Do atheists indocrinate their children into their belief system?

I can go you one better. I'm an atheist who had atheist parents so I can give you a 64-year perspective on the subject. My mother was raised in an atheist household even though her parents had been raised Catholic. My father was raised with some vague ceremonial Episcopal aura, such as church on Easter, but there was no belief; his father came from a Jewish family.

There was no "indoctrination" in our home. I saw the same images of Christianity that any kid would see growing up in Chicago, such as people filing into funny-looking buildings with pointy things on top on Sunday mornings. I never expressed any curiosity in this, it was just one of the many strange things that grownups do, and I already knew that there was no such thing as "standard" grownup behavior. My parents never had occasion to answer a question from me. We celebrated Christmas and Easter in the traditional Fraggle family manner, with lots of food and presents (even on Easter). We always had a pretty spiffy Christmas tree and I never wondered about the motivation behind it: just one more of those strange things grownups do. I guess somewhere along the way they had "indoctrinated" me in the Santa Claus and Easter Bunny myths about where the presents came from, or perhaps I just picked it up from other kids. In any case another kid told me the truth before I was old enough to raise my own objections to the story, and I remember thinking, "Ah, some of the things grownups do are starting to make sense. It is they who buy the presents."

Despite all of these religious motifs all over Chicago, especially in the Bohemian ghetto (we call them "Czech" now--grownups have not stopped doing strange things) where everybody except my mother's family was devoutly Catholic, and surely despite overheard conversations about religious topics, no one ever talked to me directly about religion, much less in an evangelical fashion.

My parents never mentioned religion at home, they had no reason to. And none of their friends did when they came over, even the Bohemians.

When I went off to first grade, Christmas became a joyful experience because we got to learn Christmas carols; this was probably the first time I got to sing. "Away in a manger. . . the little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head," "Hark, the herald angels sing glory to our newborn King," "Joy to the world, the Lord is come," I sang them all and loved them all and I never wondered what the strange words meant. I was pretty sure grownups had written those songs so it was just more of the strange stuff they do.

Bear in mind that I had seen grownups wrap ties around their necks, go to the bank and argue about funny little pieces of paper with the ladies behind the counter, throw U-shaped chunks of cast iron at a stake in the ground, and lift a trap door on the front of their car and pour huge cans of soda pop into it like it was thirsty. So all this religious stuff wasn't really any stranger than that stuff. At least we got presents and songs and candy and fancy dinners out of it!

Finally when I was seven a little boy in school started telling me about this person named "God" who lived up in... well I guess it was the clouds because he kept looking up at the sky when he said it. It was a fun story, the kind that kids make up all the time because kids' creativity is not inhibited by conventions. It was so good that I started laughing with him... except he wasn't laughing and got really distressed over the fact that I was.

Suddenly the truth dawned on me. This was one of those fairytales parents tell their kids, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. By this time he was too upset for me to gently tell him the truth like one of my little friends had told me.

When I got home I told my parents about it and asked where that fairytale came from because it was a good one and I'd never heard it before. But I wondered why his parents had still not told him the truth. They gave each other that Silent Meaningful Look that always means something really heavy is coming down and you just ain't got no idea what the hell it's gonna be. "Sit down, Li'l Fraggle. This is going to be a really long story and you're not going to believe it."

It turns out that most grownups don't ever tell their kids the truth about it. "Well okay," I said, "but kids figure out the truth about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny even if nobody tells them. This story is a lot dumber than that story. Don't kids figure it out by themselves?"

It turns out that the grownups keep telling the kid it's a true story, and every time he comes to them with a question about some really weird part of the religion, they just give him an even weirder answer. Eventually the kid gets to be a grownup himself, except for that one leftover thing from childhood, the belief in an obviously stupid fairytale, so he tells it to his own kids. Eventually practically everybody thinks it's true.

We went on about how even if a lot of people think something, you're still supposed to make up your own mind, but apparently not everybody teaches their children that. I ran into this same stupid thing a couple of years later, the first time I met a little boy whose skin was a darker color than my skin, in a hospital playground while my mother was visiting a sick friend. None of other kids wanted to play with him, but I wasn't going to base my behavior on what they thought. I went over and played with him because he looked like a nice kid. Sure enough, he was, and I had a great time with him.

When my mother came out and saw us together she started crying. All the way home on the streetcar she couldn't stop hugging me and telling me what a good boy I was because I knew better than to do something stupid just because everybody else thought it was right.

All these decades later, I still have trouble understanding why skepticism isn't more prevalent. Why people don't start laughing at religion when they're seven years old and haven't been taught "manners" yet.

I understand about cognitive dissonance, and I lecture you folks about instinctive archetypal beliefs, and I talk about how it's taken twelve thousand years to make the transition from primitive Mesolithic hunter-gatherers so it may take twelve thousand more for us to finally outgrow religion. I mystify Sam when I assure her that it's not very difficult to hate religion and still love religious people, just like I hate opera but don't have a problem with people who love it. I understand how comforting it must be to not only believe that Jesus was a real person but that he's still alive.

Still, I can't get over the vivid recollection of that little boy telling me something so absurd that a seven-year-old could see right through it, wondering what was wrong with him.

And still, despite the archetypes and the cognitive dissonance and the slow march of civilization, occasionally I can't stop myself from wondering what's wrong with all these grownups who can't see through it.

The Winter Solstice celebration goes back thousand of years before Jesus. After all, the Romans moved the date of Jesus's birth four months ahead in order to co-opt the Saturnalia festival and make it Christian. The biblical story, correlated with Roman records about census and tax procedures, clearly places the nativity in the spring. Our word "Yule" is taken from a much older festival; "Christmas" was coined around Shakespeare's time. Trees were an integral part of the winter festival among the Germanic people, but the bedecked indoor Christmas tree as we know it seems to have been invented in Germany in the 16th century.