Quinault said:
How would you explain why your children can receive from birth in the Orthodox church and have to wait to be confirmed in the Anglican church?
Well, they are quite different things. In the Orthodox Church, you think Communion has a different purpose from what we think in the Anglican Church, so why should it be strange that different customs attend each one?
Either the Orthodox view (that no one can really "understand" the mystery of communion, so waiting until you have been thru catechism is a moot point) or the Anglican view is correct. Otherwise you will set the kids up to believe that one Eucharist is more/less holy than the other.
No, I don't think so. Why so?
Again the issue is that truth is truth, not subjective. Either the sky is blue and the grass green, or the sky is green and the grass is blue. It can't be both, it can't be open to interpretation. One is a truthful statement, one is not.
It's interesting that you pick that example! You see, my dad is colour-blind, so we grew up knowing that, to dad, lots of things looked red that were actually green, and vice-versa. We learned very early on that, actually even things we think are self-evident, are matters of perspective. You could learn the same lesson through languages - there's a very famous linguistic 'map' that shows how the word for 'blue' in one language corresponds with two different words (for 'bluish-green' and 'bluish-gray') in another, and so on. It's fascinating, but also says something important about the way we learn about truth. Children take to these things pretty naturally - in the linguistic experiment, bilingual children have no difficulty distinguishing medium from content. Truth is truth, yes - but our understanding of it varies.
And seeing as you have no children, I don't think you really know how very VERY VERY literal children are. Children develop the ability to see things as less black and white as they grow older. This isn't a US thing, this is a developmental fact. You have to specifically teach children a more relativistic mindset (and even then, it isn't certain that it will even work if you do).
Maybe this is so! I'll live and learn - but, I don't think this is really to do with being literal or less literal. Plenty of adults are still very literal-minded, but it doesn't make them incapable of understanding different points of view.