Folks,
If you truly love your children, don’t fill their heads with myths and threats of eternal punishment (HELL). Telling your child that after he dies, he shall go to hell, is wrong. It is a threat that lingers in his mind, forming images of fire and eternal suffering of unimaginable proportions.
Do not do this. It amounts to Child Abuse.
Instead, teach them The Golden Rule, the power of reason and the benefits of applying a healthy skepticism towards life. Teach them how to think, not what to think. If they decide to embrace a religion once they attain adulthood, that will be their choice and not yours.
If more parents started adopting this approach, we would have better adjusted kids and a better adjusted world.
Just saying.
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Harry
Right, Harry!
Myth and story-telling has long been used to teach “moral” lessons, to children and adults. In addition to those of a biblical nature (or Quran, for that matter), Aesop’s fables come to mind.
But we don’t maintain that Aesop’s tortoise and hare actually competed against each other in a real foot race, which the rabbit lost.
Or that an irritating boy was actually abandoned by his village when he cried “wolf!” one too many times. Or that Santa Claus is a real person. We acknowledge that these are fables that teach valuable lessons!
In the same way, there are lessons to be learned from biblical stories, many of which have been transmitted to us from more ancient, non-biblical sources. For example the moral code of the Old Testament’s “10 Commandments” has been traced to the earlier Egyptian “Book of the Dead. http://dwij.org/forum/amarna/2_cmndmts_book_of_the_dead.html
Children (and the adults they grow up to become) are better off when we always teach ALL such stories–even the biblical ones–as such: Fictional fables and legends having a certain educational, cultural or entertainment value, but by no means are they to be taught as historical truth: they’re literature, not literal.