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What did my parents tell me......

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Aaaarchy:
Best thing I can imagine telling my kids is this:

Well, you stop existing. Is that scary? It shouldn't be. What about all the time BEFORE you existed. Was that a scary time? Do you even remember that time? No? Good! It's exactly like that, so there is nothing to fear or worry about.


Good luck with any of your kids.

jtheory:
Huh.  I've been reading QC for years; this is the first comic that convinced me to register for the forums.

I'm an atheist & have been for years, though I was raised Catholic, and my parents are still (though they've mostly reconciled themselves to my disbelief by now) -- I just drifted away from it during my early teens, and sat down and did some hard thinking & reading in my early 20s (that's when I went from agnostic to atheist).

Kids are kids.  Most parents (Hanners' excluded, obviously) won't be saying anything about dopamine and pleasant hallucinations.  I don't have kids yet, though my wife & I will be starting down that path before long, so I've put some thought into it already.

I intend to focus on a few things:
* no one knows for sure, though a lot of people believe a lot of different things (like, uh, grammy and grandpa do)
* we DO know for sure that when someone dies, our good memories of them, all of our stories about them and the things we did together... all of those things are still around, and don't ever disappear as long as there are people around to remember.
* probably, dying is like going to sleep when you're really, really tired.  If you're very hurt or very sick, that all goes away and you can finally rest.  Then your consciousness disappears from your body, like shutting off a light.
* the idea of the permanence of matter/energy is useful -- "We are made of star-stuff", as Carl Sagan said (I like that better than "from dust we came", etc.), and our atoms will scatter again, to become parts of bugs and flowers and so on.  My only concern with this tack is that the poor kid could get freaked out thinking there'll be a piece of great-aunt whoever floating in their milk.

I personally don't find it very frightening, which is perhaps one of the most important things to convey to a child.

Last thought to Aurjay: Beware; Intelligent Design isn't what you think it is....  It's a trick cooked up by Creationists to get religion into schools -- it claims (with extremely shaky and unscientific foundations) that evolution isn't able to explain all of the diversity of life, so an "intelligent creator" (i.e., the Christian God, though they don't say it) must have been involved.  What you're probably looking for is the idea that God planned evolution, and knew beforehand how it would all go (but evolution still operates scientifically, without any supernatural tweaks needed along the way).  I'm not sure if there's a specific name for that idea, but that's the belief of many scientifically-educated Christians.

xeracia:
I'm a pretty open and honest mother or at least I try to be. So when my children asked me this question I answered with "We really have no way of knowing what happens when we die." But then I did go on to explain what different religions teach....and actually gave my children quite a few different ideas to think about. Then I told them they could decide which one they thought worked for them.
My oldest daughter is eleven. At the moment if you ask her what she believes in, she would probably give you some elaborate idea that comes from the latest video game she plays. It will probably change next month. I am raising my children to know what all religions teach. And that none of them are necessarlly wrong or right since we have a world full of people with different ideas and ways of looking at things.
Hope that helps.

Siibillam-Law:
My parents basically let me choose. They ... no, she raised me half-catholic so my sister and I knew of God, but without forcing anything onto us. I think it was a good choice. Now I'm a half-catholic, but I think God's an ass anyway, if he exists

"God? You've been up there too long. God doesn't care what happens on Earth. As long as he gets some souls, and a bit of worship he's happy. I'm gonna be frank; God's a dick.” pretty much sums me up

honeyfly:
As some other writers here I basically told my daughter the truth:  That we have no way of knowing what happens when we die.  I also told her that the most logical explanation was that nothing happened, we just ceased to exist.  But I also told her that other people thought other things and we had no way of knowing what exists (or not) outside of our measurable universe and then we went through some schools of thought of the major religions and some of the less wacky non-religious options.  I consider it my responsibility to help her keep her options open, not pick a religion (or whatever it is) for her.

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