"I don't think kids are the literalists that some people take them to be. They seem to have an innate understanding of fiction, and don't really need to be told specifically that stories are stories."

Right. I told my two that Santa was bringing them presents. I also told them to put their tooth under the pillow and they'd get 50p. By the time they were seven or eight I cheerfully released them from these two fantasies and we have a good laugh about to this day. In fact, we still go through a charade every Christmas Eve in which they leave a mince pie, a carrot for Rudolph and a tot of whisky for Santa on a saucer at the bottom of the chimney. Naturally, they come down next morning to find that the goodies have been consumed, and there's a note left on the crumby saucer from Santa, strangely enough in my handwriting, usually complaining about bellyache from the 17000th mince pie of the night and can we please make it Talisker next year, and signed "Satnav" (we've concluded that Santa is dyslexic).

Mr Spock would probably find my pathetic reasons for pursuing these fantasies to be indefensible. But the crucial thing is that eventual release is automatic. I'd have been very worried indeed had either of my two somehow failed to ditch them (in spite of prodding in that direction) and I'd have swanned in quickly to disabuse them. But your stories are not the same thing. They are tendentious (look it up). Eventual release is not the intention. Whether they take every scrap of the tales literally is beside the point. Children are expected to hang on to the stories for life. To a Christian parent it's disappointing if the kids ditch the yarns. To some Muslim parents in certain countries, it could be the trashing of family honour at best and seeing your child's head cut off at worst. Millions and millions of people the world over take those biblical stories to be true in the generality if not in every detail, and they are probably wrong. Because you can't see that you're probably wrong yourself, you find it easy to defend the practice of, how best to put this, telling children lies. You don't even know whether Jesus existed at all (there is evidence that he likely didn't). But either you refute that doubt or it simply doesn't trouble you. I'm not going to reject everything I read in the New Testament as mythology. I'm sure that real people wrote it all down and, buried in there somewhere, there is some genuine history. But Christianity has real trouble accepting uncertainty as uncertainty. I come back to all your prayers and hymns, drilled into your children so that they can trot them out parrot fashion, chock full of certainty. The Lord's Prayer is possibly the most egregious example. The tales you tell them are not harmless fun. They are intended to stick. And there is no reason on earth why you should be doing that. No good can come of misleading people deliberately. The truth about the world is plenty wonderful enough. Douglas Adams again.