Posted by: wasim | 6th Jun, 2006

Letters to God from kids

as-salaamu alaikum

The professor I work for forwarded me images of about 20 one-sentence letters from kids to God.  Some were very amusing, others reminded me of the innocence of being a child.  Anyway, here are two of my favorites:

Letters to God from Kids

Don’t these letters remind you of letters to the toothfairy or Santa Claus?  

One kid writes: “I keep waiting for spring but it doesn’t come.  Don’t forget.”  His sense that God, not the planetary tilt towards the sun, controls the seasons is a basic premise of pure monotheism as understood in Islam.

So I naturally thought about how society (science class, TV, vogue deconstructionism) will inevitably lead many of these believing kids to atheism.  I really do believe that our society, and particularly TV and many public schools promote atheism.  I am not one to support group prayer in school, or benedictions or Lord’s prayers at football games and convocations, but I don’t think it is right to raise children to think that science and God are incompatible.  If the sun predictably (or scientifically) tilts towards and away from the sun each year, does that really mean that there isn’t some higher power controlling the movements?

 I am reminded of this year’s Muslim Youth Camp theme, “wa huwa alaa kulli shay’in qadeer” (And He has power over all things), a phrase which is found in the Qur’an.  Many of these kids believe in the idea of an omnipotent God, and I hope they hold to that idea throughout their lives in sha Allah.

Categories:

« Redundant American Muslim Groups
Drawings and Islam »

Responses

Good thoughts, my friend. They are certainly on a lot of minds these days. In particular the “culture war” within western society and against it seems to be an outgrowth of the fear that enlightnement values are incompatible with faith in God. If you have a moment for my rambling, though, I can strike a more hopeful note.
My own life has taken a somewhat unexpected turn into the realm of earth science, which – as you fear may happen to children who encounter society as a disillusioning force – has called most of my Catholic faith into question. But instead of moving me to atheism as you suggested might occur, my discoveries in the realms of geology, biology and climatology have proven incompatible with the absence of God. I’m certainly not the first to say so, but the sheer size and complexity of the world we know is a miracle. Every system I uncover – food chains, orbital cycles, natural selection, shifting continents – reinforces the idea that God is at work. Only we humans are playing a much smaller part in creation than our religious leaders would have us believe. I think we are blessed only in that we have been allowed to grasp the vastness.
Archbishop Ussher – a Catholic – set the age of the earth as 6,002 years. He was off by about four billion! Desperate proponents of intelligent design feel that the absence of explanation in evolution is explanation in itself. So ignorance is bliss! There are multitudes who take the sweeping poetry of Genesis and the opening sections of the Qur’an in the most literal manner – was the world created in seven days and do mountains hold down the carpet of the flat earth? – and it’s not clear that they aren’t meant to do so. My exasperation with religion as we know it doesn’t move me to atheism nonetheless. I am simply agnostic.
I believe that science is completely compatible with the idea of God. I only feel that religion has failed to see truth where it is obvious.

-Bill

By: Bill Boykin-Morris on August 8th, 2006
at 9:36 am

Leave a response






Your response:

Categories

Protected by Akismet • Blog with WordPress