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Apr. 15, 2006 It's happening again. They're BAAAAAACCCCCKKKKK! Strange wooden stick children - swarms of them, fluttering in the wind just stare at you as you drive by with their eyeless and headless bodies. They have an odd shape – I've seen this shape all over town, actually. It's sort of like a lowercase letter T. And they wear clothes. Little clothes. Kids clothes – it's enough to disturb anyone! Whenever the local churches have their organized “abortion is Satanic so vote Republican” campaign it always make me sick. I should organize midnight raids to these fields of little crosses wearing usable children's tops getting rained on and sun-bleached and Robin-Hood them to Goodwill or local orphanages. This area is filled to the brim with these tax-free political organizations known as churches, yet, most of this town certainly doesn't reflect good will towards your fellow man. At one point in the recent past, this county held the unsolved murder record for the USA. We managed this with a relatively low population – how's that for efficiency? My six year old daughter is bright. She's no super-genius – she won't be the next Einstein, but I'm proud of how she thinks and she is easily smarter than most of the kids in her class. I try to direct her thought processes towards a sane and rational world-view and it's actually rather easy. It just takes a bit of honesty. I also expose her to imaginative media. I think that creativity is vitally important, but I give disclaimers where required. For example, she loves Spirited Away, but knows that the spirit world is just made up. It's not an original idea – Mr. Rogers has been doing it for decades. He presented a make believe world and then bent over backwards to show that it's not real. He was one of a dying breed. He was Christian clergy, yet knew how to teach values in a secular way so that they applied to everyone... Kids need these kind of deep 3D thoughts that some brand “ mixed signals”, they need to toss them and turn them over in their brains. Brains aren't linear and kids are too smart to fall for silly 2D ideas like abstinence only education, or that pot is just as bad as cocaine. When she was four, a cousin of her mother came over and asked her what God is. She had no idea! This was after a debate about the stock Christian notion that kids somehow know God at birth, never mind that there is no evidence that random Christians are just born the world-over. Instead, most kids take on the religion of their parents, of course, no matter what religion it is. At age five, she logically deduced that Santa couldn't be real. Soon after losing her first baby tooth, she put the tooth fairy on trial – it's not looking too good for the fairy ;) Now she's six and just today, she told me point blank, “you are the Easter Bunny, aren't you dad?”. Good girl. She used to call the various churches in the area “castles”, since we have quite a few that are actually quite pretty and Gothic looking. She now knows that they are called churches. A few days ago she told me that the first letter of her name is on top of most of those churches, LOL! [Her name begins with a T] Indwelt Spirit? I don't think so. Her notion of gods is the same as the Radish Spirit in Spirited Away – make believe, mythology, fantasy. Yubaba is as real or not real to her as the Greek gods in Disney's Hercules or the gods that made the City of Gold in Disney's, “El Dorado”. As she gets older, I'll teach her the more popular Christian myths because much of the modern world and classic literature assumes familiarity with them. If I had chosen to severely restrict her access to popular media, she'd have no clue about anything supernatural. Saying nothing to kids about religion doesn't make them search for Jesus – quite the contrary. Kids are born very curious and, as with language, kids are born lacking bias or belief – any language will do. In other words, they are born atheists. The same rules and logic that allow her to stack blocks allow her to make deductions about mythological beings. She knows that her blocks can't float, that when cats are dead they don't come back and that ghosts aren't real – it's not rocket science – why should gods, even popular gods, be an exception? ------------ About the author Frederick Smith: I enjoy writing about the positive virtues of humanism - humanists are the good guys. I now have a blog that I will start to increasingly maintain and update. Here is the link: fredsuberview.blogspot.com/ About my personal background and life: I was born, I got some education, worked, ate, and had some kids. It seems I like to write � something that was unknown to me until relatively recently...How's that for detail? ;) Hate mail is welcome unless you are from the Army Of God. Please! It's not that I mind seeing pictures of aborted fetuses in my inbox, but once you've seen one you've pretty much seen them all... Email: dahlek65@gmail.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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