Scary Bible stories for kids....

[Anne Fidel]

I'm not quite 'out' to my parents about my athiesm, but I believe that they are aware of it. They know that I don't go to church, and therefore my two kids won't be exposed to God on a weekly basis. We debate the Bible at times, but we don't get right down to the question of what exactly I believe, as I'm sure they don't want the answer to that. Anyhow, I was going through my three-year-old's room cleaning it up last night and I found a Noah's Ark book and a baby Jesus book in there. I'm not sure when they slipped these to them, but I was not surprised. :rolleyes: Anyhow, reading through them, I was horrified to see that the Jesus book talks about King Herod wanting to kill the little baby boys. And we all know the sweet sentiments associated with God drowning all the people and animals not on the ark, right? I'm so glad that kid can't read yet. :eek:

The books are going in the trash, as all others before them have. I have such a wonderful relationship with my parents and we're so very close that I hate to get really nasty with them. However, I'll be damned if I have my little boy reading stuff as scary as Stephen King as he grows up because they want him to be 'saved'! :mad: Can they not see that these books are highly inappropriate for young children!?! I remember having nightmares about this stuff! His grandparents won't have him in the room when any kind of violent or scary movie is on television, but they want him to read this crap? I think religion just takes away all sense of perspective from people.

Anyone else experience this? How did you handle it?

[Face]

I read a book (that I would pay large sums of money to be told the title of, so I can buy it now that I am adult), wherein a little boy enters a witch's nest and is turned into a spider, as well as other horrible things that happen to him. It was a kid's book, and it scared me far worse than children's Bible stories. The reason? When my grandparents - Catholics - read me the stories, they were very clear (doing the 'spooky' voice and all) who the Bad Guys were and when something awful had happened. When they read me Children's Stories About God, they made it clear that God was drowning Bad Guys, so it was okay, like a morning cartoon where the good guy kicks the bad guy's butt.

With kids, I figure, it's always in the telling, how you describe what's happening, and how you explain it afterwards. And Christianity has some of the most well-planned child indoctrination methods imaginable.

[Atheos]

I had a lot of bible stories fed to me as a kid. I don't remember being frightened by them because when my mother would tell them to me she always made it quite clear that "God is good" and the people he destroyed were "bad people". I agree with Face, it's all in the presentation.

However, I do remember being wierded out when mom read the story of the woman who drove a nail through that one guy's head. I didn't like the idea of Abraham almost sacrificing Isaac either. I thought Samson was cool, kind of like Superman.

The story of David and Goliath was okay too, even though David chopped off Goliath's head at the end. That's what he deserved for being a big bully.

-Atheos

[Stacey Melissa]

Some ideas....

1. Counteract the violence with some lovin' from the Song of Solomon.*

2. Counteract all the "God is good and only punishes the bad guys" crap with a reading of Job. This should be sufficient to make your son disgusted with the idea of God.

3. Make your son read through all the begats. He'll be too bored with the Bible to continue reading the rest of it.



* I'm just kidding. Sort of.

[SLUGFly]

No no no!!! The songs of Solomon is one of the most beautiful books in the Bible. At www.christianity.com I quoted it in a discussion about vulagarity in modern pop songs (I don't remember the exact context.)

Awake, north wind,
and come south!
Blow on my garden,
that its fragrance may spread abroad.
Let my lover come into his garden
and taste its choice fruits.

I tried looking for it at the christian boards... but I think it got deleted. I couldn't find it no matter what keywords I used. lol This is really funny because this post of mine (which I found while searching for solomon) didn't get deleted:

"I have to tread carefully, I have to speak in a whisper... Had I been a painter... There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies, a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony... helping a callypygean child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the side of juke boxes.... There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child."

It's about a pedophile's first time having sex with a 12 year old girl. lol, they left a book that had been banned in many countries and declared by many to be evil while they deleted the erotic passage (which originally was much longer, I only quoted the end) that comes straight from the bible.

And speaking of "Samson Superman," he was the key figure that turned me into a Christian... well... and a girl in my class that was irresistably cute :)

[Anne Fidel]

Yeah, maybe it is really all in the presentation. Unless the poor kid takes after me, that is, lol. I always was creeped out by those stories as a kid. I think they're gonna have a hard time with this one, as he questions everything already! :D Makes me proud, I tell you. ;)

I won't even read Hansel and Gretel to him, because he'd want to know why their parents were so mean and then he'd probably need reassurance that his father and I wouldn't send him out into the woods all alone.. :p