is not really a believer, was once upon a time, in a moment of weakness, befriended by part of the congregation of the local catholic church. This was just before I met her.
One thing led to another (no not that, get your mind out of the gutter) and before I knew what was going on, she had made a firm decision that if she was ever going to get married it would be in a catholic church.
So there I was a couple of years later, an atheist sitting with a priest, negotiating how we would make this work without lying. They had no problem marrying us if I would lie, btw, the problem was that I would NOT lie.
Ok - to keep it short again, he got special dispensation to minimise what I would have to say to keep it truthful, but the non-negotiable was that I would have to promise not to hinder my wifes ability to bring up the kids within the church.
Now she didn’t really try to pursue this until a year or two ago, when her boss at work suggested they try out his sunday school, and the little buggers darlings liked it! I had of course agreed not to interfere, so I await the light dawning on my increasingly skeptical brood.
I went to Sunday school for many years and turned out alright. I do and did resent it but I also, actually, unlike my contemporaries, learnt quite a lot from it. I still know the bible better than most xtians. >:D 0:)
Well, that’s just the thing. Any halfway sane person who wasn’t fed this intellectual poison daily from infancy with all the usual gravity and solemnity will soon recognise a fairytale for what it is. All you need to do is to plant a tiny seed of doubt in young kids’ minds, watering it every so often, and their natural curiosity will do all the remaining hard work for you.
(And sometimes I might be too optimistic for my own good…)
Sunday school is fun until round 10 or 11 years of age, then it becomes more “serious” and you are fed the bible in a more educational vein. Both my boys loved Sunday school as kids, after all, its all about friends, stories and colouring in. Once they had to start the more serious curriculum, all interest faded overnight, and they were “allowed” to discontinue. I did, however, re-iterate to them right through their childhood that the bible and its tales are stories to enjoy and not in any shape or form a documentary based on true events and that praying is futile.
My main objection to sunday school is that it is carried out by believers for believers, and as such everything will be presented as fact. God did this, praying does this, heaven is this, Jesus was this etc etc. Never will they hear the objective presentation (from them) that specific religious groups believe this, and this and this, and other religious groups believe different things, and yet more groups believe none of it and claim that the beliefs are not supported by evidence.
That is my approach, to present the truth about why each group finds the other groups claims unconvincing, and why that makes credibility of evidence so important compared to just believing what your peers believe, often simply because it is all they have been exposed to.
Now in my view, telling your kids that praying is futile is to take the same approach as the religious, presenting your position as fact rather than encouraging the skills to determine fact and stressing the importance of objectivity and evidence.
The way I would put it is that believers are very quick to claim that prayers work, but they have nothing except anecdote to fall back on when asked for evidence. Several large scale studies have been carried out, with the finding that prayer does not appear to influence results beyond what chance alone would predict, and the results of prayer seem to be confined to the placebo effect.
A simple story like the youtube jug of milk prayer would illustrate why belief in prayer is so common. Believers work on a ratchet effect, taking all positive signs as proof of their position, and discounting or rationalising all negative signs so that they are never weighted as proof or even evidence against their position.
Confirmation bias - a game anyone can play, but everyone should be careful not to, unless the object of the game is to create bloated false beliefs.
Bloated false beliefs do have a purpose though, and are sometimes useful for survival, since they can bolster confidence to tackle a necessary task where hesitation could be fatal or at least restrict performance.
Yes, but at what age do you explain this to your kids? My son isn’t going to learn prayer from me and should he come to ask me about prayer, I’ll simply tell him it doesn’t work. I don’t know when I’ll actually have to go into any sort of explanation. But I will be sure to point out where the burden of proof lies.
The fact that he doesn’t say any words yet, (according to me, the wife thinks differently) make any sort of argument moot.
I am fascinated by how this will turn out by the way, he is faced with three languages on a daily basis :o
Kind of OT, but my sister did her masters degree in linguistics tracking her son’s development. She spoke only English to him, his dad spoke only Italian and he spoke French to his friends (they live in Paris). Children find learning language extremely easy, and he speaks all three with equal fluency, which will stand him in good stead in his chosen career as a diplomat.
At a young age, I would simply explain that a lot of people like to think that prayer works and that you are really talking to a god, (I would be very careful not to leave out the ‘a’ here) but that even though many adults believe these things, you only have to look at all the adults who believe other things, including other religions, to realise people don’t agree about what is right, belief is something people chose for themselves.
I basically taught my sons that if they want/need something, they are reliant upon themselves to make it a reality. Handing over the responsibility of a need or want to the skyfairy is a cop-out and then justifying the not-wanted-result by saying that “he” works in mysterious ways is even more so. The end result up until now (late teens) - they both work their backends off for what they want, and they’re both fairly independent for their respective ages. They are non-conformist to boot and have the eyebrow thing down to an artform.
I guess they are too young to have learnt the eyebrow thing from Spock, perhaps they have seen Sam Harris in action, another of my favourites.
I wish I could still lift one eyebrow. I could do it in high school, but somewhere along the line I have lost the ability, dunno why or how that happened ???