I had the following conversation in the car with my boys the other day. Hopefully, I haven't said anything to offend here. And obviously, this isn't word for word. My memory isn't that good and it's paraphrased.
LT: How old is God? Is he one hundred?
Me: God is much older than that. At least thousands of years old. Nobody knows how old God is. He made the world. He was here before anything else.
LT: Is God alive?
Me: No. God is not alive and he's not dead. He's not a person. He's just God.
T: But God was alive once, right?
Me: No. God was never alive. Jesus was alive. He was God's son.
LT: Oh, so God is Jesus's son?
Me: No. Jesus is God's son.
LT: Is there only one God?
Me: Yes and no. Most people you know will tell you there's one God because they're Christian. But there are many different types of religions and some people believe there is more than one God. Most of those religions are older, but some people still believe in different gods. The Greeks and Romans believed there were all different gods - a sun god, moon god, god of love, god of war. They had gods for everything. And the American Indians believe in lots of different gods too.
T, do you know what we call a religion that only believes in one God?
T: No.
Me: That's monotheism. And religions that believe in more than one god are called polytheistic. So there's monotheism, and polytheism. Most people that we know are Christians and the are monotheistic. And Christianity is made up of different religions too. Most people we know are Catholic or Protestant, but there is also Judaism and Islam. Catholics and Protestant are similar in what they believe. Jewish people also believe in God, but they do not believe that Jesus was God's son. People who believe in Islam are called Muslim. They believe in one God too, they call him Allah, and they believe in the Bible, but they also have another holy book called the Koran.
And these are just the Christian religions. There are all different kinds of religions - Buddhism, Hindu and many others.
LT: So there's lots of gods?
Me: Most people we know believe in one God, and they will get angry if you say there is more than one.
T: Why will they get angry?
Me: Because people want to think that what they believe is right. Lots of religious people think that their religion is best and that everyone else should go to their church. Not everyone, but lots of people. So you have to be very careful what you say about God, religion and church around other people, especially people you don't know very well.
This is why Mommy doesn't like religion very much. Churches do lots of great things, like soup kitchens where they feed people who are poor and don't have a home, they raise money for people who are sick. But they do some bad things too. Sometimes they're mean to people who don't believe what they do. And sometimes they even convince people to go to war and kill people who don't believe in their religion. Many, many people have died because of religion. I think we should be able to have all the good parts of the church without all of the bad parts.
T: I never knew that.
He has an excuse. He's only eight.
Don't you wish you had time to prepare for these huge, existential conversations with your kids? I mean, it's not like I haven't given this topic some serious thought, and have some historical and religious knowledge to explain this. But I would have done some reading the night before if I'd known I was going to give a twenty minute lecture on God and religion the following day.
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