Further information and ants

So the link for my last post didn't work but I liked this guys reasoning so much that I figured I'd just post his rules and reasoning and get it further out there on the web. Also, I apparently have ants somewhere - I keep seeing a few everytime I sit down at the desk here and it's freaking me out, cause I don't know why. There appears to be no ant colony and no gross food or anything to keep them here...just an ant or two every time I sit down. Weird.

Four Reasons (According to Dale McGowan) that religious literacy (knowledge OF religion as opposed to belief IN it) is crucial:

1. To Understand the World
A huge percentage of the news includes a religious component. Add the fact that 90 percent of our fellow humans express themselves through religion and it becomes clear that ignorance of religion cuts our children off from understanding what is happening in the world around them - and why.

2. To Be Empowered
In the U.S. Presidential election of 2004, candidate Howard Dean identified Job as his favorite book of the New Testament. That Job is actually in the Old Testament was a trivial thing to most of us, but to a huge whack of the religious electorate, Dean had revealed a forehead-smacking level of ignorance about the central narrative to their lives. For those people, Dean was instantly discounted, irrelevant. Because we want our kids' voices heard in the many issues with a religious component, it's important for them to have knowledge of that component.

3. To make an informed decision.
I really, truly, genuinely want my kids to make up their own minds about religion, and I trust them to do so. Any nonreligious parent who boasts of a willingness to allow their kids to make their own choices but never exposes them to religion or religious ideas is being dishonest. For kids to make a truly informed judgement about it, they must have access to it.

4. To avoid the "teen epiphany."
Here's the big one. Struggles with identity, confidence, and countless other issues are a given part of the teen years. Sometimes these struggles generate a genuine personal crisis, at which point religious peers often pose a single question: "Don't you know about Jesus?" if your child says," No," the peer will come back incredulously with, "YOU don't know Jesus? Omigosh, JESUS IS THE ANSWER!" Boom, we have an emotional hijacking. And such hijackings don't end up in moderate Methodism. This is the moment when nonreligious teens fly all the way across the spectrum to evangelical fundamentalism.

A little knowledge about religion allows the teen to say, "Yeah, I know about Jesus"- and to know that reliable answers to personal problems are better found elsewhere.

So should you take your kids to a mainstream, bible-believing church? Hardly. They shouldn't get to age 18 without seeing the inside of a church, or you risk creating forbidden fruit. Take them once in awhile just to see what it's all about and to see there's no magical land of unicorns and fairies behind those doors. But know that churchgoing generally has squat to do with religious literacy. In Religious Literacy: What every American Needs to Know and Doesn't, Stephen Prothero points out that faithfully churchgoing Americans are incredibly ignorant of even the most basic tenets of their own belief systems, not to mention others. Europeans, on the other hand, are religiously knowledgeable AND rarely darken the door of a church.

Coincidence? I don't think so. Most European countries have mandated religious education and decidedly secular populations. Unless they attend a UU or Ethical Society, U.S. kids have almost no religious education. Faith is most easily sustained in ignorance. Learning about religion leads to THINKING about religion - and you know what happens then.

Mainstream churchgoing also exposes kids to a single religious perspective. That's not literacy - in fact, it usually amounts to indoctrination.

So how do you get religiously-literate kids?
I'll do these separately, so wait for the rest on other days and posts.

1. Talk, talk, talk.
All literacy begins with oral language. Toss tidbits of religious knowledge into your everyday conversations. If you drive by a mosque and your 4-year old points out the pretty gold dome, take the opportunity: "Isn't that pretty? It's a kind of church called a mosque. People who go there pray five times every day and they all face a city far away when they do it." No need to get into the five pillars of Islam. A few months later, you see a woman on the street wearing a hijab and connect it to previous knowledge: "Remember the mosque, the church with the gold dome? That's what some people wear who go to that church."

As kids mature, include more complex information - good, bad, and ugly. No discussion of Martin Luther King, Jr. is complete without noting that he was a Baptist minister, and that his religion was important to him. You can't grasp 9/11 without understanding Islamic afterlife beliefs. And the founding of our country is reframed by noting that the majority of the founders were religious skeptics of one stripe or another. Talk about the religious components of events in the news, from the stem cell debate to global warming to terrorism to nonviolence advocacy.

Hope you enjoyed his ideas - the link is on my blog for the entire post, if you don't want to wait. Like I said before, it's geared from a humanist perspective. But I still think the ideas are interesting for everyone.