Keeping the ‘Hell’ away from my kids
No God and no religion can survive ridicule. Mark Twain
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Meet my 9-year-old middleborn, Erin, a.k.a. “the B”:
Oh, she’d KILL me. Heh. Lemme try again:
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Yep, that’s the same kid — a radiant flower one moment and a complete bassoon the next. She’s a typical middle child, a pleaser and a peacemaker, a moralist and a goofbag. I adore her socks off, not least because I’m a middler (and therefore all those things) myself.
So my stomach sank yesterday when she came home from school with the news that her three best friends all agree she’s going to burn in hell.
Holy horseshit! I thought, mentally springing to the Bat Cave and firing up the Mach 5. Or whatever. I simply can’t bear to see my kids hurt, nor Becca, my wife. I just can’t take it. I have made Becca cry precisely three times in seventeen years, and it unhinges me so thoroughly that I will apologize for my very existence if only she will STOP.
Same with the kids. I’m not talking about fall-down-go-boom tears, now. Those mostly irritate me, since the child usually did something (shall we say) ill-advised just beforehand. But tears of genuine emotional pain — those are something else entirely. You know, like the tears that would result from the unanimous judgment of your three best friends that you are destined for the Lake of Fire.
And though all three kids’ wounded tears slay me, none are harder for me to take than the tears of the B when her heart’s been broken. I swear, the very first boyfriend to break her heart will live just long enough to see his own little cardiac balloon quivering in my outthrust fist.
(Sorry, that was massively heterosexist. Feel free to reread with “girlfriend…her own little cardiac balloon quivering etc.” See, I’m cool.)
So I knelt before the B to get the full story. “Sweetie, what’d they say that for?”
“They were talking about church and stuff, and they asked if I believe in God and go to church. And I said no, I don’t believe in God, and I don’t go to church. And then their eyes got really big and they said, ‘Oooh, you’re gonna burn in Hell.'”
I waited for the first teardrop to appear, flexing my hand in preparation for holding three quivering little hearts at once.
“I’m so sorry they said that, B. How did that make you feel?”
Instead of tears, she shrugged. “It was pretty mean. But also silly.”
I looked at her in amazement. It is silly, of course, a profoundly stupid and childish idea, but how did she come to that so directly? It took me years and years to shift Hell from terrifying to terrifying but unlikely to silly.
And then I remembered. Of course. She’s been inoculated.
If I had hidden the idea of Hell from my daughter all these years, protecting her from the very concept, the sudden invocation of the flames by her friends could have burned a fear into her that would take some serious undoing. But we’ve talked about religious ideas for years. I’ve always made my opinions clear, but I go to great lengths to let her know that other good people think differently. “Dad, did Jesus really come alive after he was dead?” “I don’t think he did, no. I think that’s just a made-up story to make people feel better about death. But talk to Grandma Barbara, I know she thinks it really happened. Then you can make up your own mind, and even change your mind back and forth about it a hundred times if you want.” That’s the usual approach.
But there are exceptions to this evenhanded treatment, and one of them is Hell. Hell gets no hearing from me. I will not allow my children to be terrorized by anyone with the sick fantasy of an afterlife of eternal punishment, especially one meted out for honest doubts. If ever there was a religious idea with human fingerprints all over it, Hell is it. So I’ve always told my children that Hell is not only fiction, it’s also…
That’s right. She was using my exact word. Silly.
Even if there is a God, I’ve told them repeatedly, he’s not going to care if you guess wrong about him. That sounds like a human king, not the all-wise creator of the universe. He might care about how good you are, or even respect your honest doubts more than the dishonest belief of people who are just trying to avoid Hell. But in any case, the idea that any god worth his salt would create a Hell to punish his children is just plain silly.
Just as we inoculate our kids against diseases by putting small amounts of the bad stuff into their arms to build resistance, we have to inoculate them against toxic ideas that can paralyze their abilities to think freely. Specifically invite fearless doubt and they can live without medieval ignorance and fear trailing them through their one and only life. Tell them about Hell, then don’t just ‘disagree’ with it: laugh it to smithereens.