Religion’s a joke to my kids–so, have I done something wrong?

When she came around the corner in her pink pajamas, I knew she wanted to chat.  It’s Saturday, and mom isn’t rushing off to work, isn’t grading papers, isn’t busy!

“Can I help make breakfast?”  No way could I say no to that.  “Hey mom, guess what?  I have a new God that I pray to.”

“Really?”  Formerly, it was the God Poseidon.  She loved Poseidon, and swore he was the only God for her.  But I wanted to know what this new God had over him, so I played the game.  “Which God is it? Jesus?  Mohammad?”

“No.  It’s peanuts.  I pray to the peanut God!”

“There is no peanut God.”  I said.  At this point, my husband had to defend his daughter’s right to worship Sir Peanut.

“You don’t know that.  She has a Peanut God, so he must exist.”

“That’s right,” she said.  “My Peanut God is wonderful, and he smells great!”

I had the girls disappear for a minute so that we could have a grown-up chat.  I told my hubby that  he was making a farce out of faith.  Our job, I told him, was to give them a chance to choose their faith, not make religion seem like a game.

“But that’s not what we’re doing,” he complained.  “We are allowing them to choose how they interact with faith; we’ve taken them to church–they didn’t stay.  We tell them that we’ll love them no matter their choice–so they create ridiculous choices.  Religion seems like a game to them because they equate it with Santa Clause and the tooth fairy; we didn’t tell them to do that.  We allowed them freedom, and they didn’t take it seriously.  We didn’t do anything wrong.”

And I suppose he was right.

Had we been in my childhood home, and I said I was ready to worship the Peanut God, I might have been smacked somewhere, told to ask

Jesus isn't something to smirk about, right?

God for forgiveness, and then forced to attend church to repent.  In our home, we say “Good for you.  Why did you choose such a ‘unique’ God?  We love you no matter what God you choose.”

But I have the guilt that comes with being raised in a faith.   Should I tell  my kiddos that religion is  a serious subject because that’s how most people see it?  They know that a comment like that in front of, say, the grandparents, is inappropriate–the grandparents are ‘faithful’ people.  But is making a joke of religion bad no matter when you do it?

Ok Christians, you can read the Bible; but can you analyze it?

Why some one would want to listen to the Bible being read aloud for FIVE days straight is beyond me; I prefer to read the Good Book snuggled up in bed, or sitting on the couch with some coffee.

But this is America, and in America reading the Bible aloud is not grounds for being jailed.  Nor does reading the Bible constitute a public disturbance–unless you decide to do so naked, pissy drunk, or in a manner that is otherwise socially unacceptable.

So why is a small town in Stuart city Florida “raising Cain” over their 5-day Bible read-a-thon?  The article by Joe Kovacs on Worldnet Daily might have the answer.  He quotes Spirit of Prophecy Ministries’ Donna Healton as saying “Here we are on government property, and we have the Ten Commandments right there in front of the pulpit.”  Healton organized the event and hopes that it will go statewide.

My guess is that by reading the Bible at a public park, somehow the message that God is being “put back where he belongs” is being taken away from the marathon event.  In truth, I could stand and read from the Satanic Verses, or Pagans for Dummies at my local park and my First Amendment Right protects me just the same; it’s no big deal.

Reading the Bible in a space that your organization reserved doesn’t place God anywhere he wasn’t already.

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The real question

So if dozens of Christians will be reading the Bible, will they be thinking about the words they are uttering, too?  Let’s hope so.

Could you imagine reading 1 Tim.2:11-12″Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence” and not thinking, wait a minute, what did that say?

Or how about the lovely James 4:4 “the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.”  WTF?

I could go on.  The truth is that reading the Bible isn’t the problem–it’s the start of the solution.

Like it or not, the Bible needs a 21st-century update. First, we need to read the Bible, and then we need to THINK about what we read.  That’s what we want our children to do when they come across a philosophical text.  Read it.  Think about it, and square it with our personal value system.  Yes, that would take away from the sanctity of the Bible, but what’s sacred about misogyny, anti-semitism, or slavery?

All of those things are in the Bible.

What’s the point in reading the Bible (a beautiful piece of literature, BTW ) from cover to cover when you’re just as Biblically-illiterate when you finish reading Revelations as you were when you started reading Genesis five days ago?

Just a thought.

I want my girls to believe in miracles, I think…..

So we’re in the living room watching X-Men II.  My youngest forgot that Wolverine was shot dead by the police officer at Iceman’s house.  As Wolverine begins to heal and opens his eyes, she gasps.

“It’s a miracle!”

“Yea, it’s a movie,” her older sister says, “miracles aren’t real.”

The devil’s advocate inside of me screams “challenge her!”

“You don’t believe in miracles?” I say.

“No.  People don’t get shot in the head and heal up and walk.”

“Well yea, ok.”  I say.  It was so fun!  I wanted to stretch her logic as far as she was willing to go.  “What about when a plane crashes, a bad crash, and only 2 people survive.  Isn’t that a miracle?”

At this point, my hubby is intrigued.   He swings his chair around and perks up his ears.  She glances at him, smirks, and starts talking:

“No.  That’s not a miracle.  That’s good luck.  A miracle is something that could never happen–and then it happens!”

“Do you believe in miracles?” my husband asks me.

“Well yea.  Some times the probability is low, but a woman tops over a car and then she could never do it again, just that once, to save her baby.  That’s miraculous, don’t you think?”

At this point, the youngest pauses the T.V.  She could care less about anything but seeing the part in X-Men II where Siren is hollering as the snipers start begin shooting the kiddos with tranquilizers–what a great family show, eh?

“Can I rewind the movie while you guys are talking?” she asks in her  shut up people tone.

“Ok, sorry.  We’ll talk about it another time.” I say and all is well.

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But the entire time I stared at the tube, I thought about our conversation.  Did I believe in miracles?  I want my girls to avoid being scammed by the treacherous of the world; how could they do that if their not rooted in strong logic?

And if I believed in miracles, in any form, did that mean that the miracles associated with faith COULD be true?

I figured I throw the question out the world, and see what came back!

I certainly don’t believe that it’s probable for a man (like, say Jesus), to rise from the dead three days after he was buried.  That simply defies all that we know to be true.  And I certainly don’t believe that it’s probable for a man (like, say Muhammad) to fly on a winged horse.  But I do believe that the improbable happens: that’s why a probability of it’s occurrence exists.

Now the final question of how we identify those events is a whole other issue.  Do we term it  a miracle, do we say it is highly improbable, or do we just say damn, you got lucky?——> and does it matter what we call experiences if all the words mean the same thing?