What do you tell your 11 year old when she asks why her school is lying to her about God and how the world was

Question

created?

Answer 1

I ask my eleven year old to listen carefully and critically to what everyone says. She is at the age now where she can understand that people disagree, so she can't believe everything she hears.

Teach her to love everyone, even those who teach what is incorrect. Some do it from ignorance, some from spite, but most from a combination of the two. Choose "misinform" rather than "lie" (otherwise she'll think they're intentionally misleading her. They've usually deceived themselves first before they misinform others.

Make sure she gets a healthy dose of Christian education too. Sunday school classes and Bible studies will help her emotional stabilization in a world that will misinform her. Her paying close attention to everything she hears will better prepare her to be used by God to spread light in the darkness of this world.

Answer 2

Tell her that not every body believe the same things or even in the same way.

Tell her that they are not lying to her in school: they are just telling her what other poeple think about God and other subjects. She should discuss this with you at home and maybe with her teacher after school so she can make her own mind and still respect other people believes and curriculum!

Schools, (all schools) try to model and mold children to one of the two or three society standards. Even if it is reducing the individual in many ways, they're still good things that school give to children.

The thing here is to conform enough to school to be able to fit into society now and later, but keep who she is so she won't be just "another brick in the wall". This is a delicate balance.

Good luck

Answer 3

If she is confused, you should give her all of the info on her beliefs, and the teachings in school and tell her to make her own decision regardless of your thoughts. If you brought her up one way, she will probably go with it, but try anyway. Tell her that the school may not be lying, and that there may not be a god. Don't force her to think like you, or she will likely switch when she is older. One person felt the same way as you, so they started the religion of the flying spaghetti monster.

Answer 4

it is way past time to tell your daughter that you guys made a choice to believe a certain way, that not everyone shares this, that you live in a wonderful country where no one is forced to believe in or practice a religion they don't share, and that she must make up her own mind based on evidence.

Hopefully, you are not teaching your child that ancient mythology is science. the bible says so many things that are not factually true - the sun can't be made to stand still in the sky because it doesn't move, the mustard seed is not the smallest seed, etc. Not to mention that genesis has two accounts of creation and they differ. (And were the dinos not on the Ark, did they somehow fit on the arK, were they swimming alongside, why didn't the animals attack each other, how could they have repopulated the earth since the bible says noah sacrificed many, why was noah drunk and why did he punish his son who saw him like that? )

Jews will tell you that they do not take genesis literally and are dumbfounded, amazed, and blown away that fundamentalist christians, totally lacking in understanding of these ancient myths and the culture they spring from, like to pretend that they are fact, not metaphor.

Please stop teaching your daughter myth as if it were fact. Read, "Misquoting Jesus" and learn how the bible was assembled. I don't mean the silly Da Vinci code stuff, I mean, learn how many errors, contradictions, cross-outs, ommissions, and additions there are in these texts. Learn that none of them come from the time of Christ.

Learn that evolution doesn't mean we descended from monkeys. Learn something, anything, but please stop training your daughter to shut off her brain in order to function with the myths you are teaching her. So sad. So Sad.

Answer 5

You teach her that many “scientists” believe in evolution, which they say takes millions of years. You point out that to believe this, they cannot accept that God created everything in 6 days. You point out that many who believe this have never looked at the evidence that contradicts this view. They simply believe what their professor taught them, and he simply believes what his professor taught him. Some that have looked at some of the evidence, instead of developing their view based on the evidence, they have judged the evidence based upon their view. Anything that seems to contradict their evolutionary view is rejected as “faulty evidence”. You tell her that they have built their carrier on proving evolution, and they know if anything disproves it or causes it to be questioned, they loose their position of prestige as an “authority” on the subject, therefore, creationist evidence threatens them.
But you teach her that there are scientists that do believe in God. There are fossils that suggest a young earth. There are fossils that show that men and dinosaurs lived at the same time. There are ancient forms of art that show drawings and sculptures of dinosaurs. There are ancient stories of “dragons” all over the world. (Remember “dinosaur” is a new word developed in the 1900’s. Before this they would have been called something else.) You tell her to look at all of the evidence.

Look at the web-sites listed below. (By the way, the book “Dinosaurs Unleashed” available on the Apologetics Press web-site is great!)

Answer 6

Keep everything calm, positive and in the spirit of love:

Calmly explain that there are those that do not believe in God, and do not understand what it is to have unconditional love in their lives. Explain how lucky she is that not only does she have her earthly family to love her, but her Heavenly one also. She is at the point whereby she must learn to respect other viewpoints, religions and beliefs that are not hers, nor her families, but that does not mean that she must lose her faith or beliefs. She gets to have a great honour in being able to pray for these people and love them regardless of what they think. She has been given the opportunity to show a school at a young age what love really is and care about them even though they are wrong about God and to truly live out Jesus' commandments - to love no other above God and to love your neighbour as he has loved us.

I think keeping it positive and allowing her to have an active role in the discussion along with active prayer as a family based on loving these people would help her. These are things that we as adults have to fight with ourselves against the secular world. It's a shame she has to start at such a young age.

And I agree with Conrad, placing her in a Christian school would be best if you're able to afford it, if it means sacrificing, then so be it. Ideally, she should be allowed to be a child still at that age.

God bless you and I will pray for you and your family.

Answer 7

Put her in a Christian school and don't think twice about the price, it is worth it. There is much much more than just lying about God and creation, that is only the tip of the iceberg. A child does not make up its own mind we are to raise them in the truth. Sacrafice whatever you must, but put your children in private school, in the end you will save them a lot of problems and confusion..

Answer 8

You teach her what faith and belief is. You DO NOT undermine her teacher, unless you want her to be skeptical of everything she is learning in school. Unless you have scientific proof of God's existence. Which happens to be a logical impossibility as proof of God would destroy faith, which is what religion is all about. I had one parent that made the mistake of telling me the teacher was wrong, when I brought that up in class I was shown proof of what was being taught. Beyond that, it is horribly ignorant for man to assume he knows the methods that God employed in "creating" the universe. I am agnostic. Hope that helps.

Answer 9

Read the bible with her and tell discuss the creation version, read her some other creation myths, then find a children's level evolution book. Read that with her and talk about it. Explain to her that their are many ideas as to how man came to be and no way to prove who is right. The school may be incorrect, but they are not lying to her. Tell her they are only telling what they believe.

Answer 10

Well I guess she must still believe in Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, Chaunaka Harry and the Tooth Fairy too. Anybody who believes in creationism and passes it off as real has something real all right..... Real problems. The creation myth is just that, myth. It isn't even a Jewish myth either, it's Sumarian retold by the Babalonians and then co-opted by the Jews, then enslaved by the babalonians. Teaching a child myth as fact is tantamount to abuse.