How to Live a Meaningful Life Without Religion
Five things I learned from three years on the trail of godless America.
By Katherine Ozment | Boston Daily | September 2, 2016, 10:43 a.m.
In January 2013, I published an article in Boston magazine called “Losing Our Religion” about raising kids without religion. The story started out small, as a personal question I wanted to answer for myself and my family: What did we lose when we left the spiritual flock we were raised in? Did our kids need God to be good? Just as I started to dig into the story, the Pew Research Center released startling figures: Nearly 20 percent of Americans no longer affiliated themselves with organized religion, the largest proportion of religiously unaffiliated Americans ever recorded.
Called “Nones” because they check the box that reads “None of the Above” when asked their religion, the group is made up of atheists, agnostics, the spiritual but not religious, lapsed Catholics and Jews, and people who just don’t care. Now, four years after those surprising figures were released, the numbers are higher still—nearly 25 percent of the country today, including 35 percent of Millennials, are Nones.
After my article came out, I was invited to give a few talks in the Boston area, and at one of them a new father raised his hand and said he understood the trend away from religion, but he didn’t understand where he and his family could find shelter from consumer pressures, the work-a-day world, and the 24-hour news cycle. Though I had explored a few secular alternatives to religion in my article, I couldn’t fully answer his question. I needed to know more, which is how my book, Grace Without God: The Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging, was born. Three years, hundreds of interviews, and untold hours of travel around the country later, here are some of the most valuable insights I gained about how to live a meaningful life without religion:
1. You don’t have to believe in God to raise good kids.
Religiosity per se is no indicator of a child’s moral development. Research shows that what influences children’s morality more than anything else is their parents’ sensitivity to the feelings of others and to injustice. Even one-year-old children of such parents demonstrated a greater sense of right and wrong in laboratory-based tests. Our children are watching our every move, which means parents have more power to replace bygone Sunday sermons with our own secular values than we may realize.
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2016/09/02/life-without-religion/
= new reply since forum marked as read
