Editor’s Note: A new author to Rational Creatures, Jan Blixt, joins us today with some reflections from her Easter.
My children dyed their eggs last night and just finished finding them all this morning. They opened their Easter baskets (lovingly created each year by their grandmother, Poppy) and had their brunch, and now they are watching Sherlock Holmes with their father and grandfather.
You may note that church is not a factor in our Easter morning. Because god is not a factor in our Easter morning.
I was raised in a very Catholic family with a devout mother and a seemingly devout father – I learned in my late teens that he was an agnostic who’d been raised Episcopalian and loved my mother and was willing to go along with the trappings because they were important to her. I have a brother whose lovely family is devout in their Evangelical Christianity. I also have a brother who’s become rather militant in his atheism and whose family has no patience with religion. And I don’t believe in god. I just don’t. I don’t know if I ever did and I don’t lose sleep over it.
And now I have two children, ages 6 and 8, who are being raised without religion and without the concept of capital-G god.
This shocks some people. (more…)