danielleisdizzy:

kaitmpayne:

My kid feels love. My kid knows love. If that weren’t true, then she wouldn’t even think to ask about it. I’m teaching her to be considerate and kind. I’m teaching her to be fair and honest. She was born curious. She’s obsessed with science, nothing interests her more than bones and meteors and figuring out how things work. She’s been that way for as long as she could form words. I can’t pretend to have all the answers, but I’m not going to preach the teachings of an invisible and judgmental all knowing sky man. She’s asking about love because she’s curious, she wants to know what it is that she’s feeling and why. She’s a girl who likes evidence and answers. If love wasn’t something real and present for her, she wouldn’t even inquire. I’m not going to teach her to believe something for the sake of believing it because that’s what your parents and your grandparents believe. However, I will absolutely teach her that it is never under any circumstance okay to criticize a fellow human on something as personal as the way they are raising their children, especially one who she has never met outside of the internet. I will never teach her to think it’s okay to be as self-righteous as you’d have to be to send an email like that. If that’s what being a godly woman is, I want her to remain as ungodly as possible. I’ll leave you with two quotes that demonstrate the kind of teachings I DO hope to pass on to her.

“When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.”
-Abraham Lincoln

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”
— Lawrence Krauss

Everything about this response. Everything.

this.