Telling them the truth would make you a good christian.

I’m glad I came back today to read your moral dilemma.

If I were in your shoes, I would refrain from telling my kids my journey, even if putting on a front is eating at me inside. Primarily because children’s minds aren’t designed to understand complexities and subtleties and caveats. So even if you try to explain in child-friendly language, it will largely go over their heads because they see the world in black or white.

Also, maybe approach this from the angle of community. The friendships they make and the rituals they undergo can do well to bolster their mental health. You can gradually ease them into your transition as they grow up and understand more about Bitcoin.

I’m a Buddhist but only visit the Chinese temple across my house once a year! Your post made me feel that I should try harder to inculcate a sense of spirituality in my son

obligatory "bro you wrote so much, I'm answering your title before taking the time to read your story"

There are so many possible interpretations of your question, that I am honestly onlly going to beg one word: why must you tell all your children the same opinion, simultaneously?

maybe I'll finish reading your story within the ten minutes edit window

ok firstly, I'm not gonna tell you how to raise your kids... even this one question seems rather late in the process, so any advice I might have would need much more context about them, and your post is mostly about yourself.

secondly, your story doesn't seem to have a large anonymity set; consider whether one of your kids might actually find out by reading SN, and then wonder why they found out that way...

finally, keep on praying; even if you call it something else, and expect no reply, because there are lots of children and so little Time for anyone to listen.

All Christians believe in God you are an exception. In the bible god exists. Means you are not christian simple.

Religion is a topic I've discussed countless times with friends and family, even though we each belong to different ideologies or religions.

The final conclusion: they all have their uses, they all teach, they are all important at certain times in our lives, BUT we shouldn't bind ourselves to them, and even less so, follow other "masters" who claim they can offer us liberation if we "obey" them or the rules of their religion.

In my personal opinion and experience, raise your children in all religions, and above all, make it clear that they have complete freedom to choose what best suits them at that moment.
Perhaps, in the future, they will change to another religion, or become atheists, agnostics, or create their own religion (which is what I've tried to do).

I should mention that I am baptized and have received communion in the Catholic faith, but from age 12 to 29 I was agnostic (or so I thought).
Then I discovered that the spiritual world is truly the religion I can most perceive in my daily life, and that religions are life manuals that have worked at certain times in human existence, for certain individuals, but they don't necessarily have to work for me, although they do offer great teachings.

You should never cling to an idea, since it can change, just as we change every second of our lives.
The End.

Bottom line: if you brainwashed your children, the least you can do it try to un-brainwash them.

It's great that to see that at the very least, the benefits of believing are high enough that you want to pass it onto your kids, despite not being entirely sure about whether it's true.

I can appreciate that the big dilemma here is that you want your teaching to align with what you believe, which are contradictory at the moment. The implied solution to the dilemma is to change what/how you teach or to change what you believe to stay out of the hypocrisy territory. But I think there's a third way. You can tell your kids that this is how you grew up and that it was beneficial. Not to say that this is a guaranteed success, but at least it's an option that's honest.

I would encourage you to pray. It sounds trite, but I know for myself a lot of what I've asked for has been answered. Given your current doubts, the simplest prayer would be "God, if you're real, please reveal yourself to me." An affirmative answer would resolve the dilemma. A negative one would at least give you more data about where you stand, though you'd still be in the same dilemma. But you wouldn't be any worse off than you are now.

Here is POV from a Hindu guy:

Children and religion

I would lean towards saying nothing.

My experience: As a single man, I rarely visited temples or observed religious holidays. However, as a father, I make it a point to take my children to the temple and maintain religious practices at home. The two part reason is

1: I seriously believe in the absence of religion you may get influenced by bad ideas ( one example, decline of religion resulted into the rise of wokeness)

2: to me, essentially a philosophy. As a child, I loved reading parables, fables, and Zen stories, and I still find them incredibly enriching

Interestingly, as a teenager, when I got intoxicated with the idea that we may have created god as a psychological defense mechanism (Fear-Origin Theory). My mom said, it does not matter. God does not ask you to believe in Him. what you are is Nirguna ( one who believe in formless God ). did not find a good link with quick search, so here is a gemini summary[https://gemini.google.com/share/03172ec12ac9]. So, I was never an atheist.

Religion feels like a scam:

Feeling disillusioned, hold your horses. it will pass. . ZEN Short Story: It Will Pass!

What to do next

If you don't feel like it. don’t force it. You don’t need to go to church or pray as often as you currently do .It is also okay if kids also don't go to church as often as they go now. Instead of formal worship, consider reading. I ended up reading a couple of pages of Ecclesiastes [https://www.biblestudytools.com/nkjv/ecclesiastes/1.html} once, and i found it incredibly profound...so there is a lot of learned from there.

Remember, as the zen master, buddha says, it will pass, and you won' t feel and think like what you are doing now!

By the way, many Hindu story emphasize that God's fav are those who are "good human beings" and fulfill their worldly responsibilities with integrity, rather than those who only pray. central theme of "Vaishnav Jan To," Mahatma Gandhi’s favorite bhajan. I love it too. it has subtitle [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbvww26oMQ4]

When I was an atheist, I'd say I wasn't going to lie to my kids about Santa Claus. I learned to appreciate that there might be more to it than that:

1. they would diverge from their peers
2. they'd miss an opportunity to learn how gullible they are
3. they'd miss an opportunity to learn that caregivers, too, tell convenient lies
4. they'd lose a right-sized opportunity to grapple with suspicion and doubt
5. they'd lose a right-sized opportunity to exercise belief/faith in crazy sounding things

I'm no longer certain it's better one way or another. There are tradeoffs.

FWIW I grew up without religion and I don't think I'm worse off for it. It forced me to learn ethics and morality on my own which has pluses and minuses; it took time, pain, and energy to reach philosophical equilibrium while equipping me with tools for reaching philosophical equilibriums.

I don't think people need religion to be good people. I think people and the world they are born into encode most of what religions teach, but religion makes learning natural law easier by filling gaps and constructing narratives. Smart people, absent outlying social deficits, will arrive at Christian-like morality on big picture things independently. While I wouldn't say that religion exists to teach the bottom of the class (religion has value to everyone imo), religion probably keeps the bottom of the class from lying, cheating, violence, and stealing better than anything else we could teach them.

At the very least, I think there's a role for cultural Christianity like there's a role from cultural Judaism.

These days I consider myself Christian knowing that I might not meet the label's criteria (depends on who you ask). I believe Christianity is a useful encoding of natural law and I believe in God. I'm not sure that what I call God is the same immeasurable God that other people believe in, but that is consistent with my definition of God; we can share faith in something immeasurable conceptually but we can't share detailed understanding of it.

Will you teach your children to be relativist agnostic Marxists?

You can debate about (Hinduism, Islam, Shinto, etc) all you want and test them against the message of Jesus Christ if you are questioning what the best way to know God is.

But saying you don't believe in God is nonsense and the same as saying you don't believe in the weather. God is "the thing" that comes before and after.

The "proof" of God is everywhere all at once. God is the one who created reality.

If you "don't believe" in God, what happened before the Big Bang? That is what God is.

God = Creator
Jesus Christ = Son of God, Truth

How do we know who/what is God? What did God intend for us? Why was reality created in the first place? What are we supposed to do?

Jesus Christ taught morality and much more:

"So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets."

"Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, for the tree is known by its fruit. "

"Therefore render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s."

"Honor your father and mother, and, You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

This thing called religion looks more and more like a scam to me.

Welcome to reality! It’s been years since a life situation made me question everything, and I think I followed the right path, the path without crutches. Don’t get me wrong, Christian principles and, more generally, religious principles are good, but then there is a lot of exploitation of people, not to me!

Still with or without religion everyone needs faith to go forward in life, en entrepreneur needs faith to go forward with his project, a man or a woman needs faith go get married, we don't know the future and what it might bring. If we don't have faith on a good output we don't act, we give up before trying.

You got too busy to believe? Despite being motivated to do radical things with your faith?

Separation of faith and religion is a good place to live, but certainly not straightforward to teach

I don't like telling my kids to believe in something that I don't believe in my self.

In my opinion you don't have to teach them to believe it because of that. You can show them this aspect pf the world and why they have to avoid it, because many people they will have a conversation probably believe on it, so they have to understand to don't fall it their lies. This is a good strp to take in, don’t trust in institutions that claim they own you because some one you never know or trust said you are their property.

Not fully related, but I believe this is an interesting historical context for religion / beliefs.

We're going through that part of the cycle of great cultures where the loss of religion leads to a break of the foundations that gave value to those societies. Keeping religion alive passing it to our descendants has an importance beyond faith and tradition.

Have you spoken to your priest? or confessed to him?

What strikes me is that you are already doing the hardest part you are refusing to lie to yourself. Most people glide in and out of belief without ever naming it. You have and that gives you something solid to work with.

You do not have to choose between pretending and burning everything down. There is a middle path. You can tell your kids the truth in layers. Start with this I grew up in this faith. It shaped my marriage my choices my sense of responsibility to the poor. I am not sure what I believe about God right now but I still think there is deep wisdom here and I want you to know it well enough to decide for yourselves one day.

Children do not need a parent who is certain. They need a parent who is honest and calm in uncertainty. Let them see that you can question without sneering and participate without faking. You are not trapping them in a story. You are handing them a language and trusting them to speak for themselves later.

This is great, thank you.

I think you would be interested in Terror Management Theory if you aren't already familiar with it. I'm currently reading The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. TMT is based on it.

The theory argues that religion is one of many possible, necessary lies to live in a terrifying world as spiritual and physical beings: spiritual because we seek meaning, a reason for our existence, and physical because we must die. Religion is a collective solution to the problem that "we all want to be something more than a shitting and fucking creature that dies."^[1]

Culture and art are other ways to achieve similar heroism: the courage to live and accept death, rather than repress it or live in constant terror of it.

Btw, as an artist, you might like what Becker has to say about you:

The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it. This holds true for all creative people to a greater or lesser extent, but it is especially obvious with the artist. Existence becomes a problem that needs an ideal answer; but when you no longer accept the collective solution to the problem of existence, then you must fashion your own. The work of art is, then, the ideal answer of the creative type to the problem of existence as he takes it in—not only the existence of the external world, but especially his own: who he is as a painfully separate person with nothing shared to lean on. He has to answer to the burden of his extreme individuation, his so painful isolation. He wants to know how to earn immortality as a result of his own unique gifts. His creative work is at the same time the expression of his heroism and the justification of it. It is his "private religion"—as Rank put it. Its uniqueness gives him personal immortality; it is his own "beyond" and not that of others.

There's also a funny point in the book where it reduces everything down to some kind of religion:

Regarding your question about what you should tell your children: my answer is similar to what @Undisciplined said. I think you should tell them what you believe in and give them the space to find what they believe in. You could try to tell them what you told us here. It doesn't have to be all at once; it could happen slowly over many years.

1. Not my words, but from a review of the book. I liked them very much. So much, in fact, I added them as a quote on my website. ↩

Thank you for your comprehensive account!

For this, I agree it feels disingenuous:

I know all the arguments that make the faith sound like the most reasonable thing in the world, why not teach them to my children even if I don't believe them myself? Well, I think that's the part that is bothering me. I don't like telling my kids to believe in something that I don't believe in my self.

Inauthentic. Almost lying. But you keep plenty of things from your kids on a regular basis — think sex, or taxes, or schooling/brainwashing — but depending on their age, it might not be time for those convos yet.

I grew up in what I can only describe as a strong, yet highly cynical immigrant Italian version of Roman Catholicism. My Irish friends had a reverence for the church, the priests and the nuns that my grandparents and parents never had. My grandmother told me stories about how priests in the local Italian villages all had girlfriends, though they claimed they observed the vow of chastity. I was given the sense that the only thing that really mattered was your relationship with God, and the lessons Jesus taught. The institutions were accorded respect, but with a nod and a wink.

More specifically, my father grappled with the same question you are asking. He let me know when I was fairly young that he had doubts about God, but he was absolutely convinced that it was good for children to be raised in the Catholic faith. It's strange that my mother was the more devout Catholic when they got married, while my dad's faith grew stronger only when he was approaching old age. He had enough objectivity to look at it as an insurance policy.

My wife and I raised our daughter as a Catholic, but our touch was fairly light. She received all the sacraments, but we weren't great about regular church attendance. Like most of her generation, she does not practice a formal religion as an adult, but she is spiritual.

Im probably a bit younger than you but my background sounds very similar, and this same question has been one of the biggest hurdles that my brain has used as an excuse for not starting a family yet. I dont have an answer and im not sure I ever will. One thought I have is that even though I have mostly checked out of the beliefs, I still practice because I feal as though it has positive effects in my life. If I was to have children, and I was to not raise them in the church, would I be setting them up with a disadvantage to not experience these same positive effects? On the flip side I feal as though my conscience stresses me out more than it should and thats a direct result of my strict religious upbringing, and I wouldn't want my children to deal with that. Maybe the answer is just balance. Anyway, I appreciate the reminder that other people out there struggle with the exact same thing, so thanks for posting.

This thing called religion looks more and more like a scam to me.

Conflated God and religion, many such cases esp in Catholic families

Have you read the Bible? Or at least read the Gospels?

After Jesus Christ rose from the dead under His own power, He proved that everything He said and did during His ministry was good and true. Therefore, Christianity is true and all other "religions" are false.

There is no other "religion" where God came down and became a human with a plan to save us. All other religions only seek their own Gods. In Christianity, God seeks us.

Don't get wrapped up in "religion." Focus on the Bible and the Truth it reveals.

I'm Catholic, so of course I'd recommend you also look deeper into Catholic tradition as well (as all Catholic tradition is Biblical).

But I wish you well on this journey. Thank you for posting here, and God bless!

Why not be honest with your kids? You can tell them you don't believe it, but you want them to decide for themselves, while raising them in an environment that you acknowledge has positive resources for mental health, as well as not being inherently irrational or unreasonable?

The one thing I'll add is, given what you shared about your background -- I wonder if your expression of faith was narrowly tied to social justice action. Caring for the poor is part of the faith, but if that's your primary engagement with it, then it makes sense that when you lose that, you lose a lot of what the whole thing meant to you.

Ok, I'll add two things. From my casual observation, the percent of Christians in the bitcoin world seems a bit higher than in the non-bitcoin world. Take that how you will, but I do think it says something about how religion isn't inherently a scam the way many other human institutions are.

I try to separate spirituality from organized religion. I am not a fan of organized religion. My wife comes from a very religious family and thinks it is important that the kids are brought up in these traditions. I am good with it as long as they are happy and the church seems to be having a positive or at least neutral impact on their lives. But my wife and I also agree that eventually they will reach an age where they will make their own decisions about what role religion will play in their lives.

I don't know you from Adam, but it seems to me that you did not stop believing in God as higher power but you lost trust in the people (aka. organized religion) who run this "scam" as you said. I can tell that deep in your heart you have faith, just need to redirect it for the right purpose and not for organization that tells you what to do in what order and who to hate... That is purely your choice.... keep your head up!

Probably, I would stay course. Let them decide without influencing them too much. Wherever they land, will be that much the more meaningful for it.

My father brought me up in Church and always said it was so that I had the "fallback." Not sure I necessarily needed it, but I guess I it to be "useful."

Happy Easter.

I think it's important to be honest with your kids, as in not telling them things that you believe to be false. I don't think you have to be fully forthcoming, though.

I suspect there's a sort of middle ground where you can talk to your kids about their faith and traditions, without asserting that those things are either true or false.

We try to walk that line when it comes to things like Santa and the Easter Bunny.

Thanks for sharing. I am praying for you. I know that might sound trite but I have found that thinkers wrestle with faith, God, and religious institutions. It's a journey that has not yet ended for you.

In recent years (I have written a bit about this) I have been trying to learn more about Christian history and what I have found is that much of modern Christianity has been really infected with enlightenment thinking materialism that robs us of the mystical and spiritual. I'm still on the journey but there's a thread that we can lose sight of. Jesus. For much of my life I focused on the disagreements in Christian tradition but today I can see more clearly the common threads. I pray that the Holy Spirit with rekindle that child like faith and wonder that Jesus praised in his time on earth.