Our dog died yesterday. [View all]

[AtheistCrusader]

Family is still recovering, and it's going to hurt for a while, but I just wanted to take a moment to say, how incredibly grateful I am, that it is possible to raise a smart, creative, and loving child, without resorting to made up doggy-angel bullshit or anything like that. My 5 year old was sad, cried a lot, like any empathetic, normally functioning human is wont to do, but otherwise took it better than I did. He wanted to be in the room, at the end. He asked great questions about what was going to happen, and whether he would feel the euthanasia, and why it was important to help him go...

I know, deep down, having grown up always having been an atheist, that it is not surprising to be a moral, caring, loving individual, without the trappings and accoutrements of religion, but man, it wears on you. Decades of explaining myself to religious people who cannot conceive of morality without an objective, supreme law-giver... it sows doubts. Plants worries. Always looking over my shoulder, wondering, am I doing it right as a parent... even when we show studies that secular kids distinguish better between real, and fantasy, I get shit thrown in my face how 'that's not necessarily better, because imagination and creativity', and more doubts.. am I stifling my kids creativity now, or ruining fantasy and his childhood...?

No more. Fuck them.

My kid is fine. He is loving, warm, shows empathy for other kids, doesn't distinguish between 'us' and 'them', for any of the race, gender, ability, political or any other of the stupid boxes we assign ourselves to identify as belonging to. He's confident in himself, sees the good in himself, asks the most amazing, insightful questions...

I'll never doubt again. I will go on telling my son the truth, about anything he asks. I could not be more proud, as a parent, of the person he is growing into. Someday he will surpass me in *everything*, and I'm totally cool with that. He doesn't need lies and bullshit to cope with life. He needs the truth. He thrives on the truth.

I feel sorry for all the kids out there, whose parents don't value the truth, over made up manufactured lies of comfort. The parents that tell their kids, or allow some lying self-righteous charlatan in a stupid white sheet or black suit and a stupid white collar to lie to them, that they are sinners from birth, incomplete, unworthy without the mercy of some illusory externality that was allegedly tortured to death before they were born for the crime of an alleged sin committed by others before they were born...

so sad. Too many kids, too many lies sown.

The truth is so much easier, and it works. I know it works, and I will not doubt it again.

"In the name of Purity what lies are told! What queer morality it has engendered. For fear of it you dare not tell your own children the truth about their birth; the most sacred of all functions, the creation of a human being, is a subject for the most miserable falsehood. When they come to you with a simple, straightforward question, which they have a right to ask, you say, "Don't ask such questions," or tell some silly hollowlog story; or you explain the incomprehensibility by another — God! You say "God made you." You know you are lying when you say it. You know, or you ought to know, that the source of inquiry will not be dammed up so. You know that what you Could explain purely, reverently, rightly (if you have any purity in you), will be learned through many blind gropings, and that around it will be cast the shadowthought of wrong, embryo'd by your denial and nurtured by this social opinion everywhere prevalent. If you do not know this, then you are blind to facts and deaf to Experience."

-Voltairine de Cleyre (1880)