As a young man, I would never have written this essay. I was too preoccupied with other matters and raising my own kids to take the time to understand the psyche of children generally. It was only as I aged and after my kids grew up that I realized I had missed out on a lot. I have concluded that children arrive on this Earth in a basically un-programmed state but with wide-open minds that are extremely susceptible to good or bad programming by adults. In addition, however, they also come with fertile imaginations and often display a remarkable ability to ask devastatingly simple but penetrating questions unanswerable by many adults. I’m sure we’ve all seen the parent who, when faced with such a question, admonishes the child not to ask silly questions, etc. I hold the view that this behavior is unpardonable. Many adults seem unable to utter the phrase “I don’t know” to a child. Perhaps they feel that they will lose the esteem of the child or that their god-like image will be tarnished in some way. There is little doubt in my mind that children tend to view the adults they trust as some sort of superior being, much in the same way as some adults view their God. We therefore have a responsibility to at least try not to sow erroneous seeds in the fertile minds of children - the fruit produced may adversely affect them for a large part of their lives. In some children, it can be their entire life.
I should like now to relate some of the experiences I’ve had with children other than my own. Some of them filled me with dismay, whilst others heartened me and gave me some hope for the future of humankind.
Summer nights in Scotland (where I was born and lived at that time) are occasionally pleasant with daylight persisting until way past the bedtime of most kids. Sometimes I would sit in my front yard and read or watch the children playing in the quiet street where I lived. Naturally, I knew the kids of my immediate neighbors and got to know others through them. They would often ask me to join in their games of rough football, usually in the physically less demanding role of referee or goalkeeper. After a few nights of this fun, I noticed one of the boys, Alec, would suddenly disappear every time Tommy showed up. I was intrigued and one night asked Alec why he always went away when Tommy appeared. Alec’s answer was that he wasn’t allowed to play with Tommy because Tommy was a Catholic, I asked him what was wrong with Catholics, and being only eight years old, Alec didn’t know the answer; he knew only that his Dad had told him Catholics were bad people and that he was forbidden to play with them.
Most people who profess religion in Scotland are of the Protestant variety, but the area where I grew up seemed mostly atheistic and all my friends held similar non-believing views. I should point out that the incident with Alec took place in the central belt of Scotland, where I had recently moved, and where most of the country’s Catholics live. This was my first direct experience with religious bigotry perpetrated upon a child by his parents, and I was dismayed to say the least. My first reactive thought was to have a quiet word with the boy’s father, but knowing the preponderance for violence ingrained in this type of “religite”, I decided against it. I’m a fairly robust man, but I had no desire to undergo facial readjustment via a broken beer bottle at some later date. Murder is relatively rare in Scotland. We generally don’t kill people over religion; we just beat the shit out of each other.
On a lighter note, my next tale concerns a little girl named Stephanie. Her family lived directly across the street from me, and I knew her father, John, fairly well. John was a Catholic, but he was also a very friendly and basically good man. He would often join me in street games with the kids. One evening, I was sitting reading in my living room when the doorbell rang. A few moments later, I heard my wife laughing heartily. She staggered into the room and managed to blurt out, "Stephanie’s at the door – she wants to know if you’re allowed out to play”
Little Stephanie had evidently equated my wife with her own mother and naturally assumed that I would need permission to go outside! I couldn’t resist the opportunity to have some fun, so I told my wife to tell Stephanie that I had been a bad boy and was being kept indoors that evening. Stephanie, however, was made of stern stuff and would not be dissuaded. Although out of her sight, I could plainly hear her ask my wife what bad deed I had done. Barely able to contain my mirth, I went to the door and rescued my wife from the situation by asking her permission to go play with Stephanie. She, in turn, couldn’t resist telling me that although she would allow it, I had better behave myself! Stephanie smiled broadly, sensing that her persuasive powers had been successful. Later that evening, I told her father and his wife what had happened – they cracked up. After Stephanie and her older sister went to bed, we four adults got pleasantly drunk in John’s house.
My last story is about another little girl named Susan – an embryonic genius. She was the daughter of a divorced work friend of mine and lived alone with her father. One day, he asked me if I could look after Susan for a few hours that evening so that he could take care of some business, and I readily agreed. He dropped Susan at my house and, after only ten minutes had elapsed, I realized I was dealing with no ordinary nine year old. My usual questions about her schooling revealed knowledge and deductive skills far beyond most kids older than her. She told me she had recently become interested in the stars and planets and the Universe. Her use of the word “universe” took me by surprise; I had never met a child her age that understood the concept of a Universe. She said she had asked her dad about the Universe, but he’d said that he didn’t know very much about it and had promised to buy her an astronomy book.
“Do you know all about the Universe?” she asked.
“No Susan”, I replied. “Nobody knows all about it, but I know something. What would you like to know?”
“I want to know lots of things, but mostly I want to know where God lives” she said.
Not wishing to incur the wrath of her father by telling her I didn’t think God existed, I lamely replied that I didn’t know where he lived.
“Well he must be there somewhere”. “My Dad and my teacher said that God is in Heaven, and Heaven is in the sky, so where is he?”
I was stumped. All the things I wanted to say to her, things I had said to my own children, ran through my mind, but I couldn’t voice them for fear of subverting her father. I didn’t feel I had the right to do that, although I was sorely tempted. Finally I said, “Maybe you shouldn’t worry about where God lives right now. Susan. Try to find out more about him, and when you are a little older, you will know the answer”.
“Can you tell me more about God now?” she asked.
“No, I can’t”, said I. “I don’t know much about God, myself”.
By this time I was desperate to change the subject. I launched into a description of how far away the stars were, that we saw them as they were long ago because of the time it takes for their light to reach us. Luckily for me, this had the desired effect; she sat spellbound for a while as I tried to explain the concepts in a way that I thought a nine year old would understand. I needn’t have worried on that score. Her statement following my little lecture told me she understood perfectly.
“The Universe must be really old and very big”, she said.
For another hour and a half, she regaled me with questions and innocently showed me what her young mind was capable of. She had the attention span of an Einstein, with a brain to match. The two hours I spent talking with little Susan that evening were hours I shall never forget, and filled me with a burning resolve that never under any circumstances would I lie to or deceive a child for any reason whatsoever.
Why do we mentally abuse children so callously? We fill their heads with nonsense about fairies, goblins, demons and Santa Claus, then we top it off with an oft times lethal injection of the mind virus we call God. Yes, I know that sometimes kids can be unruly and we feel they should be disciplined, but I’ve never met one yet who couldn’t be brought under control or pacified by an appeal to their natural inborn curiosity. I sometimes feel remorse that I didn’t, as a young father, have the capacity to do justice to the minds of my own kids. I have the capacity now, but I was too late. I wasn’t smart enough. I didn’t know enough when it mattered most. Fortunately, both of them have become adequate adults, but I can’t help feeling I could have done better as a father.
Imagine where humanity would be now if we had treated our offspring correctly earlier in the development of our species – and I don’t mean long ago, even five hundred years earlier could have made a huge difference. Perhaps by now, we would have rid ourselves of the dangerous effects of excessive nationalism and patriotism. Perhaps by now, we would have discarded the bonds placed upon us by insane notions of Gods and false deities. Perhaps by now, we would know much more about the vast Universe of which we are a part. Perhaps by now, we would have mastered life itself and attained the level of maturity necessary to handle the knowledge. Unfortunately, we have so far failed and the long-term outlook is gloomy. A small glimmer of hope persists in my mind. If we take the right steps now, we may yet save the day for humanity. Our children are our future. Without them, we have no future. We need to treat them like the triumphs of evolution they are.
I’m utterly convinced that no deity exists that can or will intervene to save us from our plight or from ourselves. Mother Nature has instilled in us the instinct to survive, but She does not control us – WE control us. Our destiny is in our own hands; I worry that we may take over evolution’s job and select ourselves for extinction. If that happens, Nature will be completely indifferent to our demise; our tenure will have been one of the shortest in the four billion year history of life on the planet.