Parenting Beyond Belief - edited by Dale McGowan

If God didn’t exist, I would probably be an atheist.

This thought occurred to me several times as I read this collection of essays. “Parenting Beyond Belief” edited by Dale McGowan is a book that I found mostly interesting, but I don’t really recommend it.

I was excited to read this book in the interest of understanding how a system of morality is obtained and taught to children without including belief in God or some other higher authority. This book does contain information about this, but is much more evangelical of atheism than I was hoping.

I did like a few things. For example, the contrasting essays on Santa Claus covered many interesting points in favor and against establishing a belief in your children that you believe to be false. Having come from a family where Santa Claus was not taught as anything other than fiction (and having subsequently felt that I had lost out on a rite of childhood), I appreciated the differing perspectives on the subject. I also liked the chapter on Darwin’s Origin of Species. Darwin’s opus has been vilified in so many ways that I’ve never had the chance to see it as the fruit of a man who was passionate to discover and explain the world as he was able to observe it. Subjects such as these were definitely interesting to read and explore.

However, in the end, I didn’t really enjoy reading “Parenting Beyond Belief.” While it was interesting to get a perspective on morality of those who do not believe in a personable and responsive deity, it often times felt more like reading the boastings of arrogant men and women, rather than reading the caring words of people who actually had compassion for the welfare of their fellow parents. I was hoping for the latter.

The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis

I enjoyed rereading the Chronicles of Narnia series. While as a series it is fairly disjunct, there are parts of it that I love. Most of those parts include Aslan.

I love how Aslan is written in these books as he encompasses so many of my feelings for God: The grandeur and the intimacy; Being loving and personal, but full of infinite wisdom and knowledge. Like a friend you trust that occasionally will be so brutally honest that you are cut to your soul and feel an exposed, burning pain worse than any you’ve known, but once you’ve healed you realize that a persistent nagging pain is gone and that the scar the cut left behind is as valuable to you as your life. This is what I feel about Aslan as I read him in the books, and he seems to be an excellent allegorical figuration of my feelings about God.

It’s interesting to contrast these feelings with those from the notoriously “anti-Narnian” series by Philip Pullman, the “His Dark Materials” trilogy. There isn’t a single character in “His Dark Materials” that doesn’t at some point succeed in making me feel frustrated, hopeless and cynical, with the possible exception of the polar bear king, Iorek Byrnison. I like the “His Dark Materials” series, but an uplifting tail it isn’t.

My recommendation is to read “The Chronicles of Narnia”, and probably reread the series once ever decade or so, if for no other reason than to be able to relive in print some of your feelings for your Heavenly Father. My apologies to all the atheists (and other humanist types) who don’t choose to regard those feelings as valuable.