Childish Faith

Here’s a fun video:

In case you don’t want to watch it: the video illustrates how 15 very common scientific illustrations are, technically speaking, inaccurate. Imprecise might be a better word. They don’t actually tell you what is going on in.

I doubt very many people watching this thought, “Oh no, my trust in science has been misguided. I will never trust another scientist again, or go to a laboratory, or read a science book. I have been lied to!” etc. etc. But how many people who grow up on the flannel-graph, children’s-bible version of Christianity allow their faith to be “shattered” because they go off and learn that things are not quite as neat and tidy and they learned in Sunday school. As a child.

That’s not to say that very real crises of faith occur, but it seems that more often than not the reasons I hear people give for their personal faith being shaken comes down to something pretty simple. Guess what? A lot of what you learned in children’s church is probably technically imprecise, just like the models of atoms we learned about in 7th grade. But that doesn’t mean the whole thing is a lie. Faith should be childlike, of course, but that doesn’t mean it has to be childish.

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3 responses to “Childish Faith”

  1. ted

    Right on, do you believe then that it is inappropriate to teach children about God using religious materials (veggie tales, childrens bibles, etc) that you know are inaccurate? I have been thinking that I will try to keep it as basic as possible, and keep the fluffy fairy tale bible stuff away until they are old enough. That way they don’t think that the whole system is fake when they get older.

    1. Raymond Morehouse

      Yeah Ted! I just saw your comment, sorry for not getting back sooner. I have been thinking a a lot about that exact question, especially because we are now getting all sorts of baby-bible stuff sent our way. I think that there is a lot of wisdom to the approach of keeping this as basic as possible. I haven’t looked into it, but perhaps there are some good tools out there for teaching kids other difficult subject matter (talking about the holocaust, explaining hard science, etc.) that could help.

      “Fluffy fairy tale bible stuff” is exactly what I want to keep kids away from because it reduces the Bible to a comic book, usually made cute and cuddly, and the events and characters end up filed under the same concept as Superman or My Little Pony…

  2. Great Observations, Ray.

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