When an Atheist Parent Introduces Her Child to Jesus for the First Time…

this is hilarious… thank you Julia!

My son cried so hard when we watched Prince of Egypt.  “Why would God kill all those children?!” I told him that I don’t understand it either, and that it’s one reason we don’t belong to that religion.  How do Christians answer something like that? It’s not just silly, it’s horrifying.

I adore Julia Sweeney! 
I was raised Catholic, but am now an atheist. We’re homeschooling and we just spent a year learning about ancient civilizations in our history studies.  My kids fell in love with mythology, especially Greek mythology.  They didn’t learn about Hebrew mythology until AFTER they had already studied Egyptian and Greek.  It was utterly obvious to them that the Hebrew stories were also myth and it was also obvious to them how these stories must have spread and changed with retelling.  There are just so many parallels between the other ancient myths and the Hebrew bible. We actually read quite a bit of the bible during this time. My kids were flabbergasted when they learned that these stories are still believed by a lot of people.  My daughter, who is very outspoken and smart, was fuming mad when we talked about how the Eve and the apple story is still used as justification for limiting women’s rights.  The whole mythology thing segued in to a comparative religions study as we learned about the rise of Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam.  It was time well spent for all of us.  I learned as much as the kids.  I am amazed now at how much I took on faith in my younger days. 

It’s not a big deal if you don’t make it a big deal. Real, me, you, your puppy, the trees, your mom, your toys. Not real, – pretend stuff- Smurfs, Batman, Easter Bunny, Jesus. Not real and scary, – monsters, zombies, Hercules, zombie Jesus. Explaining the world takes time though, a lot of time to explain all the nonsense out there.

Baby steps, baby steps…She still needs to parse this version, although it is more entertaining than Passion of The Christ.

To be fair – Jesus Christ Superstar seems bewildering to a lot of Xians too… 

When our son was three he was the ring-bearer at the wedding of a good friend. During the rehearsal, he looked at my husband and me and said, “Why is there a big ‘t’ on the wall?” – it was so cute an innocent a statement that we started to chuckle…..the minister was nearby and overheard the exchange and promptly gave us a dirty look. LOL

Jesus Christ Superstar is a really great opera. I can suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy it – much like watching the movie Alien.

Last month we visited Paris. This was our children’s first time in Europe, and in particular their first time visiting one of the big churches… in this case Notre Dame. As it so happened, it was Palm Sunday, so we had to explain a bit about the rituals, and eventually Communion. My wife started to describe it, and then looked at me helplessly. I said, “Communion is where everyone gets together to eat God.” 
Abby, our eight-year-old, looked aghast. “WHAT?” she yelled.”
“Adam!” my wife said.”
“Well, it’s true!”
“Yeah, but…”

Funny just how ridiculous these things sound when you take them out of their trappings.

I recently started to introduce my eight year old daughter to all different types of religion and what their adherents believe. Christianity got no special treatment. When explaining that sometimes people such as Christians discriminate and show hatred towards those that are not like them she replied “That’s dumb”. I think her recent bump into reality this past Christmas when she figured out that Santa wasn’t real (the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, etc. fell soon thereafter) has helped her understand how people can believe things that they have no evidence for. She also loves science and the need for evidence is something that I have been impressing upon her for some time now.

My son is now 18, but he still loves the following story.  When he was 3, 4, 5 years old, he loved dinosaurs, knew all the time periods (Triassic, Jurassic, etc).  He could go “toe to toe” with any adult about dinosaur facts. I decided I needed to introduce stories of the Bible, just for cultural reasons.  I read him a story every night from the Children’s Bible with the pretty pictures, and he stayed pretty silent. Then, I got to Noah’s Ark.  As I read him the story, he looked at me and said, “Are you kidding me?”  That was the last night I read that book to him.  

My husband used to keep his hair long and in a pony tail most days.  He also has a beard and mustache.  When my daughter was 5, her friend’s grandmother showed her a picture of Jesus and said, “Now do you know who this man is?”  My daughter responded,  “I sure do, that’s my dad!”

The religious grandmother could not believe my daughter was unable to recognize Jesus.  I, on the other hand, was delighted.

I homeschool as well and have had the same experience. I’m introducing a lot of differerent mythologies and my 7 year old sees no difference between the ancient mythologies and the Christian or other modern day myths. Every atheist should teach myth and ancient history to their kids from a young age. I think it will do a lot to innoculate atheist kids who are growing up in an environment where Christianity is considered an obvious truth. Oddly enough, my daughter firmly believes that ghosts and aliens are hiding in the house waiting to jump out at her any time they find her alone. For some reason though, she has always found the idea of gods completely ridiculous. Any time they are mentioned she says they don’t exist. I’m not sure why she thinks ghosts and aliens are real but is so adamant gods aren’t. I’ve never even told her gods don’t exist. I just teach her things and let her reach her own conclusions.

This sounds like a wonderful way to approach things, and I wish I would have thought to do this when my child was younger.  I used to think there was no reason to teach biblical myths like the flood, Moses parting the sea, etc., but these stories are often referenced in literature and good for kids to know about.  I especially like the exercise you described of drawing parallels between various stories.

When my daughter was growing up I let her decide what she believed in.  When she was younger she went to a christian church with her friends and even bible school.  As she came into the teenage years she started to question what she was hearing.   Now she is 19 and an atheist like her mom.

I think not letting your children be free to form their own opinions about faith, or lack thereof, is not a good practice.  If you are open minded with them, they will make the right decision and realize religion is a bunch of fairy tales told to keep the masses zombielike and scared to do anything except what the powers that be want them to do.

I think there are a lot of positive lessons in Biblical stories, but you have to do a lot of sifting.  The story of the flood is particularly apt.  Noah received a message that there would be a huge flood, but he could save himself and his family and all the animals of the world with some preparation.

Meanwhile, something like 10% of people living in earthquake prone areas have made adequate preparations to deal with the aftermath of a major quake.  This figure changed slightly after Katrina, but not much.  When I was in Southern California I was literally the ONLY person I knew who had basic supplies set aside.The story of Esther is a powerful message of speaking out even in the face of strong oppression.

It’s all that crap about killing your enemies in violent ways and the magical deity we can do without.

Like Mulan, I wasn’t raised Christian. Each time I was told more information about Christianity (much of the time by Christians), I was dumbstruck to the “you believe WHAT?!?” level. I’ve never quite understood the appeal of the religion, as most of the central tenets strike me as weird or creepy. I’ve exposed my kids to a wide variety of myths. I particularly remember my oldest running into the Exodus story while watching a show on mummies. He was appalled by the whole thing and it took me a while after that to convince him that Christians weren’t all terrible people.

 I like Jesus Christ Superstar too.  Don’t have to “believe” in order to enjoy it.

I can see why he repeats is, that’s AWESOME!

I got that evil eye for casually explaining why my son didn’t know what a Big Mac was with “He’s never been to McDonald’s”.  Not sure which is the greater sacrilege in America, not teaching your kid about baby Jesus, or not teaching him about Happy Meals(tm).

That should read, “the odd things they do…”

Proofreading is my friend.

Huh?

repeats it
(and I was misreading for ‘loves’ for ‘repeats’, as in assuming he tells the story himself)

I did, and I didn’t, when I was Growing Up Fundie. On the one hand, everyone else’s beliefs were ludicrous and wrong. On the other hand, their beliefs were an awful lot like mine, so I had many, many unanswerable questions.

Obviously the cognitive dissonance wasn’t sustainable for me, but for some, they just never examine why they think the Trinity is more credible than the Corn Maidens, except to dismiss them as the work of their evil deity/former angel. Or, conversely, they apply the “many ways to heaven, many paths to (my) god” dogma and that way lay claim to all other forms of religious expression.

That picture is from several years ago. My apologies for not making that more clear.

Gotcha.  And, yes, he repeats the story, too.  He’s had plenty of years at Camp Quest each summer to share his anecdote.  

I’m feeling nostalgic so here’s one more story. 
  

My husband and I took our son, at age 4, to a small town
celebration, just a get together of the community.  We immediately gravitated to the kids’ Arts & Craft tent.  I noticed that a local
church was staffing the tent, based on the sign stating so, but didn’t think
much about it.  I saw beads, pipe cleaners,
wire, glue and construction paper, and groups of kids busily creating things. Looked good.

My son stood in line, waiting his turn, and finally, he
could begin his craft:  making a
cross.  But just not any cross.  He was told he had to put specific colored
beads in specific areas of the cross, with narration by the church volunteer:

“We are going to make a cross, to signify Jesus’s death and rebirth.

“These four red beads represent the blood of Jesus,
where Jesus was nailed to the cross in the hands, the stab wound in his side,
and the crown of thorns worn on his head.”  

My son’s eyes just kept getting wider and wider.  I yanked him away, and we checked out the
dancers on stage.

My son was four. 
He didn’t know about cruelty or stabbing or blood (except for boo boos).
And it made me realize how quickly Christian children are indoctrinated in the
gruesome concept of the cross.

Growing up Catholic, I didn’t realize how numb I was to
the concept, until I saw it spelled out in front of my son.

And, what really startled me and made me sad is that the
young church volunteer had no problem discussing death and blood and stabbing
to the very youngest of children.

A disturbing day.

I was taken off guard reading my 5 year old a Berenstain Bears where they go to church, and the kids go to Sunday school, and learn about The Flood.  And he was pretty stunned.  I want him to be ready for that, and realized I’d been kind of avoiding biblical myths.   So we got Jan Brett’s version of Noah’s Ark, and it’s very nice.  I mean, I suppose it’s worth knowing that God committed genocide, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to show a kid ‘Saw’ either.  (oh, now I KNOW one of the Christians is going to snark at me).

Of course there’s The Magic of Reality, but although we browse it, I doubt it will hold a three-year-old’s interest.

You might want to check out the FB group “Moms beyond belief”.  The Dad’s version has a list of books we’ve tossed together, with no particular theme other than we think they’re good kids books, and most have some kind of atheist/agnostic/skeptic interest.

Something else I’ve for a while was talk with him about fantasy/reality distinctions, like how Spiderman the cartoon isn’t real, but how Spiderman the movie, even though it has ‘real’ people as actors, also isn’t real.  And how do we know? Just talking about it has gotten him thinking about the distinction, and how to figure it out.

simply because they dont belong in the Kingdom of  God.. .to other kingdom  if it
 exist.

He could be anybodies daddy anyway.. .and a heir of the Kingdom of  God.

I’ve always been a little doubtful of the “religiousness” of JC Superstar, even when I was still a believer.  It seems like more of a “Jesus as a historical figure” than the usual happy-clappy Jesus praise-fest you’d expect.  It ignores the parables and doctrine and such and even leaves out miracles much like the Jefferson Bible.  (Yes, there was the leper scene, but I noticed that there is no confirmation of healing–which I have a hard time believing a religiously-motivated Jesus musical would leave out–and it ends with him being overwhelmed.)  Herod’s song is very atheistic too:  it amounts to “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and why should you be exempt from this standard?”  (I only ask what I’d ask any superstar:  What is it that you have got that puts you where you are?)  Whine about “mockery” all day long, but that’s usually the cry of the tone troll.  Jesus dies at the end and that is the end of it–no resurrection, no suggestion of resurrection, no hint of it.  Even Godspell had that taking-down-the-body happily-dancing-in-the-streets thing, which suggests the whole “christian” message and fulfills the religious angle quite nicely!

And most of all, Judas is not only portrayed in a sympathetic light, he is portrayed as outright questioning Jesus, to the point of asking questions I’ve only ever heard unbelievers utter (such as “what if I just stay here and ruin your ambitions?)  He’s still questioning even after death!  Presumably not from hell, and not singing lyrics about how wrong he was and how right Jesus was, but continuing his doubt and questioning and challenge of Jesus!  How religious is a musical about Jesus where the guy who has the most songs and screen-time is openly questioning and challenging him–and never stops?  And you have to love those questions in the finale:  “Who are you, what have you sacrificed?”  “Do you think you’re who they say you are?”  What kind of religious musical leaves anything that open-ended, especially in the finale?  Much like the leper scene, that sounds like something that was intended to be questioning, but written delicately enough so that the religious members of the audience will read the religiosity into it while more doubting members will pick up on the ambiguous language, which is something doubters have been doing for centuries already.

Now Godspell strikes me as the kind of thing a believer would write post-JC Superstar because he was disgruntled at all that was left out of JC (and I was in Godspell in HS).  Godspell is very happy-clappy and very proselytizing, focusing entirely on Jesus-stories involving salvation of believers and damnation of unbelievers, Panglossian best-of-all-worlds God-has-his-reasons-for-your-pain apologetics (It’s All For The Best), emphasis of the  blood-sacrifice aspect of the crucifixion, and, of course, copious amounts of outright God-praise songs (Day by Day).  I lost interest in that almost as soon as I was an atheist–in fact, a bit before–but JC has always fascinated me.  Especially the 1973 version that does not ignore the text in order to force the story into the traditional and mainstream structure.  (You know, Pilate is evil, Judas is greedy and evil, that sort of thing.  There’s something weird about hearing Judas’s complex lyrics being sung by someone who might as well just hunch over and rub his hands together in eager greed for his bag of silver.  It’s like vinegar and oil.)

Someone said on a forum many years later that JC was written by (at the time) atheists.  I have never been interested enough to find out if that was true, but if it is it answers every single question I have ever had about that musical.

That’s always been a big problem with me–the sifting.  I always ask why I should choose the bible and sift through the crap and the evil and the genocide and violence for some “moral and uplifting” message when I can get the same kind of thing from another source without having to wade through the sludge.  (And it gets worse when you have to make justifications for the sanctity of the sludge while also making justifications for why you are morally allowed to ignore or avoid it.)

I remember something KafirGirl wrote about how she watched Wall-E and found it a million times more ethical and uplifiting in its message than pretty much any religious text she’d ever read, which are always either obscenely immoral or just boring and dead.  That’s pretty much how I feel.  I’m being shown a pile of pearls and a pile of shit.  I am being told I can take a pearl but that there are assuredly pearls inside the shit-pile that I can dig for if I like,  and I’m being encouraged to dig through the shit-pile without any valid argument or justification for why that is the preferable route–the best they can come up with is an unevidenced assurance that the shit-covered pearls are somehow much bigger and nicer than the ones that have never touched shit, which I sincerely doubt.

What a wonderful post, I will have to share with my teenage daughter. She was not raised with religion as her step-father and I are atheists. When she was 7 or so, her father decided to show her the real meaning of Easter so he showed her a picture of Jesus bleeding on the cross and told her how wonderful it was that he died for us. Later that evening, I was awakened to nightmares and crying. The poor child couldn’t figure out why her dad liked to have pictures of a man murdered and said it was good that he was killed and bleeding. Not surprisingly she will have nothing to do with Christianity and I never had to say a negative word. 

In Ireland most schools have religion classes too. It hasn’t effected non belief in my three children. Depending on their personality they either politely challenge the doctrines or do a silent eye roll. In fact having my lot in the class may well be helping other children to question dogma. I found that especially with my youngest who is articulate and compassionate and well able to argue an alternate viewpoint in religion class. It actually does seem to be having a positive effect on opening the minds of some children. Mind you of late his religion teacher just avoids asking him questions since the answers make her uncomfortable.

You must be thinking of In God We Trust:

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/in-god-we-trust/

Have you tried explaining her how a bright and well-educated man like yourself came from a wild animal like the monkey? Crazy, right? I wonder what little Mulan would say about that?