How to make your kids think like you do
I just came across an article on Time’s website about “Sunday School for Atheists.”
“When you have kids,” says Julie Willey, a design engineer, “you start to notice that your co-workers or friends have church groups to help teach their kids values and to be able to lean on.” So every week, Willey, who was raised Buddhist and says she has never believed in God, and her husband pack their four kids into their blue minivan and head to the Humanist Community Center in Palo Alto, Calif., for atheist Sunday school.I suspect I know how conservative Christians would react to this — something about the godless heathens corrupting their own children, or something. On its face, though, it seems like a pretty decent idea. I mean, people have the right to teach their kids whatever they, the parents, want, right? And I do think it’s important to socialize children with a sense of morals of some sort, so why should those who belong to organized religion have the monopoly on that?
But let’s not fool ourselves as to what this is. Sending your kids to atheist Sunday school is functionally the same behavior as sending your kids to Christian Sunday school, insofar as each is simply a means to indoctrinate your own kids into your own belief system. Call yourselves “freethinkers,” as the article suggests some do, but that doesn’t make it true any more so than calling oneself “Christian” implies an actual adherence to the teaching of Christ.
“I’m a person that doesn’t believe in myths,” one parent in the article says. “I’d rather stick to the evidence.” What evidence? How is rationalism — or even the value of “free” thought — any less a myth than the values associated with any religion? I don’t mean to knock the values of these atheists in themselves, but I do want to emphatically reject this posture of holding values and pretending as if they’re somehow more natural or based in fact than anybody else’s seemingly arbitrary system. When you refer to your own system of belief as somehow more “natural” than others’, without any conscious recognition of the possibility that you may be mistaken, you are the most self-deluded kind of believer. That goes for the religious and the non-religious alike.
As for atheist Sunday school, I hope it works out well in practice. I hope the next generation sees a new crop of literate, critical thinkers who are aware of world religions and society without being condescending or overly defensive. And I hope that we see a new form of rebellion, where people sent to atheist Sunday school end up believing in God — not because I think they’d be more right, but because I think it would teach us some very interesting things about human sociology, culture, and child-rearing.
