Why I'm Raising My Kids Without Religion

[trotsky]

https://www.scarymommy.com/raising-kids-without-religion/

When I was a kid, I wasn’t given a choice whether or not I wanted to practice Christianity. Religious indoctrination started early on in my life, around 7 or 8 years old. I have even earlier recollections of my grandparents thanking God and praying.

...At first, I did not mind going to CDD, especially for my First Holy Communion. I got to wear a suit, have a party, get presents, and eat tons of pizza. For the most part, I was completely unaware of what I was learning or even why I was learning it. I just remember learning things like the story Jesus’ life, his death, sin, original sin, and the irrefutable fact that God is a man and never a woman.

I think because I was so young, I had no basis for thinking critically about what I was learning, so it was merely memorization. I also wanted to be good. CCD taught us to be obedient. We were taught how to listen to our parents and adults like nuns and priests, because the Bible said so (see Seventh Commandment).

...Religious indoctrination is intentionally done at an early age. For the rest of my life, no matter how many other forms of spirituality or religions I practice, I will always see things through a Catholic lens. I had no filter as a child, and I was absorbing everything that was fed to me without bias or the ability to critique it. This process isn’t done by accident.

[MineralMan]

1. Indoctrination - instilling doctrine into children at an early age.

No, there's no accident in it. It is an eminently successful strategy in the majority of cases. It has brought us to the age of Donald Trump and child abusing religious organizations.

Indoctrination. Overwhelm young minds with doctrine and most will follow your path throughout their lives. Everyone knows that.

[Wellstone ruled]

2. Hey,thank you for the truth.

Proud of our younger people recognizing what you and I have recognized. Proud to say,our Grand Kids have rejected the Indoctrination attempts by their Parents and have convinced their Parents to leave what is called Religion. We now see the new positive of life.

[MineralMan]

4. Yes. Young people appear to be abandoning religious doctrine

in wholesale numbers. That's a good sign. The sooner a majority is no longer held in thrall by religion, the sooner we may be able to recover. I hope there's time. I'll be gone before too many years pass, but human life will continue - as long as it is able to survive on this planet, anyhow.

Raise a glass to empty churches everywhere!

[Wellstone ruled]

6. Hear hear!

One of the greatest miss uses of Good Land ever. That and Grave Yards.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. A case could be made that religious indoctrination is child abuse. . . . nt

[MineralMan]

5. An open and shut case, I'd say.

[NeoGreen]

7. I raised mine without religion...

...and they have turned out to be better persons than I ever was at their ages.

[Kajun Gal]

8. We are religious, believers, but do not practice "organized" religion.

We believe that faith is in your heart, soul and your actions. It's not necessarily found inside a building.

[Karadeniz]

9. Babies and Bathwater

If I were raising kids now, I'd do it differently, too. There's so much information available nowadays to prove that there is life after death, so much more to thoughts and their power than what is supplied by the brain. We've progressed beyond Faith to Proof.

First, you should learn what Truth is...or at least as much of it as we can know. I think it's Your Eternal Self (Hogan) which lays out all the experiments that have been done with Mind to show that it's not confined to the brain. You could explain many of the experiments to your kids so that they know that there's more to them than skin and bones. Pick the experiments that made the greatest impression on you and write them down, the beginning of a book for them.

Next, reincarnation can be proven, at least in my opinion. I think it's Born Again: Reincarnation Cases.... by Semkiw that is a summary of the previous investigations. Individual cases could be written by you for a book for the kids, bedtime reading or whatever. There are tons of books with reincarnation cases that are quite convincing.

By the way, Jesus' parables in Matt/Mk/Luke...at least the difficult ones...deal with the soul, soul development, the God System, etc. Unfortunately, next to no one can analyze them. I have. My Truths didn't come from the Bible, but from a soul experience. Curiosity kept me plugging away at those pesky parables to find out if there was truth beyond untrue dogma. I found it and now, instead of my own experience, I actually use the parables to keep me on the right course because they're easier to relate to.

The most important, most vital thing to do is to teach your kids empathy, compassion. It's soul development that should be the aim of any decent religion, but that's been lost to rituals, blind faith and dogma. Here's what I'd do if I had kids. There's a web site called Love Meow, plenty of photos, simple stories of kitties' hardship stories and how they were saved. I'd print the photos, maybe rewrite the stories for your kids' ages, and use them for bedtime reading. The stories are perfect and there are more than I can say; the kids will have examples of compassion, generosity, helpfulness forever!

I know I should write a book for kids...just too old and tired!

[MineralMan]

10. OK, then.

You might want to read a few threads in this group. You may find that it isn't what you were thinking of.