Thom Hartmann's thoughful dialogue about what to teach children about religion.

[LongTomH]

The title of this video is: What if your child is stuck in a fundamentalist church by your ex and you think it's wrong. Actually, the guy Thom is interviewing is a secular agnostic humanist whose wife (they're still married) whose wife is devoutly Catholic.

The real issue is, the dissonance between what his kids are learning in church on Sunday, and what he'd like them to be learning. The dialogue is about the need to expose kids to comparative religion so they can make up their own minds.

Interestingly, Thom self-identifies as: "I'm probably intellectually a Deist and emotionally a Christian." That's close to my belief system; although I've frequently self-identified as an agnostic. My late sweetheart was a devout Catholic and I had no problem attending church with her. As I continue to evolve intellectually and spiritually, I may end up as a Unitarian Universalist or a liberal Christian, or just a mix of Deism and theistic agnosticism.

[izquierdista]

1. Depriving your children of ritual?

What, like they don't have rituals of dressing up on Halloween to go trick-or-treat? If you like ritual, get yourself a calendar with all the festival days of all the world's religions, and life will be one big party. Every day can be a holiday if you are a pantheist. And if by chance one day is lacking in mumbo-jumbo, you can always go to Fazoli's and eat the body and blood of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. The rituals that you so cynically deride are some of the most beautiful memories

of my childhood, and many continue to be meaningful to me.

Speak for yourself, not for others.

[HockeyMom]

2. Send them to Catholic school for 12 year

I guarnatee THAT will cure them.

[Humanist_Activist]

4. LOL, yeah, though in my case it was 3 years Catholic school...

9 years PSR.

[white_wolf]

5. 6 years of a Southern Baptist school cured me.

I, ironically became Catholic for a year out of rejection of Southern Baptist teaching,but wasn't ready to give up believing in God, but after a year, I just realized I no longer had faith and stopped believing in God. I'm not ready to rule out the possibility of a Deistic God, but I cannot believe in the God of Abraham.