And it might offend some people, but this has been on my mind a lot recently. 

First of all let me say that A. I was raised in a very christian family, and B. I was homeschooled for many years.  So I’m not just trying to bash a bunch of people who I know nothing about. All of what I’m about to say is based off of things I have experienced first hand. 

I was pricing books today for the book sale and putting them in to various categories, classics, biographies, etc. I went to put one book in the religion section and my mom stopped me and told me that it belonged in the education section.  I looked closer at the book and realized that it was actually a science book. Just a science book published by a christian company to “teach science in a Godly way.” there were also books for teaching math, english, and other subjects in a Godly manner. Now, I haven’t read this particular book, but I have seen other religious text books, and I honestly think these do way more harm than good.

Atheists do math the same way that Christians do, they read the same waythat Christians do, there’s no reason for them to have separate math and english books. and whether or not you like it, science works the same way whether you are an Atheist, Christian or Scientologist. And there are things that kids need to know. You can believe in God and believe in science. (I do) It’s okay if you don’t believe in global warming, some people don’t. But the Bible doesn’t really count as scientific evidence for environmental changes. It’s okay to tell your child that the earth was made by God and not a big bang - but telling your kid that the ice age never happened isn’t cool. 

You can tell your child that sex exists without encouraging them to get pregnant at 14. You can encourage them to wait for marriage and still let them know how babies are made.  I’m not saying that you should be showing “Blue Velvet” to your first grader but if your daughter gets to college and still does not know how sex works (this happens, I know you think that this couldn’t happen, but it does -I’ve seen it*) then you have a problem. 

You can have open, honest conversations about issues, you can tell your kids that there are bad things out there and that you don’t agree with some things. But you can still teach them how to deal with these things and make religious and moral decisions about them. You can let your kids know how the world works so that they’ll be ready to face it one day. Hiding them from everything doesn’t do a lot. I was probably more sheltered as a child than a lot of people, and I still had all the normal stereotypical issues in high school, I know people who were way more sheltered than me who had way more issues.  I also know non sheltered kids who grew up to be crazy. The fact is that Atheist or Catholic your child is going to grow up to to have some kind of issues, you can’t prevent that but you can help them learn to deal with it by allowing them to know the facts of life. You should just be honest. 

This is just my take on the matter. 

*just to be clear, this did not happen to me