The bushfires in Melbourne have turned the sun red this morning. Here are a couple of shots I took from our street corner. I’ve told the boys this means we’ll have Kryptonian gravity today and by the time the sun turns yellow again we’ll all have superpowers. Hey, it’s no worse than telling them that Santa is real.
A sweet moment with Hunter last night – they were showing us some pictures they had made at school during the day and Hunter was trying to keep one back from me. When I asked why, it turned out it was a picture of the animals which were involved in the Nativity Play and Hunter said “I didn’t want to show you this one because I know you don’t believe in baby Jesus. I don’t either but they made me do it. I’ll give this one to Mummy instead.”
Awwww. He’s six.
I love it when the kids work out that you’re agnostic – and it’s wonderful that Hunter understands at this point that Santa is real, but the baby Jesus is not. I can only hope for the same with my 2 boys.
Jason, I’m not agnostic, I’m a passionate atheist, or, as Brenton and I decided to call ourselves recently, “realists”.
I’ve just taken some similar pics myself.
no, you are an ego-agnostic.
you’re not sure if YOU are God.
tom
Dear Realist,
You’ve been tagged for your cruel parental ways.
http://tonygoodson.typepad.com/tonygoodson/2006/12/tagged_im_it_5_.html
There is a bush fire in Melbourne? I thought all the bush fires are in Country Victoria and Tasmania (that is causing the smoke)?
On the Santa, Jesus, drawing story, I am more worried that they “forced” him to draw it (unless of course its a Catholic school and wouldn’t that be totally ironic, don’t you think!).
Molly
Cam, I sit in the same club. I don’t like proclaim that people are atheist without knowing if they are or not.
I like the idea of the Steiner school system (in it’s view of theology) in that the white god that we as kids in the mainstream Australia were forced to accept, doesn’t exist singularly, but a whole heap of gods exist (if you want to believe in one).
And you get to choose the god or deity that you want to believe in, if you want to beleive in one at all.
I figured out the santa thing when I was 5. My mother was particularly useless at that sort of thing and when an item of clothing she’d had me try on earlier in the week miraculously appeared in the santa sack I put two and two together.
Strangely enough I used to be Catholic. By my own choice too, but then I started to lose with respect when the priest at my local church started to recycle sermons and then when Colin came I along I ditched it altogether.
I went to a youth group for a while when most of my friends started going and then stayed for a while after i started going out with a girl there – oh the sin of it all ;).
The church was really adamant that you think for yourself and question everything people tell you about the bible to find what god really meant. I did that and ended up questioning the whole thing. I don’t get how these progressive churches survive when they demand such critical thought. I also don’t get how as a society, we can’t come to an ultimate conclusion that it’s all BS (star-signs too). Atheists are too kind to the views of people of faith. Faith is fine for an individual but to force that on children or the conservative preclusions onto science (a la stem cells) is an abomination.
I was under the understanding that even history accepted that Jesus was a real individual. Looking at it from a purely historical perspective. That is; disregarding for a moment the whole deity thing.
This is from Wikipedia:
Of the non-Christian writings from that have been preserved, very few mention Jesus or Christianity, and for that matter few of their authors showed much interest in Judea or the Near East in general. Nonetheless, the works of four major non-Christian historians contain passages relevant to Jesus: Pliny the Younger, Josephus, Suetonius, and Tacitus. However, these are generally references to early Christians rather than a historical Jesus. Pliny condemned Christians as easily led fools. There is an obscure reference to a Jewish leader called “Chrestus” in Suetonius. Tacitus, in his Annals written c. 115, mentions popular opinion about Christus, without historical details (see: Tacitus on Jesus). Of the four, Josephus’ writings, which document John the Baptist, James the Just, and possibly also Jesus, are of the most interest to scholars dealing with the historicity of Jesus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity%20of%20Jesus