Okay so I'm not really a religious person .If I had to put myself in a category it would be pan-agnostic but generally I call myself nothing. My mom is catholic.She was talking to me about the future and me having kids(maybe) sometime in the future..like late future.She started talking about bring my future kids to church and baptizing them if I have kids.So I told her I would talk to them about religious if I have kids but I wasn't going to impose a belief on them and tell them they have to be what I am or something else and I would let them pick themselves if they want to have a belief because I feel that it's selfish to impose a belief on your kids..So she said she was going to take my kids to church and baptize them than she said that there isn't going to be a problem with taking them to church because I turned out okay and she said she didn't impose on me. I told her that I think if she baptize them that would be imposing her religious views on them.I had to remind her that she was imposing on me earlier today when she brought up being christian and telling me that believing in god will help me in life and I'm hurting myself by not picking a belief.I try to avoid talking about religion with my mom because she turns it into a war.All types of crazy stuff happens when she talks about religion to me...I even asked if we could stop talking about it because I didn't want to offend her with a different opinion.Anyways she still claimed that she wasn't imposing on me and I'm really not sure if I want my possible future kids to go to a church with her because I really think she is going to impose of them instead of letting them decided. Also if my possible future kids do decide to be Christians or whatever than fine..as long as they decided it and not anyone else.
This is a difficult one for a number of reasons, and as I've gotten older, my perspective on it has changed a bit.
When I was younger, I would have more or less agreed with you without hesitation in regards to 'imposing' religious views.
As I've gotten older, however... I've seen how much I've changed in just the past ten years of my life, and both of my parents have been gone for about six years, now.
The idea that a parent can somehow -not- impose upon their child is just not realistic. I learned things from my father just in his confidence to learn and fix everything. There was nothing that man was afraid to do - from engineering parts that are possibly in your car today to gardening strategies - that man had absolutely no fear of learning and doing on his own. In his eyes - hiring a 'professional' was paying someone to do something he didn't want to spend the time on.
My family was very active in the church after I got to be about six or seven years old. Granted - they mostly identified with the Protestant church, namely the Presbyterians - but that's a minor distinction. It was impossible for them to be the people they were and for me not to pick up on that.
My father was a very spiritual person, if not much on religion. Many of his concepts of God have been passed on to me - whether I really wanted them, or not (and it's impossible to say that I was capable of not wanting them as a child). He didn't 'drill' me on God, or anything - that wasn't his style, but it wasn't like I could avoid the exposure to his views, either.
Granted - my views of God aren't necessarily -all- the same, and they are still developing; but in a sense, that is kind of where I was going with this.
It is normal for their parents to educate their kids in as much of what they know and understand to be true. It is, also, normal for children (particularly teens) to seek exposure to new ideas and new things - then refine what their parents taught them with what they have newly experienced through adulthood to form a true sense of individual ideals. The person I am, today, may be far more similar to my father and my mother than I would have thought at 16 (since I knew everything, then, and had the world by the ass...) - but at the same time, I've seen and experienced things that they never had the opportunity to, and that have forced me to reconsider things they knew and accepted to be true.
In that regard, I've come to hold the belief that being concerned about 'imposing' on a child is a bit like being concerned about the water under the bridge. Children will imitate their parents. When I was really young, I wanted to paint my nails with Mom and to help build a new storage shed with Dad. Kids are wired to try to learn everything they can about their parents.
From a spiritual standpoint, I've never understood the fixation upon childhood baptism. From a logical standpoint - I highly doubt God is going to judge a child based upon whether or not his parents had water sprinkled over his head. ... That was until I actually looked at the ritual for children and how it differed (at least in language) from the ritual for adults.
From the standpoint of the Church, childhood baptism is symbolic of the congregation accepting responsibility for the child and his/her upbringing - a sort of community pledge to support that child and his/her parents. It's more for the congregation than the kid.
For adults, it is more about a personal acceptance of God/Jesus. Although I would argue it is more about accepting the journey through faith than it is about actually 'being forgiven.' But that's kind of a minor little quip on my part.
I tend to be the one who advances controversial ideas/interpretations of things within a bible discussion. Again, I somewhat get that from Dad - he loved advancing ideas that challenged one's understanding of things. Even if he didn't think they were 'solutions' in and of themselves, he liked breaking the drum-beat that often develops around meetings and discussions - and I've inherited that. Probably to a fault, since I'm known among my friends as putting forth and advancing absolutely insane ideas.
Of course, many of us were all part of 'gifted' education programs where we routinely exercised 'creative problem solving' - which is basically a process of presenting a wide range of ideas, no matter how insane, and then debating to advance and criticize and merge the various ideas. So we are used to provoking each other with insanity and then feeling very uncomfortable when insanity ends up being the logical solution (or prediction) to things.
Which, even that could be considered 'imposed.'
I tested high enough in IQ tests as a kid that the school decided to place me into a special program designed to try and teach us 'smart' kids how to be even smarter. I was asked, of course, if I wanted to... and of course I did say yes... but I didn't have any real way of having a desire for or against it at the time. I just was bored in normal classes.
That is when we were given those types of creative problem solving challenges. Again - I didn't really ask for these things... They just kind of happened to me. Kids aren't in control of much of the world around them and rely upon adults. Perhaps if they'd never taught me these methods of creative problem solving at such a young age, I'd have never developed many of my own reasoning abilities.
Key to this process was debate and not just including in your final report what you expressed to be a solution, but also ways in which the solution was limited or could fail. In many ways - I never realized until much later in life how -different- of a person this made me from my peers. In many cases - I default to that 'creative problem solving' mode of thinking even when other people don't really see that there's a problem to be solved - or where people don't understand that solving problems isn't necessarily a "by the number" affair where you select the solution from the store shelf and apply it once you've paid.
That... and it's also hilarious to see the reactions people have when I take a very unusual idea and advance it through a barrage of "why would you ever do that, what is wrong with you?"
Anyway - at the end of the day, I think what is most important is that you show your child that you care and to make sure that he/she knows right from wrong. Things are going to happen to that child that are beyond his/her control no matter what you do - and while I agree that children shouldn't be forced into things against their will... the fact is that children have absolutely no capacity to form a will for most things until well into their teenage years where they are looking for new things that they weren't shown as a child.
I couldn't say as a child what I wanted or didn't want outside of more trivial concerns. "I don't want to have everyone watching me" would be why I would shy away from a baptism as a kid. Concepts of spiritual salvation or religious overtones were just beyond my grasp and I really couldn't form a will for or against it. Most of a child's concerns are around the immediate consequences of something - "does it cause pain?" "Am I hungry and want to eat right now rather than ... whatever this is?"
The things I was taught as a child largely built me into who I am, today, and form a lot of my identity. It's logically impossible for me to have a concept of who I wanted to become without any of the ideas that form our identities as adults. I can't know if I'm Christian without understanding what Christian ideals are... and even then - I need a contrasting idea to compare it to (what the teenage and young adult years are about)... otherwise, Christianity is simply the only thing I have a concept of.
Which is why teenagers are almost -always- rebellious to some degree or another. They are seeking new and contradictory things to compare against what they were taught. I know I am re-hashing the point I made, earlier - but it's important to note that teenagers are notoriously seen as rebellious regardless of who taught them or where they come from. They need the experience that comes from challenging what they were taught in order to help build an idea of who they really are as adults.
They also need some of the conflict that arises from it - to engage their parents in a contest of ideas to some degree and to see that their parents weren't just talking out of their ass all their life - that the ideas have merit.
But, I've rambled long enough. I'm starting to repeat myself, and that's never a good sign.
