Yesterday, my son, who is five, informed me that “God lives very far away on a shiny cloud.”
Excuse me?
Allow me to digress for a moment and inform all of my readers (yes, both of you) that I am an avowed atheist. There may be higher powers in the universe other than Ted Koppel - damn he’s good - but I refuse to believe in a bearded old man sitting on a throne deciding that I am going to have a flat tire and come in to work late, therefore sacrificing a pay raise, thus preventing me from paying my mortgage on time, thus being evicted, thus leading my family to eke out a miserable existence on the street while I slowly die from lead poisoning. That view of ‘God’ just doesn’t do it for me.
But, as I said, I digress. I haven’t discussed God with my son yet - he is only five, after all. I figured I had another few years to figure out what the hell I was going to tell the kid. So I immediately asked him how he was privy to that information. (Okay, okay… I actually said “Who told you that?”) At which point he told me that he was told this by his cousin, my six-year-old niece.
It’s okay, I tell myself. I can deal with this. After all - and here’s another difference ‘twixt me and many of the babbling bible born-agains - I don’t want to push my beliefs onto anyone else. If you want to believe in a crocodile god that lives in a sacred thimble and dispenses justice with His raspberry jellyroll, more power to you. Just don’t ask me to sacrifice a goldfish with you.
Let me digress again for a moment. It may not be the idea of God that I disagree with, per se, but rather his followers, to paraphrase a bumper sticker. Organized religion sucks, leading to war, mass executions and bad knees. (I was best man at a Catholic wedding about ten years ago. Never have I kneeled and stood and kneeled so much. My knees still hurt.) Not to mention the fact that if you happen to be a musician, some of those hymns hurt almost as much as your knees.
So I told my son, in the best five-year-old-speak I could muster, that each individual has his or her own beliefs about God, and that he should never let anyone else tell him what he should believe. I think he kind of got it, although he was paying more attention to his Happy Meal than he was to me (shameless corporate plug there - I get a quarter if you visit the golden arches after reading this.) I also told him that I don’t think God’s cloud is shiny, because that could really end up hurting your eyes after a few millennia.
I wonder if what I told him was wrong. Perhaps we should let those who are infinitely more intelligent, beautiful and superior (Matt? Katie? Oprah? Are you listening?) decide for us what we should and shouldn’t believe. But I refuse to watch Fox News, so it’s gonna have to be CNN.
The Great Crocodile likes Anderson Cooper.
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