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From: Tim on 29 Jul 2008 18:42 Evil_Nigel(a)hotmaew wouldn'til.co.uk wrote: > > Personally I think filling the heads of kids with such stuff is child > abuse. All children should be banned from religious practices until > they're old enough to make their own minds up ie old enough to vote. > > Evil Nigel Not sure about child abuse but certainly agree children should not be indoctrinated with such stuff till ,as you say,they are old enough to decide for themselves. I think some would be capable of doing that several years before 18 then again quite a few wouldn't.
From: me myself and monkfish on 29 Jul 2008 22:41 On 29 Jul, 23:24, fergus <ferguscapewr...(a)yahoo.co.uk> wrote: > On Tue, 29 Jul 2008 07:26:29 -0700 (PDT), Evil_Ni...(a)hotmail.co.uk > wrote: > > >Personally I think filling the heads of kids with such stuff is child > >abuse. > > What stuff? > > > All children should be banned from religious practices until > >they're old enough to make their own minds up ie old enough to vote. > > Perhaps they should be banned from all national and cultural practices > until that age and be taught that everything is ok if it feels good. > Ah, but that is an article of faith as well but that doesn't count > because it's the current fashon. > > The prevailing spirit of the age stinks. IMHO, of course. > It seems to me that the nihilistic attitude you lament has arisen because the old way of doing things no longer provides a meaningful set of values by which a child growing up in today's world can live. To take just one specific example, in a world in which AIDS has reached epidemic proportions, where birth-rates are soaring in developing countries whose resources are already stretched to breaking point and beyond, the continued condemnation of the use of birth control by the Catholic church is grossly irresponsible - and is nothing more than the pig-headed assertion of traditional values and dogma with little or no regard for the toll of human tragedy that invariably ensues from the practise of such ante-diluvian policies in a modern world. Just one of the many reasons why traditional values are dying out is because those in Africa and other developing countries who honour them are being wiped out as a direct consequence of the continued - and increasing - inadequacy of these same values to safeguard their adherents. And that's but one example of the way in which the church fails completely and utterly to provide relevant guidance and meaningful answers to modern problems and situations, and in fact chooses to remain shamefacedly silent on virtually every important social and political issue of the day, ranging from drug use, the environment, the 'problem' of teenage gangs, the internet, the threat not only of religious terrorism in a post 9/11 socio-political landscape but the 'war on terror' in general, the social injustice of a system split into the haves and the have-nots (although the church's silence on this particular issue is hardly surprising given the strenuous efforts the church itself has made in the past to preserve inequality and promote social injustice in order to protect its own power-base), the (mis-)treatment of the mentally ill by the psychiatric community, the problem of a society that is getting progressively older and older, the fragmentation of community that city living and the structure of modern life has caused, the exploitation of children in foreign sweatshops by western companies. . . the list goes on and on and on. Confronted by a world subjected to ever-increasing change, and social and moral problems of ever-increasing complexity, the church lapsed decades ago into an apathetic silence as a tacit admission of defeat and of its inadequacy. (BTW i'm not talking only about the christian church in this regard, either. The refusal of the leaders of the Islamic communities in this country to recognize the extent to which a significant proportion of their youngsters sympathise with Al Qaeda terrorists speaks to exactly the same sort of admission of complete and utter defeat of traditional values in the face of the complexity of the modern world. They do not have the answers to these problems, and so pretend that they don't exist. In this respect, Islamic and Christian leaders have a great deal in common) Having been failed so profoundly by the church to be led out of the moral labyrinth, and deprived also of the sense of community and human solidarity that would provide a larger perspective for their thoughts and actions (a deprivation that is a necessary result of a capitalistic ethos), in the absence not only of all other alternatives but also as an answer to the despair that ensues when one has been forgotten by God, individuals in the modern world no longer have any other recourse but to turn to their own immediate experiences of pleasure and pain for some form of guidance as to how to act. The church and its representatives may shake their heads and grumble about 'kids today', but it seems self-evident to me that the very thing about which they lament so profusely is to all extents and purposes a reflection of their own failure to reach out and make a positive and lasting contribution in these kids' lives. Kids aren't born knowing the difference between right and wrong, they have to be taught it, and if kids today don't know what is right and what is wrong, it's only because the older generations have failed them and are failing them every single day, and the failure of one generation is compounded by the failure of the one after that and the one after that and the one after that. Things have gone too far, there's no turning back, and to idly day- dream about a glorious, utopian return to traditional values while castigating the faithless nihilism of today's youth is to fail to recognize the pressing need that exists in the here and now for new strucutres and institutions which are relevant and that successfully come to grips with the world with which kids today are confronted. Inherent in the old idea that it takes 'a whole village to raise a child' is the responsibility of the community to provide not only physical but also emotional and spiritual sustenace for its children if they are to grow up into responsible, loving adults themselves. As the complacent and resolutely backward attitude of the church and the old instiutions has increasingly led to their own erosion, the situation, according to some, has been reversed. Now the onus of responsibility is on the children to be well-behaved and moral and upright, despite the society into which they are born, so that the moral degradation caused by lazy and irresponsible adults might be mitigated - and, consequently, all that is wrong with society can be traced back directly to the immorality of its youth. Well, i don't buy it. > -- > > Fergus
From: humble.life on 30 Jul 2008 05:24 fergus wrote: > On Tue, 29 Jul 2008 07:26:29 -0700 (PDT), Evil_Nigel(a)hotmail.co.uk > wrote: > > >> Personally I think filling the heads of kids with such stuff is child >> abuse. > > What stuff? > >> All children should be banned from religious practices until >> they're old enough to make their own minds up ie old enough to vote. > > Perhaps they should be banned from all national and cultural practices > until that age and be taught that everything is ok if it feels good. > Ah, but that is an article of faith as well but that doesn't count > because it's the current fashon. > > The prevailing spirit of the age stinks. IMHO, of course. > > -- > > Fergus The prevailing spirit of the age has been created by puritans chastising for their own cause. Whatever that cause may be. IMHO.
From: Evil_Nigel on 30 Jul 2008 06:15 x-no-archive: yes On Jul 29, 11:24 pm, fergus <ferguscapewr...(a)yahoo.co.uk> wrote: > On Tue, 29 Jul 2008 07:26:29 -0700 (PDT), Evil_Ni...(a)hotmail.co.uk > wrote: > > >Personally I think filling the heads of kids with such stuff is child > >abuse. > > What stuff? > I watched the child read out 'her' statement on the news. She had difficulty pronouncing some of the words and she certainly couldn't read the text as sentences. She was just a manipulated pawn who had absolutely no concept of the 'crusade' she was fighting for - the right of one religion to wear bling denied to other religions. Even if you look at the detailed argument, that the bracelet symbolises handcuffs to god, there's no defence - the key word is 'symbolises', the bracelet isn't really handcuffs and the would-be wearer is not worse off for not wearing it. Evil Nigel
From: Evil_Nigel on 30 Jul 2008 08:38
x-no-archive: yes On Jul 30, 1:24 pm, "Sir Benjamin Nunn" <benn...(a)depro.co.uk> wrote: > <Evil_Ni...(a)hotmail.co.uk> wrote in message > > You can demonstrate evolution in laboratory conditions. What > > alternative would you teach? > > 'laboratory conditions' is just an example of a tendentious, > self-supporting, self-facilitating construct. Exactly like 'it says so in > the bible', or 'because it's morally wrong'. > > FWIW, I've seen absolutely nothing in my lifetime that has even remotely > convinced me of the Theory of Evolution, or even anything that convinced me > that I could possibly be convinced, given that it all seems cosmically > unobservable. Listen carefully now children. In the beginning there were people and there was Staphylococcus aureus. Now SA used to make people pretty sick and some of them died, so they prayed to their God and She gave them mouldy bread from which they made antibiotics and suddenly people didn't have to die any more. So SA prayed to their God and She gave them resistance to mouldy-bread antibiotics, so MRSA could go around killing people again. Evil Nigel |