Much has happened since my last post over a year and a half ago. It was a period marked by an extraordinary influx of philosophical & scientific understanding, which persistently continues to satisfy my desires and fill the void I feel in life (and in the lives of others). The extent of wisdom and advancement in state of mind while I was away was simply unimaginable and breathtaking.
It has been ages since I wrote on this blog. To be honest, it took a relatively huge amount of will, desire to correspond, and boredom to write again. I would prefer to say things to people face to face as discussions are personally satisfying and invigorating for me. I was actually hoping to finish off my ‘tarot series’, but whether this will be completed I guess would have to depend on whether I’m inspired to continue writing.
I have always had this quote in my head for some time, and I would like to use it to start this post:
“We are all children. Whether we are adults or not, we are still children”.
It’s not a quote by some intellectual or great minded individual, I fashioned this saying since I was very young. The power of a saying derives its power not from its author, but from the truth it reveals. I guess when I first thought of this I was in a phase of 3rd person observation in my life, I was very young then. What I mean by this is that I was seeing the world and the people in it (including myself) through the eyes of an observer who is not part of this world (to negate bias).
To be honest (and I still hold this view today) teenagers & young adults alike (and adults) on the whole are still children, and behave like children. Inexperienced, untrained in philosophical thought, and naïve (regardless of what religion they believe or university subject they do). Nonetheless, there is certainly a very small minority who are not this majority (i.e. the intellectual elites of scientists and philosophers). Chances are, the person reading this is not a member of this minority (though it would soothe your egos if you think you are). As part of this infantile quality, we (and I say ‘we’ to refer to this majority) are not aware of this. Most are under the illusion that we have grown up, moved on or evolved in the next phase of mentality, when in fact we have not.
So why all this talk about children and the state of mind you ask? Well it just so happens is that the topic for this post is on child abuse, abuse in the context of religion and religious indoctrination. A component that has considerable value and priority in the atheist/freethinker proposition & movement that has been growing exponentially most recently.
Note: There is a common practice among believers (especially of the christian/judaism/islam religion) to automatically ignore arguments like the one I am about to present. For a believer, if they begin to perceive that an argument as one that puts their faith in doubt, they have a preconceived notion that it is evil because it takes them away from god. Therefore, to think about any evidence and rational argument that may open doubt to their faith is a temptation that should be avoided (note that this is also a mindset that encourages narrow-minedness, so it discourages critical-thought). It is a common practice that their church or bible study group has taught them. This also applies to any physical evidence that can put out their faith in doubt (i.e. evolution disproving the genesis of the bible). I urge believers that my aim is not to offend their belief, but to put out a rational argument in a bid to raise consciousness and help them ignite some critical-thought in their belief. What the church and bible study group discourages, I encourage, and this is to think critically and have the courage to doubt & change your own beliefs.
Part 1: A better concept of abuse
First of all, it is important to lay clear the concept of ‘abuse’. Most typical people think of ‘abuse’ in terms of action that induces harm to the victim. In the context of children, an example of this would be to hit a child or sexually molest them in some way. However, this is only physical abuse, which is only a small portion of the larger definition. ‘Abuse’ in fact expands towards much broader dimensions. Simply speaking, ‘abuse’ involves the following: 1) to treat a person (in our discourse, a child) as a means rather than an end*, 2) it may not necessarily involve harm towards the abused, and 3) the abused may not necessarily be aware of the abuse.
* ‘means’ are the requirements or things that need to be done for a goal (or an end) to be achieved. For example, In order to get money (an end), one must work in a job that pays (a means), this can be a stable job like working in a restaurant or robbing a bank.
Part 2: Drawing the parallel
Allow me to draw a parallel to clearly illustrate what I mean, and in the hope to raise consciousness. When reading what is ahead, it is important to keep in mind that the examples and ideas presented as a parallel to the practical nature of religion, and religious teaching by parents (and pastors) today.
Let us hypothetically suppose (not that this does not happen) that two parents are advocates of a political party. They believe, like all people, that the policies of this party are what must be implemented in the political system and would most definitely result in the greatest good for society. Also, an aspect of this belief would also entail (no doubt) that other political parties would do harm if they ran for government, and that their policies would damage society. These parents, with their beliefs (and the right to believe them of course), involve their child to also advocate this specific political party.
Now it would be absurd and ridiculous if a parents subjected this to their child, but most of all it is abusive. This is abusive because the parents are simply using their child to further their own agenda, using the child as a means to achieve an end as if the child is an object to be manipulated and used as a political tool.
There are 2 counter-arguments one can make which gives the illusion of relieving the parents in their charges of abuse: First, it can certainly be argued that the child may grow to like the political party. Second, the parents think that they have good intentions and are doing good for their child (by consistently presenting him to the ideologies propagated by the party). However, these are false counter-arguments for the following reasons.
First, just because a child may grow to like the party is not a valid (or even rational) reason to subject him to support it. A child’s mind is innocent and too young (one may say uneducated) to understand concepts like freedom/human rights/sexism/free speech in their truest and most practical form. Early exposure to such beliefs without consideration of criticism (because the parents are strong advocates of the party, and hence will rarely present alternative perspectives), challenge, and with a critical mindset (it’s a scientific fact that children take what their parents say as truth without question, and hence fail to absorb it with a critical mindset) is unwarranted for the child. In this sense it is intellectually abusive as it is indoctrination, or lack of a better term ‘brainwashing’. We (specifically, our brain) forms our opinions about the world based on the type/amount of information we receive, if information is controlled (as what the parents did) then you can make a person believe in whatever you want them to believe. There is no better example than Nazi Germany to support this fact.*
*For those who are not familiar with modern history. The Nazi party manipulated and controlled information in Germany & initiated the Second World War. Adolph Hitler & his Nazi party dehumanized the Jewish community and changed how Germans viewed Jews in Germany, through powerful and ingenious propaganda (i.e. information control and manipulation). Consequently, the German people (in just a few years) saw Jews as animals and rodents spreading disease in Germany. As a result, 6 million Jews lost their lives by non-military means (i.e. at death camps), note that this is a very conservative estimate. For the record, it is interesting to point out that Hitler’s regime and his anti-semitism was heavily influenced by the christian doctrine (Hitler’s bibliography ‘Mein Kampf’ provides proof for this). Also, Nazism at that time didn’t only not receive criticism from the catholic church, but it was supported and financed by them (http://www.nobeliefs.com/nazis.htm) to a degree (the church provided a name list of all catholics & christians in Nazi Germany, effectively giving them a complete list of names of all the Jews in Germany).
With this in mind, even if the child grows up to like the party, it at no slightest bit mean that the parents are automatically relieved in their charges of abuse, nor does it mean that it was right for them to do it. The child’s voluntary and unquestioned support for the party will be the direct result of his many years of indoctrination, to believe that the party is better compared to all others. Whether the child is happy supporting the party or not, or whether the child supports it without any external pressure is not relevant. For example, you want your belief that the earth if flat to live on after you die. You bring your own child up believing that it’s right to think the earth is flat and your child grows up to happily believe it after you die. But it still does not mean that you did not indoctrinate (and hence intellectually abused) him to further your own purposes.
In terms of the second counter-argument, it is typical for one to make the false argument of saying “is like teaching your child how to swim, how to do brush their teeth, killing is wrong, or look at both sides of the road before crossing”. All these things benefit the child and obviously the parents will teach their child about it everyday because they have the best intentions. Specifically, the counter-argument is the following, that ‘if parents had good intentions or wanted good for the child, it is not abuse’. However, these counter-arguments are terrible and not well thought out, rendering them invalid.
There is no doubt that teaching children good values are good, but it must also be followed up by teaching how laws or values are not always black & white. Say that a parent teaches the child that killing is wrong and this law is absolute and must not be disobeyed. By this, the parents would be indoctrinating the child to think with a narrow-minded mind, because that there are many situation where it is good to kill, or lie, or steal, or whatever; laws are not absolute in the complex society we live in. What the parent should have done is continue to teach the child by highlighting the dynamic nature of values and moral zeitgeist. This is something that no (or if any, very little) parents do when they teach religion to their children.
In addition, just because the parents think that they are doing good or have good intentions (clearly all parents think this) does not a moment mean that they are relieved of their charges of intellectual abuse. For example, a mother telling her child “it’s ok to look down at blacks/asians/homosexuals etc” throughout his childhood and teaching him how it’s a virtue to do it is clearly intellectually abusive, yet the mother thinks she has good intentions and want good for her child.
It is easy to show that the counter-argument “it’s like teaching your child how to swim, how to do brush their teeth” is a false one. Here, the argument is false because parents in the examples are teaching their children ‘how’ to do something (that is useful no doubt). However, telling your child that ‘a certain belief or idea is right because it is, do not criticize it’ is teaching them ‘what’ to think. Both are very different, and the latter is a method of indoctrination.
Nonetheless, one can naively dismiss the account that parents are not biased, and are not like what is described above. I say naïve because 1) they have not really looked at the testimonies given by atheist/agnostic children of christian parents, and 2) looked at the statistics of christian discrimination. However, one only needs to look at their own lives to see if it’s true. If your parents/family is highly religious (especially christian/islam/judaism), have they explained to you alternative beliefs (in a way that follows a rational process to understand why they believe and the reasons behind it, not in a way similar to “there are people out there who don’t accept our belief, they will go to hell”)? Taken you to a freethinker’s meeting or Buddhist teaching seminar? I assume that if you religious and have religious parents, they have not done this.
However, one can say this for atheist parents (not an unreasonable claim). First, this assertion is false once you realize that atheism is neither a belief nor a claim like religion. This is a common misconception. Atheism (and agnosticism), by definition and practice is the ‘absence of belief’, which should be distinguished from anti-theism which is ‘against a belief’ (usually towards a specific belief). You cannot teach anyone an ‘absence of belief’ (i.e. while you can teach someone astrology, but you can’t teach someone a ‘absence of astrology’). It is not something that can be taught or indoctrinated to a child (in fact, every child is born without the concept of god, hence an atheist). Simply speaking, atheism (and agnosticism) does not have a doctrine that can be used to teach a child, unlike with religion.
Part 3: Raising consciousness - religion, abuse, & breaking the taboo.
Hopefully Part 2 has (in a inspiring way) drawn the parallel by showing the intellectually abusive nature religion & religious indoctrination on children. Allow us now to take a step back and draw another parallel to wrap things up.
Suppose that I went to primary school and labeled a group of children by the following: a Marxist child, a Communist child, a child who supports/is against abortion, a child who supports free-speech etc. I did that I would be looked down on by matured minded adults with words like ‘mad’ or ‘absurd’. The reason for this is because we all know that these children are too young to understand these complex issues, and it would be corrupt and & morally wrong to teach these things to children while they are still too young to even comprehend these issues, it would deprive them of their innocence.
But what these beliefs have in common is that they are all beliefs, like a religious belief. Why then do parents persist to teach their children the religious doctrine that they happen to believe (whilst teaching them to avoid other perspectives)? Or determinedly threaten them with hell if they don’t believe and accept it? Or continue to label their child a christian/jewish/islamic child (when it would be absurd to label a child a communist child)? To me and in the morally responsible community, this is abuse.
Using this same discourse, I would also like to raise consciousness on the taboo we have on criticizing religion. In the current society we live in, enlightened by modernity, it is normal (in fact encouraged) to challenge or even criticize one’s political belief. This also goes for one’s personal (and strongly held) belief on a particular football team, celebrity, movie, book, political ideal, social issue etc. However, only one’s religious belief cannot be challenged or criticized. It is in fact discouraged and looked down on by believers alike.
But why? Why in this society (enlightened by modern education, rationality, and scientific thought) do we have this taboo against criticizing religion? The reason, I suspect, is that religion is associated with being ‘sacred’ or ‘holy’. If you associate sacredness to a political belief or belief in a celebrity, you can also manufacture this taboo (rendering it immune to challenge and criticism). But what do we mean when we say that something is sacred? It means that “here is something that is sacred and holy. You are not to criticize it. Why? Because you’re just not”. A clever method of brainwashing someone to not question a particular belief (it works so well that it has brainwashed societies).
However, one may say (without thinking) that “it’s because in religion we are talking about god, and god must not be questioned and should be wholly respected”. Sadly for these people, they fall right back into the trap again, returning under the spell (shaped by years of linguistic manipulation and social brainwashing). In logic, this is called circular reasoning (i.e. “religion/god must be respected and not criticized because. Why? Because you have to”).
I hope this latest blog has opened the eyes of my readers towards a new perspective of looking at reality, and hope that it has raised consciousness. Our human minds fragile and flawed things. It is very common for people who are not untrained in the philosophical mindset to think that what is in their mind reflects reality (naïve realism), when in fact that it does not. It is therefore important to base your beliefs and thinking on rationality and logic, rather than intuition and emotion.
I’ll give an example to illustrate what I mean. Suppose you have a very thin piece of paper of any size you want, but with a thickness of 0.1 mm like normal paper. Now what would the thickness of this piece of paper be if you physically folded it 100 times (i.e. folding it from one side to the other)? For a typical person, using their intuition, they would think that it would equate to something roughly the size of a phone book or your hand. However, then you apply mathematics and logic, the thickness of this piece of paper would stretch from one side of our known universe to the other side (which has been proven). In reality, a piece of paper folded 10 times would have the thickness of your hand, whilst it is typically physically impossible to fold it over 12 times. Try this yourself.
Using this example, it is now clear that it is vitally important for one to use logic and reason (a fundamental principle in science & philosophy) to form one’s own belief about the world, and not form it using on primitive intuition, personal opinion, and emotional attachment (or faith). Alternatively, if one uses faith to decide what to believe and use it to support some claim (i.e. god exists or santa clause exists), the counter-argument to that (i.e. god exists or Santa Clause exists) will have equal weight & value if you use faith believe it. Only evidence and rationality (which are based on true premises) should be used to judge if something is true or exists in reality, instead of faith and personal opinion. I will end with a nice quote by Christopher Hitchens to end my blog:
“What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.”
I hope you have found this latest & newest entry insightful and eye-opening, and I hope to have raised your consciousness on the problem of faith & religion that threatens rationality (and a sustainable future) today.
^_^
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