Driving Lessons, Child Abuse, And A Nation Obsessed.
A story without borders. (In part)
Analogies, I have no great love of them, but for want of something better I fear I must employ one.
For those of us that no longer enjoy that sublime feeling of youth, a feeling I suspect more given to our children than the majority that read this forum, it is then I address you as a mature readership if not as parents.
And as such, being parents that is, has it not befallen us on occasion the pleasure of teaching our kids to drive?
I say pleasure for that it what it is, or should be for those among us that without delusion know themselves to qualified and adept safe drivers.
Not only a pleasure but parental duty to pass on to our offspring the benefits of the years of our safe driving experience.
We embrace this charge of tutorage for it is our lot as parents.
And for those among us that recognise our shortcomings as drivers we take the obvious course of action and employ a professional instructor.
What then would we think of the parent or parents of a child who from an early teach their children in a manner that we would consider foolish but totally irresponsible if not downright dangerous.
We wouldn’t for instance consider it wise or good parenting if said parents made a habit of running red lights with their children in the car.
It is not uncommon for drivers in Arab countries to adopt such practises,
Putting their faith in Allah that he will see them safely through the intersection irrespective of the colour of the traffic signal.
No we would not consider it good parenting to teach one’s children that faith would ensure a safe passage through the junction.
In fact as rational thinkers we would say “Sooner or later they, the children, will be involved in an accident and if they are not killed outright they will at least be badly hurt and no doubt require medical attention, oft times lifesaving medical attention.”
For has not experience taught us that the roads constitute a very dangerous environment as does life itself.
So much so that it is the more fortunate and the minority among us that travel life’s path and never have to seek medical aid of such a nature.
If you will keep this in mind I shall move on.
At this point a question arises, might I ask you to ask of yourself,
“Do I believe in Limbo?
The same Limbo that should a child die unbaptised it shall be doomed to spend eternity doing whatever one is supposed to do in Limbo.
I would like to think the answer is no, for even the Catholic Church is about to consign Limbo to it’s rightful place, the theological trashcan.
“In 1984, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the head of the Vatican's doctrinal department, he called limbo "a theological hypothesis". "It is linked to the cause of original sin.
Now I know Catholics barely qualify as Christians in some circles, but it is well to remember that were it not for my BFF Henry V111 wanting a divorce, Catholicism would still be the "One true faith."
It would be rather nice at this juncture if they were to send the “Other Place” to same said trashcan. Can we, as rational thinkers in the twenty first century really believe that this place called Hell exists. And before we move on can we consign two other items to our theoretical trashcan? or failing consignment let us redefine them.
“Sin” and “Evil” are not stand alone entities that should be assigned their own tangible slot in the scheme of things, both are titles we, or more accurately our ancestors, misguidedly gave, to what are only concepts.
There is no such thing as Sin; sin is a concept of morality dreamt up by Bronze Age people as they scribbled away in their respective caves as they looked for new ways to cower and intimidate the lower orders.
And just as there is no sin as a separate entity, the exact same must apply to Evil.
Evil isn’t going to creep into your bedroom and give you a “Gotcha” as you hide your head under the covers.
Hopefully it will be your partner playing silly buggers, or worst case scenarios, a real bad dude that we misguidedly call evil, or worst still the cops bursting in with a “No Knock Warrant”
So let us return to hell, or more precisely the subject of hell.
There are those among us that, without hell, existing as a separate entity, would be for want of a more descriptive term, “In Shtuck” for what then would this abuser, for he is but that,
employ to frighten the living daylights out of these kids?
Perhaps he would do that which Adolf Hitler had no need as I paraphrase, “Had the Jew not existed, I would have had to invent him.”
The shorter being; Jew, hell or some other bogeyman is required to frighten whichever chosen group the abuser uses to further his own religious/political agenda.
It is a road I shall not go down in this post, but we have the perfect contemporary example of the use of the “Bogeyman”
albeit under another name.
But some few seconds into this clip we have a perfect example
an abuser going about his agenda.
“We want to leave an indelible impression that hell is a place where they absolutely don’t want to go.”
How any parent could subject their children to this is totally beyond my comprehension.
I leave you to draw your own conclusions.
The virus of faith. Dawkins. Part 3
I ask you then to watch this second clip as the good professor Dawkins shares his views with us on children and child abuse, this from the five to seven minute marker followed by an interesting conversation with Jill Mitten.
“A child is genetically pre programmed to accumulate knowledge from figures of authority.
A child brain, for very good Darwinian reasons has to be set up in such a way that it believes what it is told, for there just isn’t time for the child to experiment with warnings like “Don’t go too near the cliff’s edge, or don’t swim in the river there are crocodiles.”
Any child who applied a scientific sceptical questioning attitude to that would be dead.”
No matter what you may think of Dawkins, I think his logic is unarguable.
He then goes on:
“No wonder the Jesuit said, “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.”
“The child brain will automatically believe what it is told even if what it is told is nonsense, and when the child grows up it will tend to pass on that same nonsense to it’s children, so religion goes from generation to generation.
For many people part of growing up is killing off the virus of faith with a good strong dose of rational thinking, but if an individual doesn’t succeed in shaking it off, his mind is stuck in a permanent state of infancy, and there is real danger he will infect the next generation."
The virus of faith. Part 2
Hopefully by now my direction is becoming apparent even if I have taken a circuitous route, and for those among you unfamiliar with Richard Dawkins I at least hope he has given food for thought.
This article started with an analogy of motorcars so befittingly we shall bring it to its conclusion in the same manner.
Our irresponsible parents are but a mile from home, and isn’t always the case, so close and yet so far, the cop in his cruiser in full “music and lights mode” has pulled the parents over and is castigating them for being totally irresponsible for driving around with their child in the front seat sans seat belt.
But when the cop gets a result on the check he has just run on the couple he finds that this is not an isolated incident but one of many, a pattern of incidents in fact.
Now the cop, having scraped numerous bodies up off the highway, justifiably is a tad upset and thinks these parents have no right to bring their kid up in this way, sooner or later the kid will end up dead.
And as it happened the kid did end up dead, not by the parent’s automobile, but by something equally as deadly, the parent’s “Faith.”
"Out of all of the sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass, the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing, compared to the matter of heredity. This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one."
Richard Dawkins.
A story without borders. (In part)
Analogies, I have no great love of them, but for want of something better I fear I must employ one.
For those of us that no longer enjoy that sublime feeling of youth, a feeling I suspect more given to our children than the majority that read this forum, it is then I address you as a mature readership if not as parents.
And as such, being parents that is, has it not befallen us on occasion the pleasure of teaching our kids to drive?
I say pleasure for that it what it is, or should be for those among us that without delusion know themselves to qualified and adept safe drivers.
Not only a pleasure but parental duty to pass on to our offspring the benefits of the years of our safe driving experience.
We embrace this charge of tutorage for it is our lot as parents.
And for those among us that recognise our shortcomings as drivers we take the obvious course of action and employ a professional instructor.
What then would we think of the parent or parents of a child who from an early teach their children in a manner that we would consider foolish but totally irresponsible if not downright dangerous.
We wouldn’t for instance consider it wise or good parenting if said parents made a habit of running red lights with their children in the car.
It is not uncommon for drivers in Arab countries to adopt such practises,
Putting their faith in Allah that he will see them safely through the intersection irrespective of the colour of the traffic signal.
No we would not consider it good parenting to teach one’s children that faith would ensure a safe passage through the junction.
In fact as rational thinkers we would say “Sooner or later they, the children, will be involved in an accident and if they are not killed outright they will at least be badly hurt and no doubt require medical attention, oft times lifesaving medical attention.”
For has not experience taught us that the roads constitute a very dangerous environment as does life itself.
So much so that it is the more fortunate and the minority among us that travel life’s path and never have to seek medical aid of such a nature.
If you will keep this in mind I shall move on.
At this point a question arises, might I ask you to ask of yourself,
“Do I believe in Limbo?
The same Limbo that should a child die unbaptised it shall be doomed to spend eternity doing whatever one is supposed to do in Limbo.
I would like to think the answer is no, for even the Catholic Church is about to consign Limbo to it’s rightful place, the theological trashcan.
“In 1984, when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the head of the Vatican's doctrinal department, he called limbo "a theological hypothesis". "It is linked to the cause of original sin.
Now I know Catholics barely qualify as Christians in some circles, but it is well to remember that were it not for my BFF Henry V111 wanting a divorce, Catholicism would still be the "One true faith."
It would be rather nice at this juncture if they were to send the “Other Place” to same said trashcan. Can we, as rational thinkers in the twenty first century really believe that this place called Hell exists. And before we move on can we consign two other items to our theoretical trashcan? or failing consignment let us redefine them.
“Sin” and “Evil” are not stand alone entities that should be assigned their own tangible slot in the scheme of things, both are titles we, or more accurately our ancestors, misguidedly gave, to what are only concepts.
There is no such thing as Sin; sin is a concept of morality dreamt up by Bronze Age people as they scribbled away in their respective caves as they looked for new ways to cower and intimidate the lower orders.
And just as there is no sin as a separate entity, the exact same must apply to Evil.
Evil isn’t going to creep into your bedroom and give you a “Gotcha” as you hide your head under the covers.
Hopefully it will be your partner playing silly buggers, or worst case scenarios, a real bad dude that we misguidedly call evil, or worst still the cops bursting in with a “No Knock Warrant”
So let us return to hell, or more precisely the subject of hell.
There are those among us that, without hell, existing as a separate entity, would be for want of a more descriptive term, “In Shtuck” for what then would this abuser, for he is but that,
employ to frighten the living daylights out of these kids?
Perhaps he would do that which Adolf Hitler had no need as I paraphrase, “Had the Jew not existed, I would have had to invent him.”
The shorter being; Jew, hell or some other bogeyman is required to frighten whichever chosen group the abuser uses to further his own religious/political agenda.
It is a road I shall not go down in this post, but we have the perfect contemporary example of the use of the “Bogeyman”
albeit under another name.
But some few seconds into this clip we have a perfect example
an abuser going about his agenda.
“We want to leave an indelible impression that hell is a place where they absolutely don’t want to go.”
How any parent could subject their children to this is totally beyond my comprehension.
I leave you to draw your own conclusions.
The virus of faith. Dawkins. Part 3
I ask you then to watch this second clip as the good professor Dawkins shares his views with us on children and child abuse, this from the five to seven minute marker followed by an interesting conversation with Jill Mitten.
“A child is genetically pre programmed to accumulate knowledge from figures of authority.
A child brain, for very good Darwinian reasons has to be set up in such a way that it believes what it is told, for there just isn’t time for the child to experiment with warnings like “Don’t go too near the cliff’s edge, or don’t swim in the river there are crocodiles.”
Any child who applied a scientific sceptical questioning attitude to that would be dead.”
No matter what you may think of Dawkins, I think his logic is unarguable.
He then goes on:
“No wonder the Jesuit said, “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man.”
“The child brain will automatically believe what it is told even if what it is told is nonsense, and when the child grows up it will tend to pass on that same nonsense to it’s children, so religion goes from generation to generation.
For many people part of growing up is killing off the virus of faith with a good strong dose of rational thinking, but if an individual doesn’t succeed in shaking it off, his mind is stuck in a permanent state of infancy, and there is real danger he will infect the next generation."
The virus of faith. Part 2
Hopefully by now my direction is becoming apparent even if I have taken a circuitous route, and for those among you unfamiliar with Richard Dawkins I at least hope he has given food for thought.
This article started with an analogy of motorcars so befittingly we shall bring it to its conclusion in the same manner.
Our irresponsible parents are but a mile from home, and isn’t always the case, so close and yet so far, the cop in his cruiser in full “music and lights mode” has pulled the parents over and is castigating them for being totally irresponsible for driving around with their child in the front seat sans seat belt.
But when the cop gets a result on the check he has just run on the couple he finds that this is not an isolated incident but one of many, a pattern of incidents in fact.
Now the cop, having scraped numerous bodies up off the highway, justifiably is a tad upset and thinks these parents have no right to bring their kid up in this way, sooner or later the kid will end up dead.
And as it happened the kid did end up dead, not by the parent’s automobile, but by something equally as deadly, the parent’s “Faith.”
"Out of all of the sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass, the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing, compared to the matter of heredity. This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one."
Richard Dawkins.
Update on “No knock search.”
2 comments:
Interesting blog. Thank you, from a reader, who enjoys that sublime feeling of youth.
Thank you.
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