Owning the young mind
 

Religions do it, increasingly children books do it, too: trying to form and manipulate the young mind as long as it is that formable. Like cigarette indsutry knows that if it failed to turn a teen into a smoker before the age of 18, the probability that said teen ever will become a smoker later on drops by over 80%.

https://www.theage.com.au/entertainm...21-p4zmv3.html

I know of people in Germany who want to prohibit the classical and much loved books by Enid Blyton due to their "anti-feminist" women-contemptous role modelling. They also want to ban Asterix comics due to their inhumane, violent content, and want to rewrite Grimm'S fairy tales to enter gender-neutral narration styles, prevent sexisim and female discrimination and protect the young sweethearts from depictions of sadism and cruelty that could violate and severely injure the child's psyche.

Fanatized, brainless retarded bullcrap like this drives me furious and makes me the angry man I have become.

It may be due low testosterone levels too (a certain moderator should take note as well :03:)

The reasons behind Grumpy Old Man syndrome :D
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/201...-for-a-reason/


Just havin' fun.



I feel your pain though. Its like humanity never learns to just let things be. Instead some push their ideals, culture, system of government, religion,etc etc on others until they cant take it anymore and slowly and surely conflict ensues. Its seems an endless cycle.

The invitation still stands Skybird, though the U.S. has the same problems everyone else has, it's BIG, lots of land. You can always find solitude here in any climate.

Whatever you do, don't dare display a fear of "Injuns" in your children's books. :doh:

I have often wondered how popular religion would be if children were prevented from being exposed to it until they were 18 years old.

Enid Blyton really? the gender stereo types are there because they were written in the 40s and 50s. But also.... The Author is a woman, half the main characters are girls or women, they participate in the adventure /mystery solving and often have their moment of brilliance just as the boys /men do.
occasionally they get told to stay behind because its 'not safe' or something like that, but usually they get their hands dirty.


People are stupid.

I'd say the answer depends on what is used to fill the gap. Something has to because young minds DO need some form of guidance if for no other reason than to prevent them from becoming savages.

Now while it has numerous downsides religion has provided that life guide for nearly all of human existence. There are many here who would say it is obsolete, ok then. So what replaces it? Nihilism and teenage emotions are a volatile mix.

@August.
Yeah there is much debate over how well western civilisation is able to sustain itself in the absence of the Abrahamic Religions much of it was founded on.

The Jury is still out on that one tbh…. We are not exactly in great shape at the moment with all the division.

We can always ask atheist families who raise well socialized children.

We should, assuming their methods do not rely on the presence of a local religious social structure and is applicable on a general scale.

More, as often forced indoctrination of a specific teaching during childhood produces atheists. The reverse, as USSR shows, is also true.

We can always ask the adult converts to Islam.

Morals were there before religion. You do not need a religion to get moral behaviour handed from one generation to the next.

In principle ,the most profound essence of what is needed, is the golden rule. Which all too often gets violated by religions' greed for power and influence and control. Some of the most immoral acts and episodes of barbary were triggered by morals told according to religions, mono- and polytheistic alike. The argument that it takes religions to get moral behaviour else the beastly nature of man breaks out, has been proven wrong by history so very often.

Man does not like to face the fact that in this giant universe his presence is unimportant, and that he has no total control and power over his fate, that is life is easy to break, and that he can all to easily get lost in the abyss of this void, and one day finally will. Man needs to form at least an illusion of some minimum control and influence he has, to make life bearable and add his existence a meaning that else he fails to see. These religions then function to a principle of: I offer a donation to the deity, and deity then does something for me. In the end, religions basing on this, are a bartering place where the devout is not that devout at all, but has power over his deity - by bribing it he can make it to do what he wants it to do. :) Great god that is, eh?

The most complete system of explanations of the human psyche that I know of, is not the Western tradition of modern psychology, but Buddhism. It is because it is not only radically empirical, but also combines a precise description of how the psyche, or say: the ego, functions, and why and how it comes into existence in the first, it combines this with a cosmological model of explaning mind and space, their relation to forms (matter) and what we - falsly - consider to be our ego. That is something that the Westrn tradition of psychology usually igores: the hunger for meaning, the crave of man to get answers when yelling his questions out into the void out there. The dualistic separation between mind and matter we have in the Western tradition, has a lot to do with that as well. It has enabled the western temporary conquest of parts of nature by science and engineering - but also has led to a deepening split inside our inner being (to call it like that in absence of a better idea of how to express what I mean), that has the dramatic consequence of us now perverting these capabilties of ours into tools of destroying the very basics of our natural survival in this planet's environment. We are, I have no better word, we are hopelessly "splintered". Some of us who hungrily search in the philosophy of the far east for something that eases their hunger, even take these Western patterns and enforce them onto for exmaple the Eastern symbology on Yin and Yang - then interpreting it as the Asian way to express a battle between the forces of the Light trying to defeat the forces of the Darkness, a monumental conflict. But the early taoists in china had a very different view of it, and that is the real reason why the round Yin-Yang-symbol is so harmonic and gentle and round. They thought of Yin and Yang not as Heaven and Hell, Light and Darkness entangled in bitter hostile fighting, but as two kids friendly wrestling with each other in a child's play. No bitter conflict in an eternal struggle for power and dominance, but a light-hearted playing around, and as a result of this play the myriads of forms emerge from the void and come into existence for some time, before they dissapear again - like kids sooner or later get tired of playing always the same game.

The real idea behind taoism is something very different than what many Westerners think it is. It is absoutely no surprise that early taoism and early Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism entered a mutually so very fruitful symbiosis once a long time ago in China. They complement each other quite well.

Okay, long lecture again, sorry. What it comes down to: Golden Rule. If we would learn to play by that alone, already more would be won than all religions together have ever acchieved in all their history. The world would be a very different one. And a much better one, you can bet your life on that.

You guys have a very erratic view of what an atheist originally is. I would recommend to stop thinking of an atheist being somebody who is something explicitly special: being atheist, that is. Better think of an atheist as someone who is somethign not: a theist believer. If you are atheist, its not as if you claim a certain characteristic that you have subscribed to, its just that you refuse to do right that: to subscripe to the characteristic feature sets of theism. Seen this way, atheism is a natural state of man, while every religious state of man is an un-natural, an artifical, an "added" state of man.


Atheism is no belief in itself, atheists do not believe in "something" that just is different from Christian or Islamic belief. It is no conviction. It is the rejection to take over theists' beliefs and concvictions on the basis of hear-say. Its healthy empirism, so to speak, and a non-membership for the theistic club. Does something like a "non-membership" even exist, does it make sense to think in such a term? Hardly. Atheists are people who have not joined the club of theism and thus reject to follow the house rules of the theistic club home. Simple as that.


The relation between political leadership and religious leadership is very old. Both, politics and relgions, always have used each other to mutually autorize themselves before the people and then claim power and control over that people. Its a cooperation in abusing the people, and keeping them locked in slavery.

"If all men were friends, there would be no need of justice". - Aristotle

^ Could have been by any socialist as well. "If only man were this or that, then socialism would function". :D

Says who? Humans have lived under various forms of religious mandated morals ever since the stone age. You can't claim to know what existed before nor you claim to know what behaviors would be handed between generations in its absence. It's true absence not just rejected by a minor subset of the population that nevertheless benefits by religions existence.

The truth is religion is an integral and historical part of human society. None of us knows what would happen in it's absence. Maybe everything would be sweetness and light but then again maybe it will just set the stage for a bloody resurgence as religions role is filled by radical cults all fighting for dominance.

And how would that be different from the way it's always been when religions have ruled?

Maybe it'd be like the difference between a lone car crash and a multi car pile up. All I am saying is that eliminating religion means removing the good it does along with the bad and nobody, including you, knows the consequences of such a massive disruption to human society.

The fearmongering of religion. C'mon, August. Even little children of pre-school age usually all by themselves arrange their playful interactions according to golden rules and fair bartering. And I bet it was not that different with the 5 years old a thousand years back, two thousand and four thousand years.

Heck, even Bonobos, when seeing one ape of their group suffering, or sitting aside, come and look at him, check his injuries or whatever it is, touch him, stroke him gently, show signs of compassion, caring and tenderness. And there are many other higher animals doing similiar things as well. Do they do this for religious reasons?

You do not need a religious framework to see people showing social acting, seeking justice in their relations, and behaving according to what we describe in this motto: "what you do not want to get done to you, don't do to somebody else". The Golden Rule, that is.

But quite often, religion has and still does violate this golden rule, in the name of its own "moral" dogma. History, until the present, is full of examples for this.

And quite often, when religion wants to define what is moral and what not, in the end it wants only one thing: control over the people and its actions.

As I explained, there is a hunger in man for adding meaning to his life, many people cannot stand to not have that, become mentally deranged, ill at their heart, desperate, whatever. Any artificial conception of a belief system serves them the purpose to achieve this: seeing a meaning in their lives, a kind of control they have over their fragile, short, vulnerable existence. Viktor Frankl, founder of the Logotherapy school of psychotherapy and survivor of the KZs (his complete family was murdered by the Nazis), put it plain and simple in words: "He who has a Why to live for, is able to bear almost every How." ("Wer ein Warum zum Leben hat, erträgt fast jedes Wie.") Its a fact known in research since long, that in the KZs those who had not such a goal, aim, belief, sense of meaning even in this horror that surrounded them, that these people died earlier and at dramatically higher rates than those who were able to keep somethign in their heart that made them wanting to live for it, or due to it. Or as Jesus has put it: "Man does not live by bread alone."

Its highly subjective, of course. The hunger for meaning however does not automatically mean that just any belief system and what it claims, tells the truth, states facts, is right. It only means that for the believer, it serves his subjective purpose. He falls out of his belief, when it does not serve its purpose anymore (=spiritual crisis).

This all is more about psycho-hygienics than about anything else. Some years ago they erratically wrote in the media that a gene was found that made people believe in God. That is Quatsch, the results were not claiming such nonsense. What they meant and what often intentionally was misinterpreted is that due to the psychological base function of adding an imagined order to the world as we perceive it, the brain may be genetically predetermined to favour the forming of artificial mental orders/structures into which we sort in our witnessing of the world, and this categorizing, to name it as that for the moment, create these "illusions" of religious beliefs and then make people prone to take them for real.

It may be an illusions - but it may be one that keeps us from getting insane, desperate, feeling lost; it may fulfill a function vital for our mental and biological survival. It may be essential for maintaining a psychohygienical homeostasis.

Like I said people come up with all kinds of reasons why religion is bad but nothing about what will replace the human need for it. That scares me because if we just leave it to chance it we could easily end up worse off.