A Mother Answers a Five-Year-Old's Questions About God (Part One)

I have a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and the conversations I hear and imagine between mother and child are fascinating and frequently take an unanticipated turn.  The following conversations took place on a road trip, which is often a place where extended conversations can take place.  It's clear that parents who have not anticipated and prepared for these questionings can find themselves getting in deeper and deeper.  (I made a note of a couple of spots that proved problematic). So here is the first of several installments.7

Does God have a peepee?
Yes, honey.  We know that because God is a man, and men have peepees.

Does God have to pee?
I don't know.  I guess so. (This is  where she went wrong, I think)

Does he have a toilet?
No.  He pees into the clouds so that makes rain!.

Does it get on us when it rains?
No!  He pees over the oceans so it doesn't get on anybody.

Does he drink water?
He can drink anything He wants.

Where does he get stuff to drink?
He probably sends his angels to get some for him. I think there is milk in the Milky Way.

Do they go to the store like we do?
No.  I think they get it from the sky.

Can we see them get it from the sky?
Sometimes you can.  They look like a streak of light, because they go so fast.  Some stupid people call them 'shooting stars'. But they're angels getting milk for God.

God is real big, isn't He?
Yes, of course.

So his peepee would be real real real big too.
I suppose so.

Would it be bigger than Daddy's?
Oh yes. Definitely. A lot.

At this point snickering and outright giggles from other passengers brought this particular interchange to a halt. A brief halt for beverages and gasoling intervened.  After the break the same two people  are involved in the subsequemt conversation.  I think it should be clear by now that making things up as you go along can be a lot trickier than you might have thought, and the conversations take you to very peculiar places when they are not planned.

Does God wear clothes?
I think so.

Where does He get them.
From the God Sky Store, I think.

Does He have to give them money?
No. It's His store.  It's the God Sky Store.

Can we go to that store, the God Sky Store?
Maybe when we get old and die.

Dead people go to the God Sky Store?
Um, yes, I guess they do.   (This turned out to be a mistake, I think)

What do they do there, the dead people?
I think they put things on the shelves so God can find them.

Where do they get stuff big enough to make clothes for God?
Way, way out in the sky past the stars is the Big Stuff Place.  That's where they get it.

Does it grow there?
Yes.  They grow Big Stuff and they sew it together on Big Machines for God.

So when we die do we have to go to the God Sky Store and work?
I suppose so.  Either there or the Big Stuff Place.

I don't think I want to go there..
Well, you have to.  We all have to.  It's just the way things are.

How do you know?
They told me at church.

How do they know at church?
I think God or one of the angels told them.

Have you ever seen one?
No. But they told me they did.

Do God and angels talk to some people and tell them things?
Yes.  That's how we know these things.

Did God ever talk to you?
No.  Not really.

Did an angel talk to you?
No.

Just to other people?
Yes.

Why not to you?
I don't know.  I suppose you have to be very special for God or an angel to talk to you.

I wish I was special.
You are to me.

But not to God?
No, I guess not. But everybody is special to God.  Just some people are more special than others.

Does God only speak to the Special People?
Yes.  It's always been that way.  And the Special People write it down and they tell us.

How does God know which people are Special People?
I don't know.  I think the Special People must be very very good people.

I've been very very good.
Yes, you're a very good child.

But I peed in my bed once.
Yes, but all children do that.  That doesn't make them bad.

Even Baby Jesus? 
Yes, even Baby Jesus.

I wish God thought I was special so He would talk to me.

This discussion definitely took an unforeseen turn.  I plan to listen carefully in the future and make better notes.

Bumper stickers

Sometimes sitting in a line of traffic I have more time than is probably good for me.  I may find myself reading faded bumper stickers on the car ahead of me.  They are frequently all over the back of the car, as if the owner of the car was just too full of wisdom (or something) to hold it all in.

I understand those stickers that advertise some service or product the owner of the car clearly has a stake in.  Advertising is advertising, after all.  But I find myself wondering what is being advertised (and why) when the car has descriptions and numbers for all the kids, pets and awards the owner of the car is connected with. Having an "A" student, no matter how briefly, is a matter of some pride, but of course the sticker remains long after the student is no longer a student.  Why does someone want others to know how many children he has?  Is that considered some form of recommendation?  Why would someone expect others to have even a passing interest in what kind of dogs they like and how many they have?

I am also perplexed by the stickers advertising religious beliefs.  The beliefs are frequently somewhat unusual ones, but there are many that simply espouse Christianity or Judaism or Wicca or just religious tolerance.  Perhaps these are all good things. Even so, how many people do you know who were converted to a religion or made more tolerant by a bumper sticker?  My suspicion is the the owner of the religious car is essentially bragging about his/her feelings of superiority to the owners of the cars behind him. "See what I think? Don't you wish you were me?"  A simple "Sucks to be you" or "You're behind me so I win" should be enough to cover the whole gamut.

I am particularly bemused by the worn and fading political stickers.  I notice that the older stickers are never, ever, about a current incumbent.  They are always about a loser that we hardly remember.  When slogans are included, they are about as relevant as "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too".  Maybe it's because all the candidates looked a lot better before they were elected.

I do briefly enjoy the humorous stickers.  Some are quite amusing and improve the waiting period before the traffic moves on.  There are fairly few new ones, so it doesn't take long or many repetitions before they become tedious.

All told, I suspect there is a negative correlation between number and kind of bumper stickers and intelligence, but if you are a car owner who has a lot of bumper stickers, you probably won't understand this sentence. Try this one:  Lots of bumper stickers=IQ below room temperature.  After hearing the last sentence a family member suggested that we need a sticker on the back of our car that says "Snark Aboard".  What did she mean by that?

Religion and conflict

In recent book (The God Delusion), Richard Dawson takes a hard line as not just an atheist but as an anti-theist.  He regards religious beliefs as dangerous in themselves for a variety of reasons which need not be considered here.

He seems to think the world would be a better place without religion.  He would regard religion as a source of the worst conflicts, the poorest quality of thinking and the cause of the prevalence of non-humanist values.  He might well think we would have fewer conflicts in a more skeptical world.   I think he is an optimist.  As a psychologist I understand that conflicts between groups, sometimes in the name of religion, result in widespread conflict and war.  I don't agree with him that religion causes these phenomena.

Instead I think intergroup conflicts are an essential part of human group conduct.  Religion, like politics or race, can be enlisted in the aid of group formation and inter-group conflict. In my opinion we would have precisely the same conflicts without religion, under different heading and flying different flags.  Conflict is what we humans do to establish our membership in our group.  The existence of other groups is necessary so that ours can have conflicts to strengthen our boundaries.  We use religion to justify this set of boundary operations, but we can and do use lots of other justifications.

In my opinion, the presence or absence of religion has little effect on intergroup conflict, which is part of the human condition, at least in this stage of our development.  Religion, in fact, is essentially irrelevant even though it sometimes promulgates benevolent ideas.  It's unfortunate that the majority of people professing religious beliefs don't act on or embody those beliefs, so their religion is just something to make them feel more comfortable personally. The people who talk the loudest about the religious life and religious values don't seem to have any better moral sense than non-religious people.  From my standpoint religion is pretty silly, and I'm sorry to see money wasted on religious items (such as churches) when such funds could be put to much better use helping the poor or improving medical treatment or research.

If we didn't kill each other in the name of religion, we'd just find some other excuse. Nothing seems to appeal as much as being "right" at someone else's expense and then proving it by killing them.

The "Taffy" Personality

It's really amazing how totally flexible our values are.  There's lots of evidence for that statement.  Think of the kidnappings in which the victim becomes attached to the kidnapper and doesn't run away, even when given the opportunity.  Consider the Stockholm Syndrome.  Leon Festinger demonstrated this with Korean War captives.

As we change our behaviors to better conform to the circumstances we are in, so do our values and ultimately the "inner self" that we usually regard as who we are as a person.  "Temporary" changes also in turn change us, and our values and preferences gradually shift to conform to the "temporary" changes we made.  Eventually we are different people.

Even behaviors that we regard as "symptomatic" of a mental disorder represent current values of ourselves and our circumstances.  If you are depressed, begin telling yourself you are worthless and begin acting as if you were worthless, your feelings will match your behaviors, but more importantly, your own values of yourself as a person begin to change to match your symptomatic behaviors.

A way of slowly becoming less anxious and less depressed is to act less anxious and depressed.  It may take months but our feelings and sense of self will shift to match our behaviors and new choices that govern those new behaviors.

All such "temporary" changes become more and more permanent.  When we divorce and marry again, eventually we change to become the person that fits our new relationship.  Our values and preference change and we become a different person than we were.  It certainly would be interesting to investigate how a spy "going undercover" may end up becoming the person he/she pretends to be;  are undercover police and spies changed by their experiences in the direction of their pretended selves?  Theory would suggest they would do so.

I have begun to think of the personality as resembling taffy.  Put a little pressure on for a long enough time, and .. squoosh!