Raising Children Without the Concept of Sin

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Yeah, my cousins were raised without the concept of sin.
They’ve been very wounded by the world, and have inflicted their own share of wounds.
Now their own children have more than their fair share of pain and wounds.

Didn’t turn out quite as awesome as my aunt and uncle thought it would.
 
I can relate to the author and the concerns outlined. The concept of sin was far too negative for me to introduce into my child’s life. I don’t really believe in it at all. I believe there is a whole wide world of people who make all kinds of terrible mistakes and have terrible lack of judgement at times. I also believe many suffer with mental illness and their actions can be a reflection of that.

I raised my child to know the difference between right, wrong, and the importance of using her conscience. The concept of “sin” carries a lot of negativity with it, and I preferred to provide my child with a more positive approach to the world, including the unfortunate things that happen in it.

It has all turned out well, for both her and me. That is really all I can speak to.
 
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Clearly there was more going on with her childhood than just sin. In any event, she may not use the word “sin,” but she has clearly taught her child her own version of what is a sin or vice, even though it lacks a transcendant value. I laughed when she said her daughter didn’t do things out of obligation, after reading how she had been thoroughly indoctrinated by her mother. I wonder how this mother would react if her daughter eventually rebelled against her orthodoxy.
 
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We, my sister and I, were raised without the concept of sin, without religion. We were raised to obey our parents, and not do anything immoral, unethical, but we did not know the word sin, when we were little. Our mom was agnostic, our dad considered himself Catholic, but had really his own interpretation of religion, and he did not consider it important to teach us his form of religion, he had some type of Universalism. So we were brought up without religion, when we were little, we did not even know that our father believed in God, it just was never brought up. We did not have Bibles until Bibles were given to us by Jehovah’s Witnesses when I was 16, and they came to teach us about the Bible and their doctrines.
Well, so we were raised without the concept of sin, and we turned out OK, ethical people. So it was successful.
 
Reminds me of that quote from Richard Niebuhr:

‘A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.‘
 
I thought the same thing. She still sounds like a fundamentalist; she just traded her old dogmas for different ones.
 
No doubt her childhood tainted how she views religious folks as a doubt. She probably balks at the idea that a rational person can be religious.
 
I sincerely doubt that a 9-year-old as advanced as she’s portraying her kid to be doesn’t know the meaning of the word “sin”.

The only thing worse than some parent doing some extreme thing in raising their kids is when they write a big self-congratulatory article about it. I’ve been massively distrustful of such articles ever since I read Joyce Maynard’s book, as I used to read her mother Fredelle’s articles on raising her daughters (Joyce and her older sister) in Good Housekeeping all the time when I was a kid. Turns out the entire family was dysfunctional and Fredelle made up most of the stuff in the articles. Wouldn’t be surprised if these “journalists” are doing the same thing.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
Turns out the entire family was dysfunctional and Fredelle made up most of the stuff in the articles. Wouldn’t be surprised if these “journalists” are doing the same thing.
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I don’t see why we should assume that the author’s non-religious family is dysfunctional. And even if it is, I can’t imagine it being more dysfunctional than the fundamentalist one she grew up in.
 
No one said the author’s upbringing wasn’t dysfunctional also. People raised dysfunctionally when it comes to religion or anything else often do not have the skills to handle the particular area functionally when it comes to their children. As others have said, this mother is being just as extreme as a fundamentalist, but in the opposite direction.

In any event, it’s not a matter of “WE” should assume. The assumption is my opinion, to which I am entitled. You can have your own opinion, I am not forcing my view on you. My opinion is that there is likely more than meets the eye to this situation.
 
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I intend to raise my kids without the concept of “sickness.” Oh, sure, we make them eat veggies and sleep and exercise, but when they come down with something we just promote wellness. I don’t want my kids to grow up with a fear of microbes and cancers.
 
We are told that in the OT and NT, the Hebrew and Greek words translated into English as “sin” mean “missing the mark.” It carries the sense of sport (spear throwing or archery). A person is still shooting the arrow and aiming at something—they merely miss the center. That is, they fail to make an excellent shot. But they didn’t fail to shoot at all.

To me, this concept of sin makes enormous sense. The opening line to Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics reads, “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.” Couple this Aristotelian thought with the Augustinian belief that evil is a privation of the good—it’s not a real, substantive thing—evil is a lack, and you’re on to something. Precisely, evil is a lack of some good that should be there in an act or thought. But, it doesn’t follow that the entire act or thought has no goodness in it.

There is a sense in which I sympathize with the author too. I am not raising my kids with any other understanding of sin besides “missing the mark” and evil besides “privation of some good.” And they know their Aristotle—every action is thought to aim at some good. I think it is definitely a mistake to speak of people as wholly evil—or even of actions as positively evil. When you sin, you took the shot, you may have even hit the target—you just failed to hit the small red circle at the center. The Biblical “missing-the-mark,” Aristotle and Augustine all taken together can, I think, provide children with an understanding of sin that is not psychologically damaging to them—and that doesn’t make them feel like they are evil people when they sin.
 
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You can tell a child, Don’t do that or you’ll get spanked, because it’s “wrong.” Then, won’t they just wait till your back is turned to do it? When I was very young, my father would tell me not to do something because God wouldn’t like it. God is everywhere and sees everything we are doing, and he is unhappy when we do bad things. I think that explanation is within reach of most of the very young.

In my early years, God was a real presence. He wasn’t wrathful or scary, but he took note of when we did something wrong. I think a simple explanation like that is preferable. When a person grows up, they can decide if they want to continue to follow God, which we notice a lot of them don’t want to do. The good side of all this is that when they have left the Church for decades and made their mistakes in the world, and they want to return to their earlier values and to God, they have something to return to. Again, that’s their decision. But you can’t decide to “return” to something you never had.
 
Something I have noticed, is that kids who grow up in an extreme environment often go to the opposite extreme, thinking that the cure lies in doing the exact opposite.
Then they’re astonished that their grown up lives are just as messed up, and their kids are just as messed up as they were.
 
Or that their kids “rebel” by becoming the exact thing the parent was teaching against.
I sometimes think my father married an Irish Catholic and became Catholic partly because his father, who he didn’t get along with, didn’t like Catholics.
 
My parents raised me without the concept of sin, because they were not religious. So it was more like their authority as leverage for the veridity of what they were teaching me. When I felt the need for religion I went and read the Bible and went to confession and it was easy. No pressure, no need to hide this or that thing that I knew it was a sin. I don’t know if I would have been taught the same moral rules as God’s rules and fear of Hell if they would have haunted me and eventually make me turn away from religion. Mom said she had always felt too much stress and pressure when she believed in God as a kid and did not want to raise her own kids in that terror. It’s true that my parents had to somehow stay instead of God as an authority figure to make me stick with the rules as given laws until I was old enough to understand those rules make sense and help me even if they are frustrating sometimes.
I think it’s the pastoral decision of each parent what to teach. God inspires people how to help their kids He sent to them in mysterious wonderful ways.
 
Is this serious? Or is it tongue-in-cheek?

Disclosure–I work as a microbiologist in a hospital lab, and even if we don’t know about the little creatures, they know all about us and if we are where they are, they will find us!
 
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