A secular answer: No, God is not talking to you. Your imaginary friend wasn’t really talking to you when you were six, and your imaginary friend isn’t really talking to you now. It only seems that way. Many people never grow out of the imaginary friend stage of life.
What’s New
Christian Nationalism (Reference Articles For Teachers)
This article is a good discussion background for why Christian Nationalism is unconstitutional and unscriptural.
For another important article on the topic, see: https://www.salon.com/2022/11/10/did-christian-nationalism-lose-in-the-midterms-sort-of–but-its-not-going-away/
How To Tell Your Family You Are An Atheist
New article from TIME:
- Studies from the Pew Research Center have highlighted a “rapidly growing” group dubbed the “nones,” because they don’t identify with a religion. Largely made up of young people who were raised in a faith but later left it, the “nones” are changing how religion is seen in the U.S. And while not every single “none” is an atheist, it’s clear that the younger generations are disregarding religion at rates never seen before, and that more Americans than ever are going to have to inform their families that they don’t share their faith. With a stigma against atheists that often paints us as Satan worshipers or even worse, that task can be daunting for some non-believers.
See full article here: https://time.com/6128721/tell-your-family-you-are-an-atheist/
Diwali will be a public school holiday in New York City starting in 2023
- The time has come to recognize over 200,000 New Yorkers of the Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh and Jain faiths who celebrate Diwali, the Festival of Lights,” Rajkumar, who introduced legislation to recognize Diwali, said in the press conference. She called Anniversary Day “an obscure and antiquated day,” as compared to Diwali, which is celebrated by a “growing number of New Yorkers.”
See: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/20/us/diwali-nyc-public-school-holiday-trnd-reaj
QUESTION: As children become more and more acquainted with the diversity of RELIGIOUS points of view on life, will the understanding grow that a particular religion is just one voice among many?
Girls Protesting The Hijab
On 16 September 2022, a 22-year-old Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini died in hospital in Tehran, Iran, under suspicious circumstances, due to police brutality according to witnesses.
The Guidance Patrol, the morality police of Iran’s Law Enforcement Command, arrested Amini for not wearing the hijab in accordance with government standards. Eyewitnesses, including women who were detained with Amini, said she was severely beaten. These assertions, in addition to leaked medical scans,led independent observers to believe Amini had had a cerebral hemorrhage or stroke.
Amini’s death resulted in a series of large-scale protests across the country which garnered international attention, including a statement from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, putting a focus on violence against women in the Islamic Republic of Iran. (Wiki)
Is It Important To Be Able To Explain Your Thinking?
You know, for instance, in math, you should be able to explain your thinking. So, it’s not enough to “know” 3X2=6, but you need to illustrate it, perhaps with manipulatives: you make groups of three with blocks, select two of those groups, and you get six total things.
Is it a problem that this child preacher can quote the bible but can’t explain what it means in his own words?
It’s amazing how often people can have a lot of knowledge/information about a topic without being wise about the topic. The ancient Greeks said philosophy is the love of wisdom.
Grooming Minds: Indoctrination vs Argumentation
- “Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.” (Aristotle)
Is difference between this above child and the more mild cases of religious upbringing of children we see one of degree, or of kind. Picture a child who is not vocal like this one, but holds similar or more mild conservative Christian views.
Here is a helpful analogy video on religious child grooming: inundating a child with just one kind of religion, excluding others and secularism:
BONUS: Thinking about logic and humor – have you ever noticed the connection between logical errors and humor? Picture a reductio ad absurdum: a method of proving the falsity of a premise by showing that its logical consequence is absurd or contradictory. So: “The Earth cannot be flat; otherwise, we would find people falling off the edge.” That people are not falling off the edge makes Flat Earth proponents false/wrong, seem silly, which is to say hilarious! Question: Is the video of the conservative Christian preacher child above in the first video (i) not something we should care about, (ii) horrific, (iii) hilarious, or (iv) profoundly true?
Secular Web Kids Tails: Darth Harley For A Time Such As This
“Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this. (Esther 4:14).”
As was usually come to pass at the end of the day, Darth Harley walked down the Angus Path, particularly pleasant and orange on a autumn eve such as this, and reflected on the day at school. His teacher had taught on “6 +1 Traits of good writing,” and specifically writing with Word Choice that reflected 5 senses and emotion words.
“Paint a picture in your readers’ minds,” she had said.
Angus Path, or more precisely Angus Trail, was a pleasant way that accompanied sparkling Golden Brook in Harley’s hometown. The Angus the trail had in mind was Angus Og MacDonald, an ancient Scottish leader who may have fought along the Templar Knights soldiers hundreds of years ago.
“What if it’s all true?” Harley’s imaginary friend “Daemon” asked as the two crunched auburn leaves along the dusty path.
“You mean like Jesus really was God’s son and accepting him gives you eternal life in blessedness?”
“Sure,” Daemon said, “or if any religion is actually right?”
Harley took a deep breath of the crisp autumn air and, being contrary as always, offered this:
“Do you know what the first thing the Abrahamic religions teach? It’s that when God created humans he made the caretakers of the world. And do you know what most people take away from these religions? They think they’re about the individual person and how they can be rewarded in this life and/or the next life. The problem is that if it is all about me, it’s hard to see how it’s all about taking care of the earth and its creatures. We may be authoring our own extinction with things like climate change by approaching life in such a way that personal self-realization and achievement is put first, and the world comes second, if at all.”
Daemon thought for a moment and said:
“You really see this in how we treat other creatures. There’s no real difference between cats, dogs, pigs, and chickens, and yet most people have no problem eating the latter, even though they love and cherish the former.”
The young Sith and his imaginary friend rambled along into the evening, a path that went down and down, round and round, as children’s author James Thurber described in The White Deer. Daemon wondered if perhaps the question isn’t whether religion was true or not, but rather even if it was true it was dangerous, and so perhaps was better left behind on the path of life.
Talking to Kids About Morality Without God
One thing you sometimes hear is that without God there could be no objective morality (the oughts), because if moral rules/principles don’t get their authority from God, where could their authority come from?
Of course, this way of thinking is wrong. Children from a very young age understand what being a “friend” means without God having anything to do with the knowledge. So, kids can extrapolate from this understanding of friendship principles like “you’re being a better friend if you play the game your friend wants to play than if you selfishly demand to play your favorite game” or “you are being a bad friend if you steal your friend’s toy car.”
Another important point here is that the key elements of morality such as altruism are present widely in the animal kingdom, and so aren’t simply implanted in humans as the unique and special pinnacle of God’s creation. One article on this topic makes such points as:
- “Since altruism, empathy, and gratitude all underpin moral behavior, finding them in our fellow mammals suggests that they run deep in our brain biology and did not come about because of moral reasoning or religion. In fact, probably the opposite is true—religion developed because of our innate capacities for caring.“
- “[I]n our attempts to study our animal brethren and avoid anthropomorphizing them we sometimes miss their very real similarities to us. According to the scientists Morell interviews, birds are capable of complex communication, elephants have long memories and strong social networks, and dolphins will act altruistically. These scientists are convinced that many higher order cognitive abilities are not limited to humans, and that we only need look a bit further to discover them in animals.“
see: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/morality_animals
ARTICLE: Finding Morality in Animals
Two new books explore research on animals to better understand the roots of human morality and challenge human specialness.
Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder
One of the traditional “proofs” of the existence of God is the beauty of the world. The claim is: surely as the beauty of a painting suggests an artist, so too does the beauty of a sunset suggest a divine artist.
One problem with this way of thinking is that beauty is a highly personal thing, not a feature of the world. Just as someone may not like the colors red and orange, and so not care for sunsets, someone who does not like the taste of wine may not care for a $1000.00 bottle of “fine wine.”
Singling out humans is an issue here too. Does a spider experience the beauty of the “fine painting?”