A few years ago, my husband and I took our three children to Pompeii - the ruined and partially buried Roman city near Naples, Italy. As one of the most spectacular sights one can see in a lifetime, I was sure my children would be forever affected by their firsthand encounter with the history of this special place, destroyed during an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. but rediscovered in 1738.
As I looked upon the children, my chest puffed out with the pride of a parent trying desperately hard to show her children the world. My suddenly very bored 6-year-old son turned to me and said: "Mommy, I wonder if anyone has ever made an M&M as big as a cookie. Could we try sometime? How could we do that?"
What? How could he say such a thing? Doesn't he realize where he is? I'm reminded of this story today as I struggle with a different and much more complex issue: how to elicit an interest in religion from my overtly cynical and science-minded children.
For years I've been a foreign correspondent and more recently became the author of a biography called "The Fossil Hunter" about an English woman named Mary Anning who helped launch the debate over extinction, evolution, and the earth's real age in the early 1800s. As a result, I've found myself writing and speaking a great deal these days about the reconciliation of science and religion, often preaching to the choir in rooms filled with educated people who understand that the two are not incompatible. But somehow I fear I've failed to make a connection with my own children as I've attempted to get this same message across.
Raised a Christian, I was always taught by my mother to go through life with the faith of a child, a wisdom spelled out in both the Gospels of Luke and Mark. Although I grew to become an endlessly curious reporter, I was never one of those children who asked a heap of searching questions like "Why can't I see angels?"
But the mustard seed of faith planted during my childhood has never left me even at a time where in some circles it's a badge of honor to skate over issues of religion. Today we live in a world marked by one scientific discovery after another, an age when scientists are extracting DNA with the hopes of resurrecting the woolly mammoth while talking about human cloning as a very real possibility.
My children love this stuff. They make straight As in science and physics classes and when they search out information they like to find answers that make sense to them. I'm thrilled about their pursuits but also have worked hard to try to force them to get excited over something they have a tougher time getting their young heads around - religion.
I've read them Bible stories and then cringed when they've begun to laugh. I've prayed with them for friends to get well only to get irritated with them a week later when they ask why the friends are still ill.
Most importantly I've emphasized the mysteries that science can't explain. For example, despite centuries of astronomical observations it is thought that more than 90 percent of the mass in our universe is still undetected.
But I fear that I've been trying too hard and that I need to be sending them the same message I send when I speak to adults about my book: that both science and religion can give explanations that are not in any kind of competition with each other, but rather are complementary. In other words, we can believe that the earth is close to 4.5 billion years old - and also look toward religion for answers about our ultimate purpose in life.
Many of the early scientists were themselves people who saw their faith as the key driver in exploring and understanding the natural world God had created. According to Denis Alexander, director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion based in England's Cambridge University, Isaac Newton would have looked puzzled in the 18th century if asked what he thought about the relationship between science and religion.
Alexander says:
For so many centuries science and religion were so closely intertwined that I'm not sure that people would have thought about the 'relationship' between them with the implication that they represent two distinct bodies of knowledge.
Elaine Howard Ecklund, Ph.D.: Religious Scientists: Faith in the American University
Patrick Takahashi: Human Cloning: A Post-Life Insurance?
Isa 40:22 It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:
Note from this verse that in referring to our planet, we see the words, "...circle of the earth". This exposes Marla's accusation of the Bible as claiming a "flat earth", to be false.
- Parents introduce their children to their initial language, by default.
- Parents introduce their children to good personal hygiene.
- Parents introduce their children to healthy eating (spinach vs. M&M's)
- Parents introduce their children to early education
- and in the case of this article's author, parents introduce their children to faith in Jesus Christ the Lord. You know- It does seem a perfectly proper thing to do.
It is *very obvious that people will ultimately develop into their own personhood in regards to faith in God. King David of Israel, was the father of both Solomon *and Absalom. However that fact does not prevent a parent's natural tendency to give their children the best information possible, in hopes that they will have a good life in this ("challenging..." let's say) world.
Why abdicate on this front? -ms
http://raisingamazingdaughters.wordpress.com
No two people in the world ever see anything the same way. A parent can indoctrinate all they want and even if their child embraces their religious beliefs, their version is still likely to be a little different from their parents.
My parents were atheist/agnostic, but sent us to Sunday school so that we would be exposed to the Christian religion. I embraced it fervently one year, then rejected it all the next year in favor of evolution. After another ten years, my own experiences and instincts led me to believe that something does exist beyond what is known by science at this time. But I explore that through my own perceptions, not through the dictates of a particular religion.
Decades later, my older brother practices Buddhism, I have my own particular spiritual leanings, and my younger brother is agnostic. I have raised my own kids to be open to spiritual possibilities, or to be atheists if they wish. I figure whatever their answers are now, as they live Life their answers will change. They have expressed satisfaction over this arrangement versus their friends' situations, whose parents are determined to foist their own religion on their children.
Whatever you teach your children, they will make up their own minds, and that is as it should be. What a parent hopes for is that their child finds the path that provides them the peace and strength they need for this Life.
I can remember a similar scene... being tucked in my bed, lying next to my mom as she read to my sisters and I from the bible. And, while my little sister was engrossed by the stories, my older sister and I laughed at the holes. I never connected with religion and, upon starting Sunday school, I made it very clear to my parents that I was just going through the motions of the sacraments for their benefit.
Years later, I decided to read the bible again, on my own. By this point, I was already agnostic and I was reading the bible for all the wrong reasons. As I read the stories, which were no longer being billed to me as "the word of the Lord", I paused and thought how much more I would have enjoyed them -- and their meaning-- if they had been presented to me like Aesop's fables.
I'm presently writing stories that will help open the minds and hearts of children to spiritual concepts and sensibilities. Not being associated with any particular religion, I think it's the core concepts that our children need to learn. The packaging and the title we associate to it are just adult formalities.
So if one of my boys asks me if I believe in god I tell them the truth about why I don't believe, but at the end I tell them something like" "But you grandmother does believe so why don't you go talk to her too and learn about what she believes."
You should educate your children about your religion. Maybe it will take maybe it won't and both outcomes are victories, imo.
But I guess it depends on what is most important to you. Your children believing what you believe or your children learning how to apply that scientific, ACH, thinking to all areas of their life and allowing them to come to their own conclusions.
The point is: don't push him.
It is also irrelevant if there are doctors and scientists attend church or believe in this or that deity; their beliefs do not make science and religion compatible. People have the ability to hold contradictory beliefs. For instance, I know a Mormon currently enrolled in a graduate science program that has learned all of the science behind evolution and genetics but still dismisses it and continues to believe the fiction that is the Mormon religion.
Whether you want to accept it or not, accepting the science while believing in a theistic religion is intellectually bankrupt.
FWIW, I've never understood the argument between religion and science, because they ask (and answer) different questions. Science asks HOW, while religion asks WHY.
Go to any place in the world and the HOW answers of science stay consistent but the same can not be said of the WHY answers of religions. Some wonder how that came to be, others wonder why.
Children (and adults) who ask questions, trust in the provable, and reject ideas which make no sense to them are more interesting, smarter, and better equipped to handle whatever life throws their way. More fun to talk to.
Parents who try to mold their offspring into clones rarely get what they want, and almost never produce happy, well-balanced kids. Listen to your children. Answer their questions as honestly as you are able. Share your knowledge and beliefs with them, but don't be upset if they reject them. My parents are pretty cool, and even though I'm nothing like them in any way we can tell, I'm reasonably okay too.