What do you tell an inquisitive child (hell, myths, church)

[SeekerSA]

Reflecting back on my earliest memories, I remember asking my mother at age 5-6, where do rainbows come from?

She sat me down with a kiddies bible and explained the Noah story.

Later on in high school I learned about refraction and dispersion and a whole lot of phun science stuff. Lo and behold I also learned that other things also make "rainbow" colours. We learned of the colour spectrum and the primary colours and how the eye works and that white light is a combination of all these pretty colours. We learned that grass is not really green but merely the reflection of certain frequencies of light while other colours are absorbed by the plant.

Wow was mom wrong....

The stories parents tell their kids regarding origins and why this, why that are mostly age appropriate lies and although deceptive, one cannot wonder how these traditions were handed down through the eons. The story of the stork was also told as you really cannot expect a young boy to understand the real mechanics behind copulation and reproduction.

I remember the first time I read about Adam that knew his wife and though doh! how could he not know his wife, did she surprise him????

I was the youngest kid so I never saw the baby bump belly of my mom. I had no personal frame of reference.

As it turned out, much of my early knowledge came from my older siblings that shared the gory details amidst giggles and closed doors.

So poof went the stork and the rainbow and many of these cute little tales.

People in my folks church would share how god spoke to them in the week, I had the kiddies bible with pics depicting moon or sun beams and a passage of some dude being spoken to by god and thought well this is how it happens. I had seen these sun beams and wondered why god was not speaking to me. So I posed the question;

"Mom, when is god going to speak to me?", the answer, "One day he will"

The sunbeams never seemed to shine on me and if they did, obviously I would not be aware as I was in the light. I was expecting an audible booming voice from the heavens as depicted in the KJV bible, it never happened.

The reason I share this, as kids, the mind is very impressionable and even an innocent kiddies bible art piece can make one connect non existent dots.

The older I got, the nastier this dude in the sky became, demanding all sorts of homages and sacrifices and rituals. My dad was pretty mean when I was a kid so the image of god was my biological father. My parents had spawned a kid too intelligent for their limited knowledge. Had they seen this potential and gone to the library to look for answers, perhaps I would be a renowned geologist today. I was always collecting rocks and looking under them. But no, they just passed onto me the stories from the "Big Book"

Before I write a book, I was 8 when my dad allowed me to drive his car for the first time and I pulled away w/o stalling and went up to 70mph and then stopped at his instruction and pulled over safely to allow him to take over. This was w/o one single lesson and merely me observing what he did with the peddles and gears. I had sat on hip lap while he was driving when I was smaller but of course he still had the wheel, I merely had the illusion of being in control.

By the time I was 16, I was given the choice of still attending church and I declined but the indoctrination had been cast in stone and years later I would fall for the con again.

Looking at some of the folk that still believe in myths as the real McCoy, I have to wonder how anyone can develop into adulthood and still take these things as fact. Some lies I guess are just more believable than others.

In my search for the real god, I was pained when I saw tragedy, a kid drowned while swimming, another kid taken by a crocodile (I grew up near the Zambezi river) a man crying out to die in hospital when I had malaria as a 5 year old (he had managed to explode one of those paraffin blow lamps and had 3rd degree burns over 70% of his body - he eventually died. His screams of agony and his crying made me cry) Where was god in all of this? Vague reasons were given and as a kid I accepted them.

I can imagine the first time a kid encountered death say of a grandfather or grandmother and the kid asked where is nana or oupa? What do you tell a 5 year old?

Folk invented a heaven, spirits and ghosts and the kid is told their grandparent has gone to a better place despite the continuous bawling of adults that told you this. You watch as the casket descends into the hole in the ground and listen to the words of the preacher "dust to dust, ashes to ashes..." flowers and rose petals and sand tossed in after the casket came to rest at the bottom. What does this all mean?

As time passes, we see some friends dying in accidents, some of them innocent victims of another drunk driver and the excuses just keep rolling in when you ask where was god. By now the heaven is a better place seems to be the par for the course answer. The drunk driver survives and serves a DUI term for manslaughter after he is patched up in hospital of course. Is this justice?

Still you look to find a rational explanation but there is none. You grow up and before you know it, you are telling the same lies to your kids.

This is how the myths of yore were propagated into modern society. As adults we should realise that heaven is mere hopeful thinking, most go with the flow as that is what the majority of folk do.

It takes serious effort and will power to reject these primitive concepts and accept your own mortality. My dismissal of the lies was a painful severage but now I am over it.

Life is no more than the roll of the dice whether you live long or short lives.

Apologetics are simply excuses for the god that was not/is not there.

Religion (which is derived form the archaic French word Relegare means bondage) and the trick of the church is to make money off you selling cosmic real estate w/o really answering any of these perplexing questions and keeping you in bondage to your fears of mortality and death.

In a nutshell, kiddie lies become adult "truths".

[RevelationWriter]

~ Jesus said, suffer the children to come unto Me.

Not bribe them...

[TRANSPONDER]

Or threaten them...but if they won't come without either....

[hljc]

By the mercies of the Lord ,...When a parent control a child and forbids the child from knowing God and the gospel and that child passes on early in life then the Lord Jesus will take that child to heaven were Jesus will teach that child and heaven will be The child's home ...... This vision is from Christians who the Lord Jesus brought visions of Heaven to Christians

[nana053]

I understand what you are getting at in terms of how the stories were perpetuated, but...

You tell an inquisitive trial the truth not Biblical stories.

The science behind rainbows is not hard to bring down to a child's level. Get a prism and show them how the light is refracted (you can use the words breaks up if you don't want to explain new vocabulary). Nowadays, you could also buy the Ipad app of Richard Dawkins book The Magic of Reality which has a game about rainbows, I think.

In terms of death, you *can* tell a religious story, but you can also explain that death is simply a part of life and everything dies. Believe it or not, even young childen know a bit about death. They have seen bugs die. They may have seen animals run over in the road. You explain that the person's body stopped working and that the person will not return. You don't use euphemisms like resting in peace or sleeping because that can scare the child into thinking that going to sleep will cause him to die. You can explain the illness or old age that caused the death and reassure him that it is unlikely that you, the parent, will die anytime soon. You can also talk about how the people we love are always in our memories and in our hearts. There are lots of good books about death for kids - some have a religious focus, but there are also books that do not focus on religious ideas.

Amazon.com: Lifetimes: A beautiful way to explain death to children (9780553340235): Bryan Mellonie: Books
Amazon.com: L. Klepzig's review of I Miss You: A First Look At Death

In terms of sex education, it starts right in the beginning. Give toddlers the correct words for their anatomy. They can learn penis and vagina and other words for their body parts. Then when they begin to ask questions, keep it on their level, but answer truthfully.

Sex education: Talking to toddlers and preschoolers about sex - MayoClinic.com

[SeekerSA]

Great Post Nana, I still luvs you too much

[BigCityDreamer]

Originally Posted by nana053

Sex education: Talking to toddlers and preschoolers about sex - MayoClinic.com

This is too much for me. I may go so far as teach my young child that their sex organs are called "private parts." But teach them that masturbation is normal activity?

That's getting into some moral issues.

[SuperSoul]

Originally Posted by BigCityDreamer

This is too much for me. I may go so far as teach my young child that their sex organs are called "private parts." But teach them that masturbation is normal activity?

That's getting into some moral issues.

It is normal.
Even babies, at some point discover their private.
I just tell my kids that if they want to touch their privates, fine, but they need to do it in the bathroom, in private.

I don't make a big deal about it. And I try to answer their questions as they come. I do have a book about how babies develop in the mother's womb that we read. And they laugh when I tell them about when they were in my womb - how they used to play with my organs inside like they were playing guitar (which felt so weird!) & seemed to be playing soccer inside my belly... & my tummy would stick out here & there.

[northsider]

Always tell a child the truth, for when they get older and can find it for themselves there's a danger they may believe that you brainwashed them into false beliefs.

[LargeKingCat]

My son asked me a year ago
"Did Jesus really come back from the dead?"
So we talked abot it. I told him no, people don't come back from the dead. But we talked about spirits, about how ancient people believed that dreams were vistiations from spirits, and so when peope who knew Jesus later on dreamed about him, they probably thought that he was alive and visitng them from the spirit world. We also talked about how stories evolve and change, and how people borrow from other myths and legends.
We talked about what really happened when the Romans executed someone. They were not taken down and given some miraculous 2 hour prep, funeral and burial, we talked about how the events in the biblical timeline are not probable, as no one could be buried after the sabbath, and it would have been impossible for Jesus to have been prepared and then buried in so short of a time. We talked about the possibility that he may not have been dead, that his body may have been stolen, or more likely, he was left up to rot like everyone else the Romans executed, an example made for everyone to see.....the whole "THis is what we do to criminals or anyone who incites riots or rebellions. take Note>"
SO coming back from the dead? Well, we know when the body dies, when the electrical impulese in the brain cease, so does life. If he was dead and came back, he would have been so brain damaged as to not even be able to walk. Most Biblical references are to spirit resurrection anyway, not bodily, and most are vague, written years later, or on at least one case, the "Spirit" is appearing to one with known mental illness or agendas, so we really do not have an accurate record in the Bible of what happened. We only have a record of what early Christinas Beleived or thought happened. .
Plue if he did, don;t we think that the tomb where he was buried would have become the center of all spirituality instantly? I mean if someone from this tomb came alive, then everyone would be "DYing to get in there" and it would become the center of religious culture, preserved for generations and decades to come. As it is, no one, not even archeologists, know where this "tomb" was...kind of odd, eh, that if something so miraculous happened, people would have no idea of the location?
We talked about how the Bible is not real, literal, true, but only myth, superstition and symbolism, and with that, we can take what we want from it. Some things in it are great, especially the "Love thy neighbor as thyself" Which sadly few Christians themselves even practice anymore, but it should not be seen as fact and nothing in it should be seen as perfect .
We have had many talks about life, science reason
Today my older son brought up the fact that one day in millions of years we humans will evolve into a different being. When the youngerr one asked why, I pointed out that we know that all life on the planet is evolutionary, and will continue to be so. We can even measure that now in mutations and changes in current organisms. That is not science fiction, that is science fact!
Leaves no room for the creation myth and the silly garden of eden story now does it?