Steve Shaw says: As for what happened to tolerance, where exactly is the tolerance in bringing your kids up in the faith that you happened to be accidentally born into, when there are so many others available? I call that the height of intolerance. I call letting children grow up before they make up their minds about religion tolerant. Of course, that wouldn't work, because they simply wouldn't sign up, and your Church would quickly pass into history. Oh yes. We "scary" atheists know only too well why you believers do things the way you do!

I guess Mr. Shaw was conditioned as a child to see faith only as ideology, and that's too bad. I see bringing kids up in a church as bringing them up in a tradition, a tradition that celebrates and explores birth, death, and life and the events of life according to a treasured tradition and set of rituals. My own Catholic upbringing had little to do with ideology. It was growing up in an interesting, rich tradition that I enjoyed - and I received an exceptionally good (and critical) education in the practices of that tradition and the reasoning behind those practices. A tradition that you choose as an adult because it's tailored to your needs, just doesn't feel authentic to me - although my neopagan Catholic wife and many others have made that choice.

I realize that there are some people who see faith as ideology, but I don't. Neither does my wife. She respects but doesn't feel at home in the stricter Polish Catholic tradition she was raised in, so she has chosen another path. She sees faith and religious practice as a method and school of insight, but not an ideology. What she does is good for her, and what I do is good for me - and we respect that in each other.

-Joe Offer-