[cafe]

I can understand where you're coming from with this. I, personally, want my kids to have a good understanding of the Bible and the traditional tenets of faith, that kind of thing, just so they can make an informed decision themselves. I don't think I have all the answers or that human beings are even capable of understanding a lot of the answers if we even knew what questions to ask, but I would like them to have some understanding of what their daddy and I believe and why. I'm not willing to go too far beyond that and I'm not entirely sure how we're going to work out the logistics of it all since we can's seem to get our good-for-nothing rear-ends to church on a regular basis.

Young kids are concrete thinkers by nature and most don't gain the ability to think in the terms Jennifer is describing (truth/facts vs Truth) until they are getting into their teens. Going into a lot of complexity before that just isn't very productive.

And for perspective, Don and I agreed before we had kids that we would not teach them to believe in Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, etc. We didn't think the fun of it was worth the deception it involved. However, despite our feelings on the subject and our complete refusal to play along, more than one of my kids has insisted that Santa is real and not in the historical sense like I taught them. I felt chagrined and taken aback, but when they wouldn't see the light, I thought it must somehow be important to them to have that belief at the time, so I didn't make a major case about it.

I think religious stuff can be the same way. They will have more clarity of thought and more experience as the get older, so it's not worth a major effort to debunk stuff that they want to believe in right now.