Raising atheists, part 1
A fairly typical question that we get on the show and in email can be boiled to, “How should I raise my kids?” As if we were qualified to answer that. Child bearing seems to be relatively uncommon in the atheist community at large. It probably has something to do with the fact that we’re not subject to that “be fruitful and multiply” directive, and we have no moral issues with birth control. While some people see that as a cause for panic — Oh no, the stupid people will out-breed us and Idiocracy will become a documentary! — I don’t worry about it that much. Intelligence these days is passed along more by memes than by genes, and you can have a far greater impact on the sum of human intelligence by donating your time as a teacher or a writer than by replicating your particular genetic sequence. Anyway, for those of us who do have kids, the usual questions I hear basically fall in a few categories: How can I raise them to be responsible, independent thinking adults? Should I introduce them to atheism early or do everything I can NOT to indoctrinate them? How do I handle my family and their peers when they inevitably want to expose my kids to the religions that I’ve been shielding them from? What do I do if the child’s other parent, or other family members, want to bring the kid up in their own religion, and/or bully me into not talking about atheism? This post addresses 1 and 2, the next post will address 3 and 4. When it comes right down to it, I don’t think anybody has the “right” answers when it comes to parenting, although some do better than others. A quick Amazon search for books with the keyword “parenting” yields 62,830 results, and many of them contradict each other. Read more
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