You have to put your hands together
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Pray
We had a lovely gentle chat today,
about being unknowingly led to pray.
“You have to put your hands together,
hold them up like this. Say thank you,
to ..a mystified look.. for the food we eat.”
My son is only four, he does not properly know
how to say the word ‘God’ or ‘Lord’ let alone know
what it means – why ever should he know?
I say to him as he shows to me,
it is just a thing you do in school,
a quiet time. A time to join in,
… but to think for yourself.
Take that time, as I used to in school
to quietly think for myself.
Quietly, calmly – every day.
It tastes insidious. Positively poisonous -
To the loving of all of life …
I tell him about all the dinosaurs, animals, the sharks,
fossils and his poster of the “Tree of Life” topped
by a man … Charles Darwin.
Are we, two-ways, drawing a child’s keen attention
across a forever riven world? So it is and so it is, all ways
given to all – ways of knowing, thinking, deeply feeling
revealing. There is no choice, in truth,
rejoicing, praising, singing …
“Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Praise ‘er Claude!
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Praise ‘er Claude!
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Praise ‘er Claude!
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Praise ‘er Claude!”
“Claude?” I ask, but he does not know …
… he trusts, as he trusts “Bob the Builder” to be
innocent, educating, exuberant and funny, only words.
He does not know.
I explain that ‘some people’ look up to a someone -
a kind of person or man … a “god” – up in the sky.
A man who made everything, who looks down on us
and everything – and who looks after all things.
I tell him his Baba does not agree, or believe in this man,
that he does not need to worry or take it too seriously,
there is no big plan or anyone looking over,
no laws or orders from anywhere other than ourselves.
So, just take that nice quiet time
to think to yourself,
find out,
and think for yourself.
by Gareth Rosser
Thanks Gareth for permission to publish your work. You can read more of this poet’s work here:
On Truth, The Tyranny of Illusion
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On Truth, The Tyranny of Illusion
From a short-term, merely practical standpoint, you really do not want to read this book. This book will mess up your life, as you know it. This book will change every single one of your relationships – most importantly, your relationship with yourself. This book will change your life even if you never implement a single one of the proposals it contains. This book will change you even if you disagree with every single idea it puts forward. Even if you put it down right now, this book will have changed your life, because now you know that you are afraid of change.
This book is radioactive and painful – it is only incidentally the kind of radiation and pain that will cure you.
Stefan Molyneux
Fiction as Facts (Paragraph excerpt)
When you were a child, you did not have the ability to objectively validate the commandments of those who had power over you. Your susceptibility was a great temptation to those who would rather be believed than be right. All power tends to corrupt, and the power that parents have over their children is the greatest power in the world.
A child is biologically predisposed to trust and obey his parents – this has great utility, insofar as parents will often tell their children not to eat poisonous berries, pull hot frying pans off the stove, or run around all day outside without sunscreen on. The requirements of survival tend to discourage endless “trial and error.”
When parents instruct their children, they can either present that instruction as conditional, or absolute. Conditional instructions – do not hit your brother except in self-defence – tend to lead to endless additional questions, and quickly reveal the parents’ lack of knowledge. As the child continues to ask what exactly defines self-defence, whether pre-emptive strikes are allowable, whether teasing can be considered aggression and so on, the fuzzy areas innate to all systems of ethics quickly come into view.
As these fuzzy areas become clearer, parents fear once more the loss of moral authority. However, the fact that certain areas of ethics are harder to define than others does not mean that ethics as a whole is a purely subjective discipline. In biology, the classification of very similar species tends to be fuzzy as well – at least before the discovery of DNA – but that does not mean that biology is a purely subjective science. Water can never be perfectly pure, but that does not mean that bottled water is indistinguishable from seawater.
Due to their desire for simple and absolute moral commandments, parents spend enormous amounts of energy continually herding their children away from the “cliff edges” of ethical complexities. They deploy a wide variety of distractive and abusive tactics to achieve this end – and all these tactics are designed to convince the child that his parents possess absolute knowledge of ethical matters.
However, as children grow – particularly into the teenage years – a certain danger begins to arise. The children, formerly compliant (at least from the “terrible twos” through the latency period) begin to suspect that their parents’ “knowledge” is little more than a form of hypocritical bullying. They begin to see the true conformity of their parents with regards to culture, and really begin to understand that what was presented to them as objective fact was in reality subjective opinion.
This causes great confusion and resentment, because teenagers instinctually grasp the true corruption of their parents.
A counterfeiter necessarily respects the value of real money, since he does not spend his time and energies creating exact replicas of Monopoly banknotes. The counterfeiter wishes to accurately reproduce real money because he knows that real money has value – he wishes his reproduction to be as accurate as possible because he knows that his fake money does not have value.
Similarly, parents present their opinions as facts because they know that objective facts have more power and validity than mere opinion. A “doctor” who fakes his own credentials does so because he knows credentials have the power to create credibility.
Recognizing the power of truth – and using that power to reinforce lies – is abominably corrupt. A man who presents his opinions as facts does so because he recognizes the value of facts. Using the credibility of “truth” to make falsehoods more plausible simultaneously affirms and denies the value of honesty and integrity. It is a fundamental logical contradiction in theory, and almost unbearably hypocritical in practice.
Thus it always happens that when grown children begin to examine their elders, they rapidly discover that those elders do not in fact know what they claimed to know – but knew enough about the value of the truth to present their subjective opinions as objective knowledge. This hypocritical crime far outstrips the abuses of mere counterfeiting, or the faking of credentials, because adults can protect themselves against false currency and fake diplomas.
Children have no such defences.”
There are some great ideas for parents to think about in this short “book”, which you can read in about one hour. Or, there is the option of downloading an audio recording. The books available at the site are free, but a donation is appreciated.
Conversational Intolerance
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A forum participant writes:
It is rather a relationship with a loving God who desires to know them and show them truths of the Bible in their everyday lives. It is about understanding that acceptance is not based on performance but on the very existance of that relationship. If I did not teach what I believe to be true and so very important, eternally important, I would be remiss as a parent.
++++++++++++
Hold up there! First of all you cannot provide a single shred of evidence to show there is a god. Let alone a Hebrew god of the bible (assuming you are Christian). We cannot accept such imaginings as justification for parent’s actions. Prove there is a god — then maybe we will listen to you.
Children should only be taught the truth of the natural world, not the wild postulations of the supernatural. You do not know there is a god. You simply have decided to believe there is a god. If this gives you comfort and satisfaction, well and good you are entitled to follow your conscience. It does not mean you are entitled to infect your children with your delusional beliefs.
Do you understand the difference? Making crucial life decisions based on unproven beliefs is highly irresponsible. The principle of freedom of religion only goes so far — the minute harm is caused by a belief in religion your rights are abrogated — null and void. Teaching vulnerable children supernatural myths and unfounded religious dogma is harmful. You can couch your misbegotten program with all the sentiments of love you so choose, that only makes your actions more reprehensible. Parents that truly love their children respect them as persons and allow them to make there own choices to suit themselves.
If we are going to suffer harm, wouldn’t we all rather be wounded by someone that hates us than by someone who loves us? You are trampling on your children’s religious freedom.
The USA Should Institute International Standards on Child Rights
The United States and Somalia stand as the only two nations in the world that refuse to sign the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, a document that lays down the basic rights and moral standing of children. Nor has the U.S. attempted to adopt the comprehensive legislation passed in many countries, such as England’s The Children Act, which focuses on all matters pertaining to children, with the child’s welfare squarely defining all legal actions.
James Dwyer, in his complexly argued book, The Relationship Rights of Children, believes that, while the United States goes far in protecting parents” rights, it is often at the expense of the welfare of children. He does not offer why the United States leans so far in favor of parents (there are complicated historical and cultural reasons for our “difference”), but instead makes a strong case, based on two centuries of philosophical reasoning, for why children deserve the same moral and legal consideration as adults, even when this consideration steps on the rights of adults.
The debate about children’s rights, when it takes place at all in this country, is usually carried on by legal scholars, with the occasional contribution of social scientists who either study child development or who offer measures of children’s economic and psychological well-being. With Dwyer, we are offered extensive arguments from the philosopher giants, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, John Rawls and others on the value of the moral autonomy of the individual. These philosophers, he admits, focus their arguments on adults, not children. In fact, he notes, John Stuart Mill, in his theory of liberty, specifically states: “[this] is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties.” Not so for Dwyer. He makes a compelling case that the same moral rights apply to children.
“Critically then, each of us competent adults has rights of self-determination because it is generally assumed as a moral matter that our interests matter, and matter equally regardless of our status in society. This empirical assumption certainly applies to children as well, and if we are to respect children as equals, we must extend the moral assumption to them also–that is, that their interests matter as much as do adults’ interests in state decision making.”
But how do children know what their interests are, and if they did, how can they assert them? Children are, of course, dependent upon adults to do so for them. But which adults? Here Dwyer argues forcefully that although the law professes to promote “the best interests of children,” in fact it is far more protective of parental rights, and that these rights are often based on a purely biological claim, not any test of parental ability. Dwyer promotes a view of parents as caretakers, not automatic owners of children. He focuses his criticism on laws creating parental rights at birth, and protecting them in events of abuse and neglect after birth. His solution is to drastically re-formulate the law so that, among other requirements, a birth mother must sign a “Parental Vow” promising love and support within two days after birth in order to become a legal parent, but the state may file a petition within seven days to determine in a court proceeding whether the mother is, in fact, unsuitable for one of many reasons, including age, mental incapacity, past conduct of violence against family members, etc. Fathers achieve legal parenthood only if the birth mother consents and they are married. Fathers not married to the mother can only be deemed legal parents if the mother consents and the father petitions the court, passing all the tests of adequate parenting. Non-biological adults may also petition the court within 30 days and their claim will be determined by the court. Following birth, similar strict tests are applied in cases of abuse or neglect of children, allowing the court to more easily terminate parental rights than is now the case.
His view of children’s rights privileges birth mothers but gives little other advantage to biological ties. Unwed fathers still have an obligation to support but not to access unless they have passed all the above tests. Adults who have acted like parents, or have firm attached relationships to children, like stepfathers, have rights over non-involved biological fathers, and a child may have more than two significant adults in his life. From this perspective, attachment trumps biology and a parent must earn the right to become and to continue as a parent.
This concept of parents as caretakers or trustees rather than the owners of children who have independent rights is much more in keeping with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and with most European efforts at establishing a code of children’s rights. Some of its obvious consequences would be a move toward no corporal punishment and ultimately the right of children themselves, as they grow older, to petition to “divorce” their parents–the course taken in Europe.
Grounded in a strong tradition of moral philosophy, this child-centered approach adds valuable support to some American legal scholars and others who have been moving more timidly in this direction, most notably with a new revision of the influential American Law Institutes” treatise on Parent and Child where “de facto” parents (such as stepparents) without biological ties would be given greater access rights.
A limitation of this book is that Dwyer limits himself to the “protective” rights of young children and does not wander into the thornier “choice rights” of maturing adolescents. For instance: does the protective state have the right to insist on drug testing for children before they may join any after-school activity, as the Supreme Court recently ruled? or, are the rights of children served when in one courtroom a 13-year-old who steals a candy bar may be given a lawyer and nearly all the due process rights of a criminal defendant while down the hall a 13-year-old whose physical custody is being determined following divorce may have no voice or representation at all? Perhaps this philosopher will tackle maturing children’s rights in his next book.
Mary Ann Mason
University of California, Berkeley
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