One-Hour Catholics

I was lucky enough to be raised by a pair of one-hour Catholics. We went to church on Sunday, but no one felt the need to discuss why. When it came time to debate the matter, my parents had little stomach for argument and I was allowed to think whatever I wanted to think. My adolescent challenges to my mother's and father's belief systems were met with half-hearted defenses. Subsequently, I lost the faith as easily as one might lose a key when their key-ring rusts through and snaps in their pocket. I hardly noticed the event. It was not a momentous occasion for me.

I agree with Shaw. If you teach your child religion, teach them not to take it too seriously. Faith is but a first step on the road to fanaticism. By nature, all religions are superstitious and intolerant; two patterns of thought all parents should actively seek to prevent their children from falling into. Teach your child to think for themselves and to create a system of beliefs based upon their own thoughts and observations. Encourage them to investigate questions that interest them and to hold the answers they find gingerly and without dogma. Honesty and humility are more important than comfortable, conventional piety.

People subscribe to a religion -- and to religion in general -- for a number of reasons. Sense of community. Love of ritual. Moral certitude. These are all valid reasons for individual faith, but their extreme subjectivity render each less than universal in scope or appeal. For someone objectively seeking the truth, more is required. A systematic program of pragmatic personal study is of infinitely more value than communal history, family tradition, or respect for one's elders. It has been my experience that the people who hold religion most in regard are those who have thought about it the least.

I take my current non-belief far more seriously than I ever took the lukewarm faith of my youth. And this has as much to do with education and self-examination as it does with age and maturity level. When confronted with hardship or ill-luck, I turn to science or logic for comfort or help. The idea of religion as a resource or God as an explanation for that which is unknown has never appealed to me much. I don't pray nor do I desire to be prayed for. I fear intellectual dishonesty more than the wrath of a distant deity. For all of this I thank my parents; not so much for what I was taught, but for what I was allowed to learn on my own.