No Need for God? : Millions say they can teach their children about right and wrong and the meaning of life without invoking a deity.

The God Problem started nagging at Gregory and Sandra Weber some time after 1 a.m. on June 12, 1990.

Until then, religion had really not been an issue. The couple lived and worked in Davis--a Northern California town that he describes as “the antithesis of the Bible Belt.”

But early that morning, Alissa Weber came into the world. And her parents, who don’t believe in a deity, unexpectedly found themselves in a spiritual dilemma.

How would they answer questions about life after death, good and evil, and the origins of the universe? How would they instill a moral and ethical code without a God to reinforce it? And how could they avoid a spiritual vacuum that might leave their daughter susceptible to some future David Koresh?

Such puzzles are faced today by millions of Americans--atheists, other nonbelievers and agnostics. And many, like the Webers, seem uncertain how to proceed.

Religious authorities warn that raising kids without God is a prescription for trouble. Others say it can be pulled off quite successfully.

Nobody says it’s easy. Among the most treacherous undertakings, not surprisingly, is teaching a child to be good. “Children are not born to cooperation or sacrifice but to the rawest self-interest,” author Martha Fay says in her new book, “Do Children Need Religion?” (Her answer: No.)

In working against such instincts, some atheists decide that, yes, their offspring do need God. They drop the kids off at Sunday school each week or--in some instances--join the church or temple themselves until the youngsters get older.

But other nonbelieving parents--including Fay, an ex-Catholic--work to implant values and ethics without religion. They rely on everything from secularized Ten Commandments to the forces of nature.

Atheist Mona Field of Eagle Rock, for instance, teaches her two daughters a moral standard “based on what is good for people .” In practical terms, it’s simply a non-religious version of the Golden Rule: “We don’t treat people in ways we wouldn’t want to be treated . . . no lying, cheating, hitting.”

The girls are also told they “have a responsibility to help others (and) make a difference for people who are less fortunate.”

But what’s the motivation for such altruism, if not spiritual? “I can’t explain it,” says Field, who also grew up without a faith. “It probably has to do with (my ancestors’) Jewish heritage . . . with (the call to) heal the world. I was raised that way. It was just the right thing to do, so you did it.”

Field’s daughter, Tania Verafield, 10, offers her own analysis: “I like to be good because then my parents praise me. That’s my motive. (When I get older) maybe (the motivation will be) other people’s praise or having that good feeling that you did something good.”

To reinforce such feelings, Field involves the family in political and environmental causes:

“We think (the idea of) God is kind of silly, but we have an alternative. We believe in people and the power of nature--earthquakes and storms--and we have to respect and protect the Earth.”

Gregory Weber, an ex-Catholic who once seriously considered the priesthood, also relies on nature’s grandeur.

He uses trips to the ocean and the mountains to instill in his daughter “a sense of something beyond herself--and beyond her back-yard sandbox.”

Does it work?

Fay--backed by some psychologists--says yes. The most critical factor influencing a child’s moral development is the example set by his or her parents: “Children don’t need religion. They need parents with strong moral convictions,” she says.

But other observers argue that morality without God is empty. “It becomes purely subjective,” says Dennis Prager, a radio talk-show host, author and activist on religious and ethical matters. “What I say is good is good for me, and what Hitler says is good is good for him.”

The views of Prager, who is Jewish, are echoed by Christian and Muslim leaders.

“Without God, morality becomes very pragmatic and relative,” says Dr. Maher Hathout, chairman of the Islamic Center of Southern California. “You can do things today and deny them tomorrow based on what is popular or what benefits you personally. With God, there’s a stable, fixed yardstick that makes a person accountable.”

Buddhists, on the other hand, don’t worship a deity, but do believe in karma, which suggests that good or bad behavior will produce like effects in this life or the next. Their children are taught to adhere to guidelines set down by the Buddha in order to receive karmic rewards.

“I do believe children need to be shown a path to follow, but they don’t need to believe in God,” says the Rev. Sarika Dharma of the International Buddhist Meditation Center in Los Angeles.

Prager concedes that individual parents have successfully reared moral children without religion, but insists that such efforts have been catastrophic for society at large. Anyone who thinks otherwise isn’t paying attention to what’s going on, he says: “The decline of religion and the . . . decline in values are directly related. . . . Kids cheat more, they steal more, they curse more.”

And when Prager polls high school seniors on whether they’d rescue their dog or a stranger if both were drowning, two-thirds pick the pet.

“Atheists have tremendous faith in human nature,” he says. “After Auschwitz and the Gulag, I don’t.”

A still gloomier assessment appeared recently in the Atlantic magazine under the headline “Can We Be Good Without God?” Political science Prof. Glenn Tinder of the University of Massachusetts suggested that the decent and admirable behavior of secularized Western governments and many atheists depends largely on the continued strength of Christianity.

According to Tinder’s argument, “customs and habits formed during Christian ages” might be the only thing stopping people from acting on Dostoevsky’s logic that “without God, everything is permitted.” If that is the case, he says, “our position is precarious. . . . To what extent are we now living on moral savings accumulated over many centuries but no longer being replenished?”

Then again, religion’s moral track record--from the Crusades to apartheid--isn’t unblemished. Even Tinder acknowledges that it took the Enlightenment, a secular movement, to bring about ideals that Christians “often shamefully neglected or denied.”

And Michael S. Josephson, president of the Josephson Institute of Ethics, says a new survey of 9,000 young adults shows that, although highly religious people lie, cheat and steal less than other people, the difference is “not very much. . . . I think the churches and synagogues are going to be disappointed when we publish the numbers.”

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Atheists are not--at first glance--a big presence in the United States. According to various polls, fewer than 10% of Americans deny the existence of God.

But the figure would probably run much higher if it included what some call “de facto atheists”--people who haven’t actually declared themselves nonbelievers, but for whom God and religion play no role in life.

Of the 86% of Americans who identified themselves as Christian in a recent Gallup poll, for instance, only half reported any active involvement in a church, according to the Boston Globe. “For the others, religion seems to be an ungraspable, utterly private, practically invisible thing in their lives,” church historian Martin Marty told the newspaper.

Unless children are in the house.

In that case, even the staunchest atheist can find the subject difficult to escape. For many, the issue comes to a head with the death of a child’s grandparent. “What does dead mean? Where do people go when they die?” Fay’s toddler daughter, Anna, wanted to know when her grandmother died.

The questions “landed like metaphysical shrapnel,” Fay says, “forcing (us) to re-examine (our) own beliefs and to consider, between improvised answers, the potential effects of those beliefs on her.”

Things got more complicated when Anna’s friend reported that his dead grandmother went directly to heaven, which he described as “a blue planet with fire all around it.”

But Fay, unlike many other atheists she interviewed, rejected the comfort and solace that such an explanation might offer her child. Heaven, she says, comes with too many strings attached: “It introduces not just a different scale of fantasy but a different conception of reality altogether, one that includes the existence of a parallel universe that is real but unseen. . . . If one does not believe in that universe, what is the point of advertising its real estate?”

She simply told her daughter that people go into the ground when they die, an answer that seemed to work.

Other non-believers explain that dead people live on in the memories of their loved ones.

At the other end of the spectrum, of course, are questions about life--namely, how did it get started? Fay writes: “You never really understand how handy the story of Adam and Eve is until, barely grasping the matter yourself, you’ve explained evolution to a 4-year-old and been rewarded with, ‘But how did the first person get born?’ ”

Field weaned her daughters on an abbreviated account of evolution--”life started with some little creatures and they turned into people”--then added details as they got older. Says Fay: “You tell children what’s appropriate for their age. . . . And sometimes you blow it.”

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But science doesn’t always work, either.

Fay recalls her daughter, at age 3, asking for bedtime stories from a children’s Bible book given to her by a friend: “I opened (it) and read the first story. Whoops. Miracle No. 1, Jesus cures the lame. Listen, I tried to tell her, this isn’t how things work. This isn’t true.” But as the miracles piled up and Fay’s protestations continued, her daughter grew increasingly impatient. “She patted the open page. Just read, she said.”

Fay got the message. “Did I turn to her in the middle of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ to say, ‘Now listen. You cannot climb a beanstalk in real life. And there are no such things as giants. . . . As far as she was concerned at the age of 3, they were just stories.”

But a few atheists consider any fantasy dangerous. Paul Ricci of Cypress refused to let his children believe in Santa Claus (although he had trouble convincing his 6-year-old that the bearded guy in Sears was “just a man in a costume”) because “believing in Santa Claus is a step toward believing in God.”

Christmas itself, on the other hand, poses no problem, he says. “We simply take the Christianity out of the holidays,” Ricci explains, echoing the comments of other atheists. “It’s pretty much been done by society anyway.”

Thus, Christmas becomes a winter gift-giving ritual, Passover a historical tradition, and Easter simply a spring rite for hunting dyed eggs.

But there can be perils to so much secularization.

Isolation and the struggle to find meaning in life rank among the most troublesome.

Tania Verafield says several school pals stopped hanging out with her when they realized she didn’t believe in God: “I like being different from other people . . . but sometimes it’s kinda hard.”

Her mother takes Tania and her sister to Sholem, a “secular Jewish community,” as a substitute for the built-in sense of community offered by church. The group offers weekly programs on Jewish culture and history and “gives us regular Sunday contact with people who share our values,” Field says.

The family also attends various political events, where “we find a tremendous (sense of) community among people who want to make a better world.”

Likewise, Gregory Weber says he might join a Unitarian church, not for the “doctrinal baggage”--of which there is very little--but for the social connection with “like-minded people.”

But for people turned off to secularized churches or politics--or who live in areas populated by few agnostics--isolation remains a big problem. Says Ricci: “There really aren’t a lot of social activities for young atheists. . . . You have to be kind of tough-skinned.”

Even when social and family ties do offer a secure sense of community, atheist children still can experience a feeling that something is missing.

In Gayle Mesco’s case, that missing something was God. “I always felt like there had to be more to life than being born and dying,” says the Northridge woman, who grew up in a secular Jewish home but now belongs to the Self-Realization Fellowship, a sect based on meditation. (In similar fashion, her brother Michael joined the Protestant Church of the Nazarene; her other sibling remains a “devout atheist.”)

Mesco’s search isn’t surprising. People need something to believe in, says ethicist Josephson: “Life has meaning primarily in response to some sense of purpose. But it doesn’t have to be religious.”

Still, some atheist parents worry: If a person isn’t given a tried-and-true messiah as a child--Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Buddha--will he seek out a Jim Jones or David Koresh as an adult?

“Yeah, he might,” says Josephson. “Or he might decide to help the homeless.”