I don't have kids and don't want kids, but parenting and schoolteaching are two very interesting things for me to observe.
I am the biological son of a mall Santa. I was never taught to believe in Santa or any of that. My biological father had a stroke, with severe mental impairment, when I was 6, and died when I was 14. I don't remember those extremely early years, so I'm not sure how he handled the God question. As far as God, my then widowed mother hired a babysitter at one point (a family) that took me to church at a YMCA.
Then, I started coming home eventually with "some weird ideas". The next sitter was a Unitarian Universalist, and I took to that really, really well, but then abandoned it in my mid-20's due to my own political journey, plus, well, atheism.
If I were to have kids, I'd want to be as brutally honest as I could about the facts of life, starting with never imbuing him/her/them with belief in God, Jesus, Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and whatever else. But I would need a whole heck of a lot of help with this from my wife. And that scares me, because marriage scares me.
I am the biological son of a mall Santa. I was never taught to believe in Santa or any of that. My biological father had a stroke, with severe mental impairment, when I was 6, and died when I was 14. I don't remember those extremely early years, so I'm not sure how he handled the God question. As far as God, my then widowed mother hired a babysitter at one point (a family) that took me to church at a YMCA.
Then, I started coming home eventually with "some weird ideas". The next sitter was a Unitarian Universalist, and I took to that really, really well, but then abandoned it in my mid-20's due to my own political journey, plus, well, atheism.
If I were to have kids, I'd want to be as brutally honest as I could about the facts of life, starting with never imbuing him/her/them with belief in God, Jesus, Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and whatever else. But I would need a whole heck of a lot of help with this from my wife. And that scares me, because marriage scares me.
"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan
