I don’t think I can ever let my parents know I’m an atheist and with that seems to go my chance of having kids.
Which got me curious: can any irreligious people on here who have kids while having religious parents share what thats like?
Would love to hear your stories or thoughts on this in general.
Just to add a view from someone living in a progressive-ish country:
Religion and differences of religion have never played a big part in my relations with anyone, nor am I aware it has affected anyone else towards me. There are very few fundamentalists here, so nobody seems to care all that much what you believe or don’t believe.
It’s strange that someone would worry about this. I’m agnostic rather than atheist, but most of my family are very deeply into religion. And my partner is priest by profession. Never has that played a role in our relations, and we do very openly talk about all this occasionally too. They are not trying to convert me, and I’m not trying to convert them. And if nobody wants to convert anyone, there’s very little friction. All it takes is some understanding and empathy, and probably the humility to accept that any of us might be wrong, even one themselves. So nobody’s preaching to anyone, yet we can talk about these things very smoothly and openly if need be, like in regards to children and upbringing etc.
Disagreeing is healthy. Talking is healthy. Getting offended is not. Neither is trying to force anyone into anything, or even worse, unwarrantedly expecting something from someone.
So religion has played exactly zero part in this or anything else at least in my personal relations, or those who I know. I don’t think religion has anything to do with children either. Upbringing can be colorful and include everyone’s opinions and views, and the unique stuff just requires some open conversation and compromises from all parties, which is true for everything in life anyway.
But your partner is a priest, so if you had children, would your partner want to raise them religious? And how would you feel about that?
Yeah this was the actual question op raised and this doesn’t seem to answer that
I think the main thing I might have problems conveying is I don’t see it as a binary. Neither is she. It’s not that they either get a religious upbringing or one without religion. There’s plenty of scale between the two ends and I don’t really feel any reason to try and go either way too deeply. Or restrict it to any one religion or philosophy. There can be many religions and different flavors of void of religions. Kids have a lot of questions and it’s fairly fun to describe the world to them, and that is never going to work just from one point of view. The world is vast and filled with many cultures and ways of perceiving the world and humanity, and it’d be a disservice to them if we tried to do black and white there; on or off. I think we can only so our best to give as honest a view of the world we can, with all it’s colors and shades of gray, and hope that some of it gives heureka moments or some illumination at least. It’s never possible to give an objective account or be detailed with all the different aspects and layers and whatnot, since at least me myself; I’m really not that smart honestly. All I can offer is my very best and hope it gives tools to process and understand this world. It probably won’t, as none of it did for me, probably not for anyone, but it’d be worse if we didn’t even attempt and just went with the current norms and limited, culturally claustrophobic takes that’d only serve to unknowingly shoving them down a singular pipeline that’ll only lead to identity problems later down the line.
Thanks for sharing! I find what you have is really interesting.
Something I’m very curious about is how your wife is alright with the risk of them not choosing to be Christian and getting an eternity in hell? Is she a Christian universalist?