Dear god,

Hi all,

I am not what you would call a religious man. You would probably call me a lot of things, some of them rather rude maybe, but not one of them would be religious. In fact there is nothing more strange for me than spending several hours of everyday worshipping what actually amounts to be a fairy.

But in my happy Atheist world there is a problem. My daughter's school took my daughter (and others, it wasn't a special indoctrination trip) to church.

Now due to the quirks of a 5 year old's brain she has got it into her head that the priest, or vicar, storyteller if you will, is, in actual fact, god. This doesn't seem to be a problem until you try to explain it in from an atheist point of view. Here is roughly how the conversation went.

"Daddy, I went to church today and saw god"

"god doesn't exist sweetheart."

"yes he does, he's slightly shorter than you and wears a dress."

"That's the vicar, my angel"

"No Daddy, it's god."

"God doesn't exist, some people believe he does, but I don't"

"But..I SAW him"

"Sweetheart, you can't have seen 'god' because he is an anthropomorphic personification of natural forces, and the stories of his alter ego, Jesus are an amalgamation of stories that originated 2000 years before Jesus was around, if he even existed"

Ok, so I probably pitched this a little high for a 5 year old, but to her credit she came back with:

"I know that Daddy, but I saw him, and I spoke to him. So he does exist"

Now my response to this was probably not as intelligent. In fact it is probably more what I would expect from my daughter, having just taken a first class trip into the world of sarcasm recently, but I said, and I am quite embarrassed about this. I said:

"Whatever."

So there you go. My daughter believes in god. But what's more she believes that father Gerald is god. And I have no argument that she can understand. Any more than I can explain that inside every Tellytubby there is an under paid, under valued actor. So now that seed has been placed in her mind, through society and not through my teaching, I have to provide the balancing wheel, I will have to entertain her thoughts until such time as she can actually understand exactly what she has been told. Thank you to the School system.

Thanks for reading,