There is no such thing as no decision. In matters of belief, there is no halfway. Like Dawkins, I don't buy agnosticism. If you're unsure whether there's a God or not, it means either you are not living with belief in God, which means you are an atheist, or that you fear that there might be a God and want to leave that option open, in which case what you really are is a believer. There's no neutral position. In his 1995 open letter to his 10-year-old daughter Juliet, Dawkins counselled her against belief based on ''tradition, authority or revelation''. Because children, he writes, are ''suckers for traditional information, they are likely to believe anything the grown-ups tell them''. If this is true, surely it applies to atheism as much as to belief. To keep my children out of church would be to impose my unbelief upon them by the exact mechanism that Dawkins warns against. The real question, then, is what should be the default position that better allows children to develop their own spiritual thinking? Church or no church? So they know what those buildings are. Imagine growing up in a world where the most imposing monuments of architecture are unknown places. Do atheists really want their children to think of churches as fearsome compounds of weirdness? I wonder if the grown children of militant atheists eventually ask their parents, ''Why did you never let us learn what happens in there?'' ''What were you scared of?'' ''Why couldn't we make our own minds up?'' Letting children learn to pray and see others praying could be a defensive measure, to forestall the lure of forbidden fruit. There is some evidence that children who grow up without television or junk food will have a distorted relationship with those things in adulthood. By banning them, you increase their mystery and possibly their attraction. The stories are their birthright. I don't believe Jesus raised Lazarus, or walked on water, or fed the masses with those loaves and fishes. I don't believe in the seven-day Creation, the Flood, the burning bush or the parting of the Red Sea. Yet I cannot imagine feeling at home in Australia without knowing those stories. I realise this is a narrowly Christian-educated view of our culture, and to the extent that I don't know, say, the narratives of the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita, I am limited in my understanding of Islamic and Hindu Australia. Whatever the religion, it doesn't make sense to blinker children to the formative stories and rituals of their world. You might as well, if you are strongly anti-war, stop them hearing about Gallipoli. My point is that these stories don't belong to anyone, but to everyone, and censoring them is a mirror image of superstition.

So they will know what rules they are breaking. When (not if) my children rebel, it would have more meaning if they knew what they were rebelling against. I mean rebellion in the broadest sense: artistic creativity, inventing secret languages, striking out for independence. I mean rebellion in the sense that I rebel against Hitchens's 300-page anti-religion harangue, God Is Not Great, even though I agree with every word. There's something particularly bullying about singing in the choir being preached to. Without a knowledge of rules, destruction tends to be for its own sake, and boomerangs inwards. If that destruction takes a creative form, it's hard to imagine a serious artist having any coherence without working off the bedrock of Bible precepts and stories. Whatever form rebellion takes, it always follows Ezra Pound's artistic principle: Make it new. But first you need to know what it is. So they may come home with unanswerable questions. Who made God? Why can St Mary save some sick people and not others? I send my children to church not to find the answers - they won't - but to come home with more questions. With unanswerable questions, they can puncture the infantile myth of their father's omniscience. Unanswerable questions are the flint of children's imagination, as is some acquaintance with the infinite. Sitting on the beach, I've passed on Carl Sagan's metaphor: if the number of grains of sand I hold in my hand is the stars we can see at night, the number of stars in the universe is how many grains there are on the beach. It's a wonder to see children taking this in. It prompts more questions: how many leaves there are in the world, how many blades of grass, how many rocks. This is how we learn about the countless, and the infinite (two separate things). Religion can limit this wonder - by personifying God as a man with a beard - but can also be a means of expanding it. Good works. There is one basic distinction for which I admire the Catholic Church. As the coverage of Mary MacKillop's canonisation showed, even if you reject the mumbo-jumbo of miracles, there is much to be gained from the example of selflessness. Yes, Mr Hitchens, the Catholic Church has wrought untold evil, but my children's church, in Sydney in 2010, places a constant emphasis on giving practical help to the less fortunate. Charity's justifications are often hokey, pious and simple-minded, but if every parent wants their child to have a better life than they had, the church's encouragement of sacrifice for the needy is one pathway to it. Without it, they can never be tolerant, only indifferent. As Hitchens reminds us, churches have been bastions of religious exclusivity and intolerance. But the great crimes of the 20th century were alliances of the fundamentalist few and the indifferent many. To profess a lack of interest in religion is not to tolerate it, or to live and let live. It is to allow religious debate to fall into the hands of the forcefully intolerant. This is how persecution takes place in liberal societies: when the majority's indifference cloaks itself as ''tolerance''. They're not the same thing.

Religion is not synonymous with ethics. The content of NSW's proposed schools ethics classes has been robustly debated. But to substitute ethics for scripture is akin to replacing food with vitamin pills. Biblical parables, or teachings from Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism or any other religion, may contain ethical lessons. They may not. But they do much else besides. A secular, non-scriptural ethics syllabus should be available to parents who want to opt out of all religion; but as an atheist, I would like to see ethics classes taught in tandem with scripture. Kids don't get indoctrinated that easily. If children's minds were putty, they would emerge into adulthood caring for the underdog, distrusting materialism, cherishing the environment and standing up against the corrupt. These (Judeo-Christian) precepts are embedded in pretty much all of the children's film, television and literature I've ever seen. Do children grow up to embrace those beliefs? The evidence suggests otherwise. If kids' morality is not indoctrinated by Hollywood, what hope does the church have? I don't see a church trying to indoctrinate, at least not in the old-fashioned way. The priest who sermonises to my children reminds me of the Uniting Church ministers of my childhood: full of commonsense, non-dogmatic, more like a friendly uncle than James Joyce's town criers of the Catholic hell (''All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer … ''). If the church is risking anything by dropping the hellfire, it's in not standing strongly for anything. That might not be the best thing for the church, but it is for my children. Because I had to. When my son finished his first Communion classes after two months of Sundays, he was in a celebratory mood. ''Yay, now I don't have to go to church any more!'' ''Not so fast,'' I said. ''There's still confirmation.'' He wasn't too pleased. ''But you don't have to go to church every Sunday.'' I replied: ''I did when I was your age.'' Did it do me any good? Possibly. It didn't make me a believer, but it left me with some knowledge of what I was unbelieving in. I understand what the 18th-century rationalist Edmund Burke meant when he said religion, not atheism, is the true remedy for superstition. Had I an atheistic upbringing, I may well have ended up, through a contrarian temperament, religious. At worst, Sundays in church give hours of boredom in which the young mind can roam. Kids don't get much of a chance to get bored. As the filmmaker Peter Weir once said, the creative mind should actively seek boredom. My children's schooling is more engaging than mine and their leisure hours are filled with more varied activity. A little boredom now and then, sitting in church while they're thinking about something else, can send them off to new places inside the lozenges of those stained-glass windows. The boredom of that Sunday hour, if boredom is the worst of it, might be more precious than it seems.