My wife and I are best friends, among other things. The few areas of disagreement are small, and that does simplify things. In terms of religion, I consider myself an atheist, but not a militant one insofar as I am not interested in converting others to my views. My wife concedes the possibility of a deity or something, call it what you will, but certainly has an aversion to organized religion.
After considerable discussion back in the day, we raised our daughters without any "churching." You may wonder, if you have not tried this yourself, if it is possible to raise your kids with a sense of morality without religion. In our experience, yup it is. Our daughters are compassionate without being naive, and intellectually curious without being accepting of nonsense. In terms of sexual morality, our experience is that this is not totally dependent on religion either. We raised them without an insistence on chastity until marriage, as that is pretty rare these days. Yet they strongly oppose promiscuity and the cheapening of relationships that accompanies casual hookups in current culture.
All this is not to say that their lives will be trouble free in the religion area. Hey, do you know anybody who can claim that? There is this issue of peer pressure and getting along in society. Our daughters seem to use their judgement well there- our youngest has mastered the head nod without saying anything, the change of subject, and other strategies of avoidance. They both will argue a point when confronted with religious intolerance- and I think that is proper. But they also generally keep their mouths shut on the topic of atheism or agnosticism when religious people are around, and that seems wise to me rather than cowardly. It seems civil to me, the habit of avoiding religious discussions with those whose minds will not thereby ever be changed.
The thing that worries me is the question of marriage. I visualize our daughters having to struggle or negotiate religion in their future married situations, should their husbands be more in the religion mode. How to raise the kids? What to tell the mother in law? Let's face it, religion is up there with money and poltics in terms of couple stress. I have to sort of laugh at myself on this one. Just think how many millions of parents out there are terrified that their kids will marry someone of the WRONG religion, or marry a pagan. And here I am worried that ours will marry religious folk. It's a funny world.
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Comments: 17
As far as my son to be honest this isn't something he and I have talked about. He also at the tender age of 9 shows great compassion and tolerance for his fellow man. I had my best friends mom watch over their fall break and my friend's youngest was pulling and yanking my son around by his shirt and my friends mom said to me one time Ethan must have the patience of Job. He knows it isn't good to lie, steal, or intentionally hurt another's feelings. He's a little young yet for the sex talk and when a good time to start is. If I have my way it'll be after he's 50 whether he's married or not!
Best of luck to your.
Mine are turning out pretty well so far.
They have turned out to be sane, moral and kind people.
If their partners should ever want a chuchgoer as a partner, then they've chosen badly!
They, like us, keep our religious views private. That is a common thing in New England. Despite the numerous churches in every small New England town, nobody really speaks of their religious beliefs. I grew up not even knowing which churches my friends' families belonged to and what they believed. New Englanders respect privacy and consider your religious beliefs to be a private affair into which they do not pry. They tend to judge people by how they act, their compassion, their friendliness, their ability to help others in the community, their sense of humor.
I think we'd all be better off if nobody knew anything about anybody else's religious beliefs, but just appraised them on their humanity.
The biggest reason for doing right is still to be able to look one's self in the mirror each morning and have respect for the person they see! Ethics are an obligation to the human race and need to be understood in relation to how the ethics of others can effect each of us, directly or indirectly. Those two factors are real, demonstratable and easy to understand compared to somethings that someone, somewhere, sometime wrote in a book and others have expounded on and promulgated. Religion requires faith and its morals are based on faith so the religion, to be effective, must come first, then the faith and finally the moral beliefs.
Religious morals, for the most part, are identical to human ethics and morals. They don't really diverge until you get into certain areas of social concepts.
As for intolerance, I've seen it in many situations and religious beliefs were cause for a minority of them. Thank God in this country, your religion or lack of doesn't rate killing over.
Your daughters will do just fine. They will just have to manage the questions according to their own beliefs. In many ways, they will be free to choose for themselves which is much healthier than living one's life in a religion only to discover that the religion wasn't a good fit.