Reply to And my first grader is in a huge debate about God with his classmates.

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[quote=Anonymous]When I was that age, I a Catholic had a good friend who was an evangelical Protestant.  We would frequently have discussions about religion.  She posed questions to me I couldn't answer and vice versa.  We'd come back another day with an answer to the others' challenge we couldn't answer before.  This taught me to question what I had been taught and to better defend beliefs or maybe modify views I had been taught.

This was excellent training in how to debate and made one think much more deeply than otherwise about the larger issues of life; many years later I still remember these juvenile exchanges and am grateful I had the opportunity to have such free discussions with someone of very different views.  It was an early exercise in apologetics, which anyone with beliefs about religion or nonreligion or ecology or anything else can benefit from.  The key is to always keep it respectful and stay open to the possibility that you always have something to learn from those with beliefs different from yours.

Kids are pretty blunt, so you might tell your child to make polite clarifications like: "You mean you think your religion says I will go to hell."  Instead of saying he does not believe God exists, your son could ask them why they believe God exists instead, forcing them to think them to think and defend rather than parrot words they've been taught.  (Your son will then be called upon to defend his position, his chance to exercise his intellect.)

This is an opportunity for a stimulating intellectual debate and I wouldn't quash it, but just give some tips on keeping it on that level so it doesn't degenerate into name calling and expressions of bigotry.[/quote]

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