From my son during a recent lengthy car trip: “Dad, what religion are we?”
I answered that we are not religious or, more specifically, that I am not.
Turns out that some of my son’s friends had been poking into his background in that way newly-minted middle schoolers have of interrogating each other in order to determine their own location on the social conformance index.
“Then what are we?”
“WE, aren’t anything,” I answered. “When your friends ask you that question it might make more sense to ask why they think of themselves as Christian or Muslim or Jewish or whatever.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll find that THEIR religion is really just whatever it is they’ve been taught to believe. In other words, they are being taught to believe what their parents were taught to believe and their parents before them.”
He chewed on this for a bit and then asked, “So are you anything?”
My turn to chew.
“I suppose if you need to put a label on it I’m what you might call a gnostic, which means that I believe that ‘god’ or whatever you want to call it must be personally experienced – it is not something that is taught or someone you can be introduced to or that your brain can ‘figure out.'”
The conversation left me feeling enormous sympathy for children and the way those young minds are fed belief systems that they subsequently and unknowingly adopt as their own and then blindly feed to their own kids and so on, ad infinitum.
Why can’t we point our children inward, urge them to trust their own intuition, to listen for that still quiet voice within which is forever whispering to us the transcendent truth we ostensibly wish to hear but cannot because we’re all so busy chattering away about the thoughts fed to us by other chattering minds that came before us?
We adults are akin to drowning victims, pulling our children down down down into the same illusion from which we ourselves wish to escape.
What if more parents, when asked about God, answered, “I don’t know. Why don’t you find out for yourself?”
Very good.