One Hundred Ideas

I said I would favor my United Methodist leanings, and I think I have made good on that. This week, I provide a link to an atheist website. It is a lot of fun to read, especially if you have pre-teen and early teen kids. I’m sure it will get very interesting as the kids grow. I’ll point you to one of my favorite entries, but there are many other good things there, click around.

In the link, his daughter comes up with the idea that a world where many ideas are presented and freely discussed is a better than one where we all think alike. Not a bad idea. I was raised to think for myself, but never thought of it this way.

Many people turn to religion when they start to think about how to teach values to their kids. Unfortunately, they find a confusing array of choices, each with a confusing array or values that they attempt to teach. For some, finding a church that comes close to their values is pretty difficult. As a Sunday School teacher, I had to figure out just what I would choose, Matthew 25 or Leviticus?

In the end, I concluded we are not much further ahead on how to teach values than they were 2,000 years ago. There is no set of rules out there waiting to be discovered. There are plenty of good ideas. I am not ready to write a book on parenting, but on the site linked above, I found something that works for me as guideline when deciding what to teach a young person.

“If it is ever the case that teaching this system to children will mean that later in life they come to hold beliefs that, were they in fact to have had access to alternatives, they would most likely not have chosen for themselves, then it is morally wrong of whoever presumes to impose this system.”
Nicholas Humphrey, Oxford Amnesty Lecture, 1997