Growing trend to not pass on religion?

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After reading his perspective, I feel for this guy. I think he really means well. I used to think like this. Not quite exactly the same way but similar enough for me to understand. I would think most people could relate to this if they think back to their twenties, or even thirties. It’s a kind of rejection of your own experience without acknowledging that your experience is the thing that brought you to this ‘enlightenment’ of thinking. For me, it was thinking that my experience growing up was restrictive and not free enough, like walking a line instead of having freedom to move around.

But in my experience, many people eventually see that the approach that this man wants to take is more like walking a tightrope than walking on solid ground. After critically thinking about it, I myself, saw an ‘open approach’ to religion as being fraught with pitfalls and requiring a knowledge that I didn’t even come close to having. Back then, I can now say that my instincts about that were correct. I actually didn’t even know my own religion well enough to pass it on. But I started to learn, and wow, was I surprised at what I found.

I see the same thing in this man. He doesn’t know his own religion. That much is apparent just by reading this perspective piece. Besides the other non-starters in his writing…how can he possibly think that he will teach his kids about other religions when after 13 years of Catholic school and having a great Catholic family he doesn’t even know his own religion?

I could say more, but that’s enough.
 
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1Lord1Faith said:
when after 13 years of Catholic school and having a great Catholic family he doesn’t even know his own religion?
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If 13 years of Catholic school, a Catholic family, being and altar boy and church reader leaves a person without knowing their own religion, that says something about the methods of teaching or else the faith is too complicated.
 
Yes, the methods of teaching have gone from the extremes of ‘your going to hell for XYZ’ to ‘just be nice’, all within two generations. Many people have fallen through the gaps in the ensuing confusion.

I personally think the Church is still emerging from the Middle Ages as odd as that sounds, still unfolding VII, still not settled in how to teach.
 
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I was a bit like him once. I thought I could teach my kids about God, the Commandments, and how to live well. Then I realized I couldn’t do it on my own. I hope that he likewise comes to his senses.
 
I assure you that the faith is not “too complicated.” It is complex, as it represents the sum total of revelation of the infinite God to mankind. One may dive as deeply into the pool as they wish - never reaching the bottom, but may also wade at the shallow end. Some of the most holy men and women on this earth are also the most simple. Others are some of the most brilliant and insightful.

Consider the shepherd girl Bernadette Soubirous. Very little education, but the apparitions she was graced with have changed the world - mine included. Others such as Saint Teresa of Avila have been mystics of the highest order - possessing such a profound relationship with God that their ecstatic union with Him deprived them of sensory contact with this earth.

Christ did not found a Church that is either incomprehensible to an average person, or restrictive to the gifted.
 
po18guy said:
“too complicated.”
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I often feel Christian teaching needs to do more to appeal to those who long for a faith which is simple, natural, and intuitive. Christian doctrine does at many times seem to be “too complicated”, or at least a little over-cooked. Consider the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which is so subtle that most analogies you’ll commonly hear about it are wrong but only in the most nuanced ways.

The issue with the “simple, natural and intuitive” approach is that it runs very close to basic paganism. I think that’s why Wicca and Friends appeal so much to the young, who haven’t experienced enough of life to really acquire a taste for its complexities. They want something that appeals to them with the same immediacy of their iPhone interfaces. Christianity at times seems more like DOS.
 
“For a religion that placed such a premium on loving thy neighbor, it sure had a lot of restrictions on whom you were allowed to love.”

Uh, that kind of love is not for all your neighbors, dude.
 
KevinK said:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...-values/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.13e4271a9267
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Reception of the sacraments is not always fruitful.

Luke 16
27 He said, ‘Then I beg you, father, send him to my father’s house, 28 for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they too come to this place of torment.’ 29 But Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them.’ 30 He said, ‘Oh no, father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’ 31 Then Abraham said, ‘If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.’”
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This is the fruit of the “open mindedness” of relativism.

“Who am I to tell my child what to believe…”

They are, generally, oblivious to the hypocrisy of this statement, as they force relativism and “modernism” on their children from all sides. By avoiding teaching the faith, they leave them open to the evils of the cultural zeitgeist…
 
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C.Ray said:
I often feel Christian teaching needs to do more to appeal to those who long for a faith which is simple, natural, and intuitive.
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Actually, Christian teaching is all of those things. The problem is that “natural” runs up against people’s “natural” sex urges at which point the religion is perceived as “unnatural” rather than the sexual behavior being somehow wrong.

We had less problem with this in the eras when you were expected by society - not just by the church, but by society - to get married if you wanted to have sex with each other, and once married, you were expected to stay married until death and children were automatically part of the package.

Society now has promoted a different idea of what is “natural”, which is basically mating with a whole bunch of people while using artificial means to reduce or eliminate the risk of offspring. It might be somewhat “natural” from a pure animal point of view, but if we did everything from an animal POV we would also be killing off any tribe of humans who got in our way so we could take their resources (including their females if we thought they were attractive).
 
Tis_Bearself said:
It might be somewhat “natural” from a pure animal point of view
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Actually, from an purely animal point of view, this sort of behavior is even more unnatural than from the human perspective.

Animals mate for procreation. Period. (With the apparent exception of dolphins)

People who behave like sex is meant only for fun aren’t even acting animalistically, they are behaving like something less than animals.
 
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The problem is we got rid of so many of our beautiful traditions and rites and festivities that were all intermeshed with each other and the truths and mysteries of our faith. These are the things that inculcate the faith into the minds and hearts of the “simple” and become cherished family treasures that one wants to keep handing on as so many generations before did. The Church stripped these away (and those not forcibly taken away mostly dissolved without their basis) and then we wonder why no one wants to hand on the bare, disconnected, inconsistently-preached moralism that was left over.
 
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It’s natural to the extent that it’s natural for a man to want to mate with as many women as possible to procreate his genes. The idea is that the strongest/ smartest/ best specimens of male would be best able to do this, and in so doing would propagate the best genes for the survival of the species by impregnating many women, not just one. Obviously this gives rise to a social order where a whole lot of men might not get to mate/ propagate at all and where men will constantly be fighting over who gets to mate with/ impregnate women.

It’s not natural to use some artificial means to prevent the pregnancy, as the whole reason men would be doing all that mating would be to impregnate human females.
 
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I was about to say, “Yeah, it’s really frustrating-- being in RE, and trying to teach kids about their faith, except their faith isn’t really part of their daily life. It’s nice that people send their kids to Sunday School— but Catholicism isn’t just a couple of hours a week. It’s an entire worldview, and it affects your perception of your reason for existence and your place in space/time/the universe.”

And then I read the opening bits–
My children, a 3-year-girl and a 1-year-old boy, aren’t baptized.

Many people take issue with this parenting decision — especially the people I know from my days as a devout, practicing Catholic. Most of the judgment comes through passive-aggressive comments. Some folks, though, have no problem telling me to my face what a great disservice I’m doing my children. One woman actually told me my children would likely go to hell because of my choice. She didn’t say it maliciously. But she did say it with all the urgency one usually reserves for, say, letting an oblivious stranger in the street know they are about to get plowed over by a car they don’t see coming.

My mom is also concerned. Initially, she was downright combative about the whole baptism thing. “Aren’t you happy with the experience you had growing up? Don’t you want that for Emma?” she asked when I informed her my wife and I wouldn’t be raising our firstborn — or any future children — Catholic. Not only did I attend Catholic school for 13 years, from kindergarten straight through high school, I also immersed myself in all religious amenities such an upbringing afforded me. I was an altar boy and a church reader. I played the part of Jesus Christ during our grade school’s Easter play and developed a serious crush on the girl who played Mary Magdalene, just as I imagine the real JC must have done in his day. I even strongly considered going into the priesthood.
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Truly an intellectual and spiritual powerhouse… 😉
Gradually, however, I lost faith in my faith. There were too many unanswered questions, too many problematic absolutes, too much fearmongering and way too much hypocrisy. For a religion that placed such a premium on loving thy neighbor, it sure had a lot of restrictions on whom you were allowed to love. When the priest sex-abuse scandal broke — a scandal the scope of which we’re still learning about — I knew I’d never return.
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So, other people failing to practice the religion correctly equals “I shouldn’t be part of that religion, either.” Isn’t the whole thing “there are no 99 sheep who never strayed-- we’re all the lost sheep”? And @C.Ray very accurately pointed out love vs love. 😉

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This is the kind of article WaPo loves to run on Sunday. It makes all the professionals who are sitting home (or in their office) reading the news over coffee before they head out to brunch - church not being on the agenda at all - feel okay about their choices, while their Catholic mom is sitting back home in some suburb of some state praying that her son who used to be an altar boy comes back to the faith. (or Baptist Mom, or Jewish Mom, you get the idea.)

One day that mom will die, and Mr Non-religious guy will lose a job, get ill, have a loved one get ill, and then he might think about all this again. Any person who feels a need to either write or read such a long piece of drivel is already thinking about it. It may even be waking him up in the night.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
Any person who feels a need to either write or read such a long piece of drivel is already thinking about it.
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As a nonbeliever it is kinda funny. After falling away I was ok with my choice and didn’t give it much thought afterwards. I think the author gives it much thought mainly because those around him (his mom and others) make a big deal of it. Possibly he is trying to navigate a world of believers and help his children in the same.
 
I don’t think “believers” are hard to navigate unless you have an internal conflict. If you truly feel okay with what you’re doing, right or wrong, it’s a breeze. I was mostly nonpracticing and mortally sinning right and left for about 15 years, while my mother continued as a faithful Catholic and wished I’d return. I would have laughed at this guy’s article even then, like I routinely found most of the WaPo religion section laughable then. Perhaps I am displaying pride by thinking that, but Washington is full of people like this guy and that’s one aspect of the place I don’t miss at all.
 
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In my experience, believers can be hard to navigate. Some of the fundamentalist Baptist ones in my family have given me the cold shoulder for years. Here in CAF, I’ve seen people say that they have concerns about taking their kids to Thanksgiving or other family gatherings if their gay relative will be there with his partner.
 
If the believer* is a coworker or casual friend then you’re correct. If they are family, a romantic interest, et. then it becomes a careful balance for reasons beyond the scope of the OP. The art of pitching battles and disagreeing without offending.

*I saw “believer” in quotes. Just to clarify I use that term since not all denominations view each other as Christians.
 
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