We are not, as I've noted before, a religious family. Yes, I went to Catholic school, and I believed it all for a long time. I've even received four of the seven sacraments! But education, particularly history and science, along with war, poverty, hunger and all the crap done in the name of (G)od(s) has put me off the whole business.
As a natural consequence, J is being raised without religion. She hasn't been to church or Sunday School, and we don't even have a bible in our house. It amazes me, then, how often religion (and on the Oregon Coast that means Christianity) pops up in her little world. And watching her little brain try to make sense of it all is absolutely fascinating.
"God" is such an easy answer to pretty much all her questions. "Why is the sky blue?" "Why can't you touch a rainbow?" "How did I get inside your tummy?" But that's a cop out, so we spend a lot of time looking things up in the dictionary or on Google. And after you do that a few times, it becomes harder and harder not to answer, "That's just how God made it."
Because, for example:
J: Why does it rain all the time?
Me: The plants need water to grow and also? We live in Oregon.
J: How do plants drink water? They don't have mouths.
Me: They absorb it through their roots.
J: Like a straw?
Me: Yeah, kind of. But they need soil and sunlight, too.
J: Why?
Me: Well, there are nutrients--vitamins--in the soil, and the plant turns the sun's light energy into food.
J: Like the sun is the stove?
Me: Sort of. You could say that, I guess.
J: And the plant doesn't talk because it doesn't have a mouth?
Me: Yes. And it does't have a brain.
J: Why doesn't it have a brain?
Me: Only animals have brains.
J: Mammals are animals. I am an animal AND a mammal.
Me: Right. So you have a brain.
J: Why do I have a brain?
Etc., etc., etc.
How much easier would it have been to say the rain is God peeing? At any point along that path I could have said God and ended it. But then she'd end up...stupid.
My niece has declared herself, at 13, an atheist. That's fine, but her lack of any religious training worries my sister. Not on grounds of salvation, but because she feels that religion gives kids something safe to rebel against. And because the bible is an important cultural reference that her daughters don't know anything about. A friend of mine recently watched "The Bible" on the History Channel. She had also never been exposed to the bible. "It was really cool," she said of the miniseries. "They were great stories. It was like science fiction!"
I'm ambivalent about J's cultural ignorance of Christianity. Right now she still believes in fairy tales, so I'm not in a hurry to tell her more stories that she'll eventually realize were made up, however culturally significant they may be. After her no-cavities dentist visit last week, J got to pick a prize from the treasure box. She selected a pack of biblical "Go Fish" cards
I'm going to put aside the question of why our dentist had this, alongside friendship bracelets, plastic dinosaurs and mini slinkies. It's just not answerable. J was enthralled at having her own deck of cards. Playing them, however, was difficult. Since she can't read, she has to rely on the pictures. But she didn't know what they were. You really can't say, "Do you have a 'Jonah'?" or "Do you have a 'David'?" when she doesn't connect the names to the pictures, and she doesn't even know who these men are. (And they are all men, except for one card that has Adam and Eve).
In fact, looking at the "Noah" card, which shows a smiling old man with an ark full of happy animals, she asked if the grandpa were taking the animals to the circus. I told her that each card depicted a character from the bible. J then asked what the bible was, and I explained that it was a book of stories about God. "Like my purple book of fairy tales?" Yes, JUST like that.
By the way, J says that you can tell the cards are for "Go Fish" because each one has a fish on the back. A fish that looks like this:
Christmas and Easter are also fraught with traps for the
Easter's a super fun holiday because, really, it's all about death. J knows, at least superficially, that everything dies. We've also been working on the fact that people do not come back after they die. (Same with fish.) So I thought her question about whether God also died was a good one. No, I said, he doesn't die. What about Jesus? Well, yes and no, he died but he came back to life. What about Jesus' mom? Yeah, she died. In fact, she stayed dead AND there's no candy involved. To which sweet J replied that it wasn't fair that only the woman had to die. She unwittingly hit on one of my problems with religion.
But are we doing the right thing by keeping J away from religion entirely? G's parents are full-on anti-evolution, self-righteous bible thumpers. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. I've thought about Unitarianism, but that does still require some underlying belief in something. And I just hate church.
So what to do? "Some people believe..." is really kind of condescending. Knowing she can take a bible as literature class in 15 years doesn't help the here and now. Some of her friends are already telling her about Jesus, and asking why she doesn't go to church. I'm waiting for some little punk to tell her she's going to hell if she doesn't accept Jesus as her savior.
Ain't no hell hot enough for that shit.
