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Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion – Dale McGowan |
Given the important part that religion plays in the way believers raise their children, it can be quite challenging for parents who are secularists, atheists or nonbelievers and wish to have the same experiences as their religious counterparts. Religion offers people a structure as well as a community, both of which are seemingly important in a child’s life. So how do nonbelievers ensure they bring up happy and healthy children? Neither is that easy nor is that impossible. There is some material that irreligious parents can refer to when they feel clueless about how to raise their children and Dale McGowan’s Parenting Beyond Belief is one such material.
In his book, McGowan celebrates the freedom that comes along with raising children without any kind of formal indoctrination, as he tells parents the most effective ways of bringing up freethinking children.
With information from doctors, educators, philosophers, psychologists as well as everyday parents, Parenting Beyond Belief informs readers about several sensitive topics that are necessary for discussion while bringing up children.
With as many as seven million irreligious parents in the United States trying to bring up children in nonreligious households, McGowan thought somebody had to offer a helping hand to those that got stuck at some point. Thus he wrote this rather informative and helpful book for nonreligious parents. In Parenting Beyond Belief, you will come across contributions from Dan Barker, Penn Jillette, Julia Sweeney, Richard Dawkins among many other outspoken freethinkers. So get yourself a copy of this book and learn how it is no more difficult bringing up a freethinking child as it is not bringing up any other.
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I think the overall observation between the so-called believer and their non-believing counterparts is that there's some mysterious thing at work that favors one but not the other.
Really? Man's stupidity never fails to make me sad I'm one of its species.
The rules are universal. Do not hurt me and I won't hurt you. You help me and I will help you. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is not rocket surgery.
I get that the world was at one time a cauldron of hate towards so-called godless people. If they were godless then they were siding with the evils that are otherwise in conflict with god-fearing. This is no longer the case.
I raised my kids in a secular environment by simply telling them all rules of society were written by the hand of man with the solitary goal of creating a cohesive society and sense of community. Then I told them that man, who has historically shown to be quite routinely capable of creating gods at every convenient moment, reassigned those rules as the (wise, benevolent, yada yada) work of the gods. Eventually, the idea of pleasing multiple gods became unfashionable and was devolved down to one. History writes a colorful accounting of all the silliness, pageantry, blood-letting and divisiveness in the timeline of cultures sporting gods and religions. The main idea is there are people of faith and people of fact. The problem with people of faith is they teach their faith as fact (indoctrination) and that is a fraud and deception I was not going to perpetrate upon my own children like it was perpetrated upon me.
My parents did the best they could but they were people of faith. Not giving me the option of choice was a failing on their part. They could just as easily sorted out the facts for me as I did for my own children. My father actually made the statement that without religious training people would have no moral or ethical code to live by. What a dunce. That code he spoke of was written by man, not some metaphysical image he let float around in his head as an omniscient being. He truly was a brainwashed person. My mother was worse. Heck, why not? The Jesus story was a good one and something any sensible person would want to be true, right? Right. Dream on.
The problem with the facts is that people need to be fearful of something other than themselves - like a god - with consequences for not abiding by those rules. So, having a god around kept everyone in line and those who strayed, well, we had measures that took care of them now didn't we?
People don't need to have a god around anymore. We have civil laws representing that moral and ethical code mentioned above. Those civil laws were in effect over the centuries as well but now we have certain sensibilities secularizing the code and distinguishing it as a man-fact rather than a god-fantasy.
Just tell the kids the story of man's propensity for creating gods, the history of it's presence amongst men and let them decide on their own what to believe.