I'm looking for ways to handle a separate parents situation

Hi everyone! I'm in need of advice. I've been an atheist since I was in my teenage years. My entire family is Catholic and I respect their believes (even when they don't respect mine and are always pushy about their religion). I have a son with a man who, when I met him, he was an atheist as well, however, from a year or so to now, he became an Evangelist. He says he believes in god and preaches the word.

We have been separated since our sone was one, yet he always kept in touch and my son spends time with him, although not so often. This last time around, my son stayed at his house for about 2 weeks, and apparently they took him to church.

He also told my son all sort of things about his god, even when we agreed, years ago when he still was an atheist, that we were going to wait for our son to be older so he could learn about all kinds of religions and his options, so he could CONSCIOUSLY CHOSE whatever he wants to believe in.

I, of course, will respect whatever my son choses, however, since he is only 7, I don't think he is ready to learn about all the different religions out there, and I don't think it's good to expose him to religion directly, either (like going to church, praying and such).

I don't know how to handle this, since I am very very upset right now, so I come here to ask from more experienced parents how I could handle a situation like this one.

Thank you in advance.

in atheistparentsby AnneMarieHRo

91%

12d

View all comments

DogLvrinVA

12d

You need to start inoculating your kid against religion

This is how I went about religion with our kids.

I loaded up on picture books on creation myths from cultures around the world.

I explained to them that ancient peoples tried to understand how natural phenomena came to be, but because science hadn't evolved as a discipline, they came up with fanciful stories. That these fanciful stories made up gods and each culture had its own mythologies. I made sure to use terms like Jewish mythology, Christian mythology, Islamic mythology etc.. Pretty soon the kids came to their own conclusion that what we call mythology now, was just the religions of days gone by, and the current religions are just current mythologies.

We had fun looking at myths that tried to explain the same things to see the similarities and the differences.

I can't tell you the kick of pleasure you get when your 5 year old asks you why people believe that their god created the world in 6 days when science has shown us that it isn't so. Then the kid looked at me and asked me why people even believe in gods.

Read your kid a ton of mythology from different cultures. Especially concentrate on the mythologies that are similar to the Jesus one but predate it. Lots of mythologies have reborn gods

This was an excellent innoculation against religion.

Specialist_Gate_9081

12d

Can you recommend some of those books you looked at?

DogLvrinVA

12d

My kids are 23, so I can’t remember the titles of the books. We started off with D’Aulaire’s for Greek and Roman mythology. I remember buying quite a few jim Weiss Mythology Recordings. He’s a fantastic storyteller for kids and did mythologies from multiple cultures. We also bought recordings from Naxos.

Full Cast Audio’s mythological recordings were spectacular

If I were to only choose a few, I’d leave off the Naxos

I had many picture books, but can’t remember the names