Let the small gods live on in

In an era of crumbling secular belief systems, what can atheist parents give to their children in the place of religion? Carlos Amato weighs up the options

When I was eight, my Waldorf School class went for a camp on a biodynamic farm called Bloublommetjieskloof in the Boland. We were taught how to churn butter and stare at goats, and one rainy night we slept in a forest, in shelters made of grass and sticks that we had built with our bare, bourgeois hands. That was a life-changing experience for me — I’ve hated camping ever since.

The next day, we weeded a field under the supervision of the camp host — the late, great Jeanne Malherbe, who was a formidable pioneer of sustainable farming in South Africa. We were sitting and yanking out weeds when she pointed to a cowpat, and asked us to note its distinctive shape. “That spiral form that you see is the cow echoing the spiral movements of the stars and planets

in the sky,” she said. Even though I knew nothing about fluid dynamics, I could tell just by looking at the evidence that Malherbe’s theory was a load of kak.

Even so, I didn’t raise my hand and say to Malherbe: “I don’t believe you.” I just nodded and smiled, partly because I wanted to believe her. Because I loved the idea that cows drew a little flow chart of the cosmos every time they took a dump. It was funny and beguiling, and I never forgot it.

Was Malherbe telling us a big, steaming lie — or was she simply giving us something delightful for our brains to seize on, and use as we chose? The easy answer is both, I suppose.

But the answer gets more difficult if we sharpen the question: If you’re an atheist parent, what do you tell your inquiring children about religion and its absence?

The other day, I was reading my three-year-old son a picture book — Tabby Mctat, The Busker’s Cat, by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. He is a connoisseur of towers, and he spotted a church steeple poking from the background of a London street scene.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s a church,” I said.

“What’s a church?

I paused for a second.

“It’s a place where people go to sing songs.”

As parental cop-outs go, it wasn’t a biggie. It was bedtime, and I reckoned both of us were too tired for a discussion about gods. He’s also about three years too young for that discussion, and I felt about three years too old for it.

But the exchange did alert me to the task that awaits my wife and me in the years ahead. I suppose that task will be easier than the related one facing religious parents, who must surely feel obliged to give their children a robust argument for their own brand of faith, one that stands up to the formidable weight of the case against. In the long run, the odds of success in that project are not good.

But the atheist or agnostic parent has another, possibly bigger problem: How do you offer your children a godless belief system that is as emotionally energising and consolatory as religion (in its gentler variations) can be? To put it more graphically, if you can’t put stars in their cow shit, then what else can you put in it?

(If you’re a parent already, it’s way too late to become a devotee of the world-renowned University of Cape Town philosopher David Benatar, who argues that having children at all serves to increase the sum of human suffering and should be avoided purely on ethical grounds. He states baldly that our pleasures in life are outweighed by all the pain we have to wade through, from grief to trauma to the myriad small affronts of being cold or hot or hungry or sore or bored. His “antinatalist” verdict on the human experience is impressively chilly, but perhaps the act of reading Benatar is itself the tipping point that makes your life a pointless ball-ache. In any event, his message is not suitable for children.)

The long ideological sales pitch we make to our children is made for our own sake as much as theirs. It’s a defence of our status as domestic authorities. Children are a tough crowd — they have the critical distance of Martian emissaries, and they’re not afraid to use it. So we need to get our story straight if we want to have some clout in their lives. If we want them to behave, in other words, without resorting to authoritarian or violent parenting.

And just like religious believers, we self-satisfied atheists have learnt to ignore the cracks between our professed convictions and our actions. A large proportion of atheists are middle class. Most of us believe that gross economic inequality is morally indefensible, but we don’t transfer property or advantages to people who are poorer or less advantaged than us. We don’t actively support humanitarian causes as readily as religious people do. We may believe that capitalism is an evil economic system, but we don’t abandon it to barter eggs for toast in anarchist communes. We may believe that anthropogenic climate change is real, but we don’t eliminate our carbon footprints. (Congratulations to any unbelievers who have done all these things, but I’m not talking to you.)