Explaining Religion to a 5-Year-Old

To qualify this though: There have been a bunch of studies showing just how credulous young children are, i.e. that one about a wolf inside a box(?).

i hope he doesnt change his little mind.

My son is four, and when we recently drove past a playground he spied, I menioned it was at a church. “What’s that?” It’s a place where people who believe in god go to talk about him. “I don’t know what that thing is you just said.” Which started our brief theological discussion.

I agree with Richard Dawkins that teaching a religion to a child in exclusion of other religions is a form of child abuse.

However with my son I never tried to push him one way or the other. My typical explanation of the strange religious stories was that “2000 years ago people didn’t know much, but they had to have some answers so they made things up”.

I did tell him that the one thing for sure he should do about religion is to not believe what his dad tells him, that he has to make up his own mind.

I love FML. Whenever I feel down (when I’ve had an argment, or the pressure of work is getting to me) it always cheers me up.

I never understood why my parents worked so hard to deceive me about Santa Claus, even trying to extend the fiction past the time when I questioned how it could be true. My own children were told that Santa was the spirit of giving anonymously, so that when they figured out he wasn’t a real entity (or a real spirit), they didn’t have to adjust their world view. They still got to enjoy the fun and good will, but didn’t have to see their parents as untrustworthy.

Then I couldn’t figure out why we were supposed to let go of the Santa concept when we grew up, but cling to the similar (but a lot less pleasant) entity called God.

I wonder if this God thing started out, way back when, as a way to make children behave, or a simplistic way to explain concepts that the parents didn’t themselves understand, but the children believed it enough that when they became parents themselves, they passed it on instead of seeing the flaws in it.

Santa gives more generously to kids who have wealthy parents than he does to the children of the poor. Does he like them better? Likewise, has God been bought? How do we answer a child who asks if He has something against the poor or if he is he greatly pleased with the wealthy? Why was the earthquake (an Act of God) death and devastation in Haiti (which is poor) so much greater than in Mexico?

Despite the many American slogans proclaiming the country to be a meritocracy, life (in the current economic system) isn’t fair, and doesn’t fairly reward those who work the hardest.
I suspect that a lot of privileged Americans use their piety to justify their entitlement to all the good things they enjoy, and the poor use Christianity as a comfort to support the hope and expectation that they will someday be rewarded, so the current state of religion is rooted in a desire for Santa to be real.

I was reading a children’s bible to my then five year old son, flipping around, and stopped on the “Noah’s Ark” story. I started reading it out loud to him, when he stopped me and said, “Are you kidding me?”

Happily for him, he’s attending his 4th Camp Quest this summer!

Thegoodman, whilst you might be right about, say children being atheists, I’m not sure where you got the idea that children are natural vegetarians.

That one seems a bit oddball to me.

Certainly all I have read and seen suggests that the vast majority of young children find vegetables very bitter, and that they only taste nice as the kids’ tastebuds change as they grow older.

And from anecdotal experience, I am yet to meet a young child that eats their veg without a fuss… (!)

That was totally me at 5! Good to know I am not the only one.