How do you begin to discuss the matter of religious faith, or lack of it, with a child of six? You cannot do it - not with the kind of sincerity and bilateral breadth that would be brought be bear if you were having the discussion with a grownup. But four years ago when my daughter thought it was about time she asked why I did not go to church or profess Christianity as my faith, I knew I had to come up with an answer.
But first, whence and why the question? The whence is simple: at age six children are often in the fever-pitch of question-asking, this is the time they will drown anyone who has the fat luck to be around them in the sea of whys, whats, wheres and so on. I recall my girl asking me one day: Daddy, why can’t I be in two places at the same time - at home and in school?
I was slightly surprised by this singularly abstruse question. In one go a child of six had put herself in the Valhalla of great minds like Kant, Hume, Husserl, Sartre and just about any thinker who has grappled with the matter of being. And asking her father why he did not go to church was no less thoughtful than Bertrand Russell’s attempt at explaining why he was not a Christian.
Then to rub it in, she said something which would have been seen as stereotypical if she were not a child. She ended her questioning with: you are a Nigerian, you are supposed to go church. In spite of being taken aback by this declaration, I gave a postscript to the little genius’ observation: Or a mosque, I said, Nigerians go to mosques too. She didn’t know a lot about religion, pretty much nothing about Christianity, still less about Islam or Muslims, the first Muslim classmate she had came a year later. So she just let go the tag-on about Muslims.
How do I begin to explain to this six year old philosophette why I do not go to church (or mosque) and why I do not pray or call on any god? This is tricky, I told myself.
How do I tell her that as a teenager I read a book by a man called Robert Ingersoll entitled Some Mistakes of Moses and that the book had set me off on a path less travelled? How do I explain who Moses was to her? Why should I lie to her that the world was created six thousand years ago when I know this is not only wrong but also absurd? Why must I lie to her that her first forebear was a man called Adam, from whose rib a woman called Eve was made when I know this is utter nonsense?
How do I tell her that the person called Job in the Bible was mythical (how do I explain myth to her)? Or that the story of Noah and his ark with its pairs of passengers is at best a fairy tale.
How do I tell her that she should live her life as best as she can here and now and not bug her mind with the notion of any heaven or hell? Why must I scare and terrify her with the figment of hell? How do I tell a child who still thinks Santa is real that Santa’s big bearded uncle whom a lot of people believe lives somewhere in the skies does not exist?
How do I explain Immaculate Conception to her (of course she did not know a thing about conception, immaculate or not)? How do I tell her that a man called Paul in the Bible considers her - being female - a second-class citizen, a half-human who must submit herself unquestioningly to a man’s whims and will?
How do I tell her that if she prays she is indulging in wishful thinking, and that she is as likely to get what she prays for as not? How do I tell her that evolution explains how things are today better than creationism and intelligent design? How do I tell her that I don’t like the idea of colonising my mind with a foreign religion brought to my rather recent ancestors by colonisers?
How do I explain to her that she was born without religion and that if I, her father, tell her she is a Christian or a Muslim or even an atheist, I am imposing my wishes and desires upon her? (As a matter of fact she was born an atheist rather than otherwise). How do I tell her that she will sooner or later hear over and over again the elaborate yarn of a man who died and was said to have risen from the dead three days later (of course she knew nothing about death at that age, still less waking up from the dead)?
Children see through lies, they know when you are bullshitting them. I would not like my daughter to catch me out telling her stories I will swear by as true but whose veracity I cannot prove.
