Raising Moral Kids without Gods: The Wisdom Commons

[moobu2]

From debunkingchristianity.com

As parents, we want our children to be happy. We want them to achieve great things. But we also want them to be good people. We want to be as proud of their kindness, generosity and integrity as we are of their achievements. How do we help them get there?

Moral development

Each religion teaches that it is the source of morality. Christians perceive themselves as "a light on the hill" without which the world would fall into moral anarchy. As a freethinker, I have had people ask -- how can you raise good children without religion?

In one sense, this question is almost silly. Research shows us that healthy human children come into the world primed to become moral members of society, just like they come into the world primed to acquire language. Moral emotions, such as empathy, shame and guilt, begin to show their presence during the toddler years regardless of a child's cultural or religious context. A toddler may pat an injured peer, or offer a grubby toy to an adult who is distressed. A preschooler may hide in the closet to cover a transgression. As a child learns to think, moral emotions are joined by moral reasoning. By age 5 or 6, they can argue long and loud about fairness.

And yet, kids don’t learn to be decent human beings without adult input any more than they learn to communicate without adult input. For a child to grow into an honest adult, for example, we have to model honesty, expect it and explicitly teach it. Traditionally, religious institutions are the place where we talk explicitly about moral concerns and ideas. Despite frequent hypocrisy, churches legitimate the idea that there is such a thing as moral community, and that it matters. So for parents who are not church goers, the question of where and how to have these conversations with our children is real.

Virtue and morality

One way to think about moral development is that bad behavior is simply the absence of virtue. When a child hurts another, it may be that their internal sense of kindness, patience or self-control has fallen short. When they sneak or steal, it means their internal sense of honesty wasn’t as strong as the external temptation.

etc... etc... etc...

[Warpy]

1. My mother, the Irish Catholic agnostic who believed in reincarnation

only threatened me with god until I was about 4. After that, she helped me think things through, "What if everybody did that? Would you like it if they did that to you?"

That's how atheists and agnostics can raise ethical kids.

[jgraz]

2. The real question is: Can you raise moral kids *with* god?

Very little of salvationist dogma fits with our modern sense of morality. We really need to be questioning a belief system that values prayer over action, superstition over science and treats horrific suffering as "part of god's plan" and therefore a Good Thing.

[laconicsax]

3. Morality does not come from religion.

People who say so tend to cherry pick passages in their holy books oblivious to the fact that by doing so, they are demonstrating that their morality comes from a source outside their religion.