A question for atheists

[xangelusx]

I recently answered a similar set of questions that asked on Formspring. Here was my reply:

Are you raising your kids as athesist? If so how do you explain religious holidays like Christmas and Easter to them? How do they answer questions about their lack of religion?

First, let me preface this by saying that I don't believe anyone has the right to raise their kids _as_ anything. There's no such thing as a Republican baby, and one should be very careful about labeling a child as Muslim, Christian, etc. I myself am very careful to say that I'm raising my children in an atheist home, just as I say I'm raising them in a vegetarian home. I am an atheist, my children are simply the children of an atheist. Whether or not they choose to identify as atheist (or vegetarian for that matter) when they are older is up to them.

And not to get too far off on a tangent, but one of my biggest gripes with religion is that each practice blatantly targets children with their message. It's indoctrination at the earliest levels without any counter arguments or balance. Children are taught to listen to adults because they have the answers, so when an adult tells a child that there's a heaven and a hell and a god and a devil the child takes it as "fact" unquestioningly. After a decade and a half of that sort of indoctrination it's very difficult to slip into a mindset of objective reasoning. No wonder parents have a hard time accepting when children leave "their" faith. But that's just it - it was never their childrens' faith, just theirs.

Now, back to your questions.

We don't hide from Christmas for many reasons. For starters, Christmas has pre-Christianity origins as a celebration of natural events. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas#P...background) In fact, modern day Christmas has very little to do with the Christian holiday other than being its namesake. Christmas trees, Santa Clause, and plenty of other yuletide traditions (not to mention the deluge of commercialism and consumerism) have no religious origins. (See http://atheism.about.com/od/christmashol...itions.htm for more examples.) Personally, we celebrate Christmas because it's a familiar tradition for my wife and me, and because we enjoy celebrating it with our families and our children. We just don't celebrate the religious components.

As for Easter, one could easily argue that this is very much a Christian holiday with no pagan origins. However, once again modern culture has added it's own traditions that have no religious origins - namely easter bunnies, eggs and "Peeps", those sugar coated marshmallow harbingers of cavities. A secular observer could then easily argue that they celebrate Easter as a festival of new life, renewal, Spring, etc. Personally, I prefer to celebrate Spring as it arrives and not on any particular Sunday in April. My children do however get Easter baskets from their grandparents, and I'm OK with that as long as they pay the obligatory Dad Tax of a few jelly beans and chocolate.

On to your last question.

My kids don't have a lack of religion, at least not as far as they are concerned. They've been raised without religion and without a belief in any god(s). They aren't "missing" anything.

To be clear, we don't hide religion from our children. We talk openly about it with them when it comes up, and we explain as best as we can given their ages. (Honestly, religion is such an abstract concept that it's nearly impossible to explain objectively to a five year old.) In regards to biblical figures and stories, we give them the same weight that we give to Greek mythology and other stories. When they get older, it will be important for us to help them understand the concept of religion and the practices of some of the major sects, not just so they can make their own decisions about it when the time comes but also because it's culturally relevant and they need to understand how it affects various elements of society.

If you'd like more information on raising secular families, I recommend visiting http://parentingbeyondbelief.com/. You're also welcome to ask me more questions.