There’s a great post on Unreasonable Faith by guest blogger Vincent Skolny (of Avangelism.com) about kids, their understanding of death, and the nature of reality.
He writes about his three-year-old daughter’s understanding of death as it relates to a recently-deceased family cat… and herself.
A small excerpt from the conclusion:
Death isn’t confusing at all: We’re gone and won’t be seen anymore. What makes death confusing and confuses children is pretending that dead people (or cats) are really somehow still alive. Or anything other than what they are: dead and gone.
Reality is seldom as confusing as lying about it.
Religion seems to be an extremely complex avoidance of the simplicity of reality. Sure, if you get down into the details of biology, astronomy, geology, paleontology, and other sciences, there are some pretty tricky details but, in general, reality is pretty straightforward. Obscuring it with unnecessary supernatural explanations seems a bit silly.
Vincent’s daughter’s understanding of death fits Occam’s Razor perfectly.
(Just trivial FYI: The cat pictured in the index icon for this post… you won’t see it in the RSS feed, just on the site homepage… is my recently deceased cat Pokey, who lived for about 18 years old and was a wonderful, wonderful companion.)