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April 14, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:18
709 Religion in the media

What passes for 'debate' in the mainstream media

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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope that you are having a wonderful day or evening, and I thought it might be worth having a look at an article that is in a pretty well-respected magazine in Canada called Maclean's, which I got free with my cable subscription and occasionally hold my nose and have a look through.
And there's a cover article in the...
The April 16th, 2007 magazine.
And the cover article, it says, Is God Poison?
And the caption says, A growing movement blames religion for all the world's ills, from the war on terror to AIDS in Africa to child abuse.
And it's a very, very interesting article.
I mean, the person who wrote it, one Brian Bethune, is literate and obviously intelligent, well-educated, and an effective writer, which is not necessarily to say a good writer.
And I thought it would be worth just having a go over some of the writing for a couple of reasons.
One is that I think it's important to understand what passes for intellectual debate in modern society so that when you do get involved in debates with people and you find that there are problems with rationality, problems with So here we start with the beginning of the article,
and I'll pick and choose little bits, and at least I can share what I think about it, and you can let me know what you think.
So it starts out, well actually let's start with the header.
Is God poison? A new movement blames God for every social problem from doffer to child abuse.
Well immediately there you have the classic appeal to the middle ground, right?
Appeal to the middle ground. So a new movement.
It's a movement. It's not a new school of thought.
It's not an updated philosophy.
It's a movement. Which is immediately suspect and said, blames God for every social problem from daffer to child abuse.
Now that, of course, is a complete mischaracterization of the atheist position.
Atheism doesn't blame God for anything.
Because God doesn't exist.
I, for one, as an atheist and a philosopher, do not blame invisible, magical, dancing leprechauns for every social problem, because there is no such thing as God, and there's no such thing as magical, dancing leprechauns, which, of course, is a great shame. So, blaming God is a sort of emotionally volatile term that is completely incorrect.
And then they say, for every social problem.
Blames God for every social problem.
And what that means is that human beings, or this new movement, this sort of atheism that is represented by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, to a lesser degree myself, and so on, Blames every social problem.
So, for instance, we blame God for inflation.
We blame God for the failure of foreign aid programs.
We blame God for potholes in the road.
And we blame God for crack.
So, of course, this is not a reasonable position, but what the writer is doing is Using an ad hominem and argument from extremity or inflation attack upon this particular approach, right? So there's this atheism called the New Movement and blaming God, again, that immediately mischaracterizes the emotional Maturity of atheists, blaming God.
Well, of course, it's complete nonsense.
Atheists don't blame God. Blame religion, blame the infliction of religion upon children for some social problems, and then blames God for every social problem.
Well, of course, that is a complete mischaracterization of the approach, and there's no reasonable philosopher who's out there who blames even religion for every single social problem, and so on.
So here you have an immediately...
It's just sort of a bitchy and inflated and snarky and sarcastic and eye-rolling...
approach to this particular issue.
And this is what is called an argument.
So let's dig a little bit into the article and see what we can make clear.
So the article starts like this.
God is a delusion if his enemies are to be believed.
Nothing more than the creation of a species with prefrontal lobes too strong and aggressive instincts, sorry, with prefrontal lobes too small and aggressive instincts too strong for its own God.
For its own good. So here we start, let's just look at the very first phrase of the sentence.
God is a delusion if his enemies are to be believed.
And of course, there's no atheist in the world who is a real, a strong atheist, who opposes God.
We oppose irrationality.
We oppose fantasy. We oppose superstition.
We oppose bigotry. We oppose all of these mischaracterizations of the universe.
We oppose falsehood masquerading as truth, just as a doctor opposes illness.
But, so to say, God is a delusion if his enemies are to be believed.
So nobody is an enemy of God because God doesn't exist and you can't fight 2 plus 2 is 5.
To characterize atheists as being anti-God is like saying that the sum total of mathematicians' emotional and intellectual energies are focused on railing and spitting and scorning the proposition that 2 plus 2 is 5.
Well, no. It's just false.
Now, the consequences of a false belief That is associated with absolutism, with fantasy.
It results in manipulation and dictatorship and theocracies of various kinds, and it results in intolerance and wars and murders and suicide bombers and so on.
But nobody who's an enemy of God, you can't be the enemy of something which doesn't exist.
So, then the article goes on to say, his worship is poison.
His adherents commit child abuse, metaphorical and actual, on a daily basis.
And the murderous clashes of rival gangs of his followers are the single greatest threat to humanity's future.
Whatever else God may be, he is most assuredly not dead.
You can take his critics' word and the depths of their passion for that.
And again, focusing on God rather than the subjective and absolutist beliefs of irrational religious people who were scarred by being told falsehoods and bullied and so on when they were young, it's a lot easier to talk about God than it is to talk about religious people.
So this writer characterizes or identifies 9-11 as a catalyst for the atheist text, of course, and there was something which did occur for people in their awakening to religious extremism and violence and so on that occurred.
So Christopher Hitchens, who is an ex-Marxist, now socialist, left-wing supporter of the war in Iraq, so obviously a man who is deeply morally insane, is a person who is taken as a character engaged or As characteristic of this sort of atheist movement.
So this is a quote from Hitchens who's on the phone from his Washington home.
He says, the argument between faith and non-faith is cresting again in a way that's not been seen since the Scope's monkey trial.
Whether we're arguing about intervening in Darfur or about the recognition of gay marriage, underneath we're always arguing about religion.
He could have easily added, says the writer, from an endless series of other topics across Europe and North America, hot-button issues, in a debate many thought long over.
This is sort of the euthanasia, abortion, stem cell research, the papillomavirus, whatever, whatever, right?
Ten Commandments in the courthouse, and so on.
So there are fights, and certainly here in Canada we're getting more of a religious revival that is taking over government.
The conservative is really, in the same way that it has in the United States, the conservative movement has largely been taken over by Christians.
And across Canada there have been fights over practices associated with restrictive forms of various religions, wearing facial veils, Islam, carrying even symbolic weapons, Sikhism, gender segregation, Judaism, and the less-than-scientific biology taught in some No surprise, then, that what Hitchens calls the oldest argument in human history is increasingly engaging.
The public, in London's Westminster Central Hall on March 27th, some 2,000 people, turned out to hear Hitchens, Dawkins, and philosopher A.C. Grayling debate a trio of religious authorities on the question, we'd be better off without religion.
The motion carried 1205 to 778.
He thinks that Hitchens is pleased.
He said, we atheists never thought that religion would die out because it comes from fear of death, but we did think theocracy would die.
Instead, those of us who used to think we'd just live a life free of religion are fed up with insults and threats from believers, with Danish cartoonists who can't work and murdered Dutch filmmakers, with saying getting AIDS is better, more godly than using condoms.
You know who's a neighbor of mine now?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, America's first refugee from Western Europe in living memory.
I think that...
I don't know who that is. If anybody knows, please feel free to let me know.
So let's have a look at...
There's one or two arguments that I would sort of like to pull out in this.
And he says...
Dawkins, he says, seems spiritually deaf to everything from a sense of wonder to the pull of family or community.
That's a wonderful, wonderful sentence.
Very, very complex and detailed in the way that it dismisses the philosophers that are on the atheist side.
So let's just have a look at it again.
Dawkins seems spiritually deaf, says the writer, to everything from a sense of wonder to the pull of family or community.
Now, the wonderful thing about Richard Dawkins, and there are things that aren't so wonderful, but he is enormously engaging in a sense of wonder.
There's an online lecture that he gives where he basically says that who you are 20 years ago physically, there's not one single cell that is who you were 20 years ago.
You've been completely replaced.
So who are you? It's an amazing question.
It's a wonderful fundamental question.
And so there's a sense of wonder in science that is totally beautiful.
There's no sense of wonder in religion.
There's no sense of wonder in religion.
Anymore than there is in racism or bigotry.
Sense of wonder to the pull of family or community.
Now that's really, really fascinating to think about.
The pull of family or community as the root of certain religious ideologies or practices.
If we look at that in a sort of more fundamental way, the pull of family or community, what that really means, of course, is that children are taught that God exists and that he is involved in their life and that he loves them or Satan hates them or God loves them unless they do things that their parents tell them are wrong or the priest tells them they're wrong, in which case God hates them and might send them to hell and so on.
And so the pull of family or community in the sense of religion is very simply this, that there is a union or a fusion of personalities based on subjugation to a common illusion or bigotry called religion.
If you were talking about a cult that was raising children to believe that the world was a gallstone in the belly of a giant boa constrictor of eternity and that any time they disagreed with the boa constrictor's thoughts,
They would be burning in hell for eternity, and they would be physically punished, and they would be cast out of their community if they ever questioned the imaginary thoughts or the thoughts or the willpower of the great boa constrictor of which this world is but a gallstone.
We would not say, well, gee, there's a sense of wonder in that cult, and there is a real pull of a family or a community.
What we would say...
Oh, and of course, the boa constrictor never talks to anyone directly.
That has to come through priests.
It has to come through people who believe that only they receive the information from the boa constrictor, and so on.
Would we really say that there's a sense of wonder In that cult, in that community that believes in the giant boa constrictor or the flying spaghetti monster or whatever.
And there's a pull of family or community.
What we would say is that there is a brutal domination of children from family and community and that the children's dependence upon the community when we're all dependent upon our parents and community when we're young That the children's dependence upon the community is used to dominate the children.
The children are dependent on their parents and basically we have to conform to our parents when we're children because the threat of parental withdrawal of affection is basically a death sentence for a child.
So you can't survive without your parents.
So would we say, you know, it's a pull, it's a wonder, it's a, you know, we would just say, no, these people are brutally lied to by their parents and they're threatened with expulsion from their community.
And that's a cult. I mean, that's just a cult.
And so there's really no sense of family or community.
There is only that you will be thoroughly rejected should you have the temerity to question the bigotries and fantasies of those around you.
That those around you will choose fantasy and bigotry over you seven days a week and twice on Sundays.
So that is a wonderful way of mischaracterizing what occurs within a religion.
If you have ever talked to somebody who has tried to, say, get out of the clutches of Judaism...
Then you get a sense of just how brutal these things can be.
I mean, they don't last for 5,000 years because they're true or they're good.
They last for 5,000 years because they brutalize, reject, scorn, and vilify anybody who tries to leave.
So here's another phrase that I think is very interesting.
The thrust of these books, those atheism books, is a common assault on the world's three great monotheisms.
A common assault on the world's three great monotheisms.
These books have a field day with the soft targets Judaism, Christianity, and Islam present.
The sexual obsession, the dizzying array of contradictions between and within the faiths, And above all, with the violence they've unleashed on humanity.
This is the writer again. The common god of the Old Testament is painted as a terrifying murderous tyrant, a god whose followers can find ample precedence for their most homicidal impulses.
But Yahweh is not the only culprit.
Hitchens devotes a chapter to hacking away at Eastern religions, pointing out that it was Hindu Tamils on Sri Lanka who long before Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda pioneered, quote, the disgusting tactic of suicide, murder, and the enthusiastic participation of of Japanese Buddhists in their country's genocidal 20th century wars.
So let's have a look at a couple that are in here which I think are just absolutely fascinating and well worth having a look at and understanding again sort of what passes for debate within the modern world.
A common assault on the world's three great monotheism.
Assault is interesting.
Assault is very, very interesting.
And again, it's not a phrase that is entirely inappropriate.
So you can assault, say, the bigotry of the Ku Klux Klan, and it would be an assault upon them.
It's a bit of a negative phrase, but not the end of the world.
They have a field day with the soft targets presented by these three religions.
And this is a wonderful phrase.
The common god of the Old Testament is painted as a terrifying, murderous tyrant.
Now, painting is a wonderful, wonderful phrase that is...
It has got a lot of richness, metaphorically.
When I have a blank canvas and I paint a picture on it, clearly whatever I put on the picture, whatever I put on that canvas is not inherent to that canvas.
It is a metaphor for psychologically what's called projection, which is imagining that other people have the feelings that you do not acknowledge yourself, right?
So if I'm a really angry person in general but I don't, Acknowledge that or deal with it, then I seem to imagine that everyone else around me is really angry and become passive-aggressive and provoke them and then lo and behold they become angry and blah blah blah blah blah.
But the idea that this deity, this fictional character that is portrayed in the Old Testament is not actually Murderous or a terrifying murderous tyrant.
The fact that it is atheists who paint this mad deity as terrifying and murderous is fascinating.
Imagine if he'd phrased it differently, if he'd said the common God of the Old Testament is correctly identified as a terrifying murderous tyrant.
That's a very different way of saying it, rather than saying the common god of the Old Testament is painted as a terrifying, murderous tyrant.
That means that he's not actually a terrifying, murderous tyrant.
It's just that this is how he is portrayed by the atheists.
And again, fantastic, absolutely wonderful.
And he says, No one can tell me fascism was not a religious movement at bottom,
he says. Consider that most of it took place in Catholic countries often formalized by concordance with the Vatican or that the Greek Orthodox Church blessed the Junta colonels or Hitler's Nordic paganism.
Quote, and of course it was literally true in Imperial Japan that Buddhist militarist alliance.
Religion kills, Hitchin says, because it is tribal and totalitarian.
In the most extreme form, Of in-group, out-group markers ever known.
Although some faiths are more pacific than others, that has more to do with their relative powerlessness.
Were the Amish, say, to rise to supreme authority over other faiths, they would soon begin to resemble the medieval Catholic Church.
Power corrupts religion uniquely because it considers its doctrines uniquely right.
It necessarily seeks to interfere in the lives of non-believers.
Thus, religion offers a constantly available license for ordinary people to behave cruelly sometimes.
The entire history of Christian anti-Semitism, not to mention its racial offspring, the Nazis' final solution, is a case in point.
And the cruelty and irrationality is still enacted regularly in less violent ways in the present day.
This is the writer characterizing the argument of the atheists.
Two of the monotheisms, each with millions of followers in Africa, campaign against condom use in a continent rife with AIDS. One can only infer that they think the cure is worse than the disease.
Outside of the religious box, who could possibly come to that conclusion?
Members of the Bush administration resist funding the vaccine against human papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted disease that causes cervical cancer, on the grounds that fear of the disease should act as a deterrent to premarital sex, or if you get cancer, as just punishment for it.
Now, this is particularly gross, and if you have a squeamish stomach, you might want to skip the next few minutes.
Then there's the even more grotesque situation that unfolded in New York in 2005, cited by Hitchens in his book.
It concerns a 57-year-old Mohel, a Jewish circumciser, who, like many deeply orthodox Mohels, practiced an ancient form of his ritual.
The Mohel completes circumcision by taking the infant's penis in his mouth and sucking off the amputated foreskin.
By so doing, the New York Mohill gave herpes to at least three babies, killing one of them and bringing brain damage to another.
It's estimated that two-thirds of all adults, most of them unknowingly, have the oral herpes virus, which merely leads to cold sores in them, while posing a mortal threat to infants' brains.
In an election year, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg backed off from the city health department's recommended ban on this practice of sucking off the severed foreskin of a baby in the name of religious freedom.
And of course, what needs to be said about that at all?
I mean, the fact that you are hacking off part of the baby's penis and sucking it off in your mouth, and I assume spitting it out, I don't know if they swallow it or not.
There's no language that can possibly encompass the sickness that that represents.
Hitchens says, being told that you're not really going to die is simply contemptible.
Those who offer false consolation are false friends, especially when behind that lies religion's dirty little secret, that they want a world to end.
They pray for the end to come soon.
Christian obsession with the end of the world has real-world implications, Harris notes.
I think this is in A Letter to a Christian Nation.
Almost half the American population professes the belief that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead within the next 50 years.
This means, adds Harris, that should New York be destroyed in a nuclear fireball, quote, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver lining.
Beliefs of this sort do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves.
And then the writer goes on to say, moderate believers naturally won't recognize themselves in these portraits of bloody pathologies, nor should they.
Nor should they, he says.
But the story of the Mohel brings up an aspect of the atheist argument that is even more enraging for believers.
Religion claims a central role in the protection of children.
In Christianity, the commandment comes directly from Jesus.
Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.
In other words, if you upset a child, if you offend a child, then you should be drowned, you should be murdered.
This, of course, is considered to be some wonderful moral commandment, and so on.
But, of course, atheists argue that the monotheistic record, beginning with the chilling story of Abraham's willingness to obey God's commandment to slay his son Isaac, A foundational myth for all three faiths is one of constant child abuse.
It runs the gamut from the contemporary Catholic Church's pedophilia scandal in which known rapists were protected and actually known pedophiles were protected and moved from parish to parish to religiously sanctioned female genital mutilation to Jehovah's Witnesses refusing blood transfusions for their children to the regular instilling of religious terror.
And this is all really quite wonderful in terms of its argument.
Of course, nobody here, these are all arguments from a fact, and nobody is actually saying, does God exist?
There's all this amount of nonsense that, well, there's this effect and there's that effect, and some people like it, and some people are happy, and some people are sad, and some children enjoy religion, and some children don't, so who are we to say?
Nobody is actually debating whether or not God exists, and there's lots of arguments in Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens' books regarding the existence of God.
Of course, that's not a question, right?
So can you imagine an article about the Ku Klux Klan that would say, well, it gives people a sense of community, they're happy, it gives them comfort in the face of uncertainty, and their belief that, I don't know, blacks are inferior, or, I don't know, Orientals are inferior, or, It has some effects, and some people find it very unifying, and it brings communities together, and it makes families very happy, but other people end up killing blacks and Orientals and so on.
So there's really no real way to judge it.
But of course, the central question in this sort of bigotry is, is it bigotry or is it true?
Is it simply an opinion that people hold because it was inflicted upon them as children and the community will punish them for failing to hold it?
Or is it a fact, right?
So the first thing that you would do, I would say, when you wanted to battle racism, is you would ask the Ku Klux Klan member who says that blacks are inferior, well, that's very interesting.
Perhaps you can tell me the scientific data behind and the logical arguments behind your proposition.
That would be the first thing that you would establish.
If somebody says 2 plus 2 is 4, or the sky is blue, and you don't believe them, you simply have to work through the proof.
That's how you actually get things resolved.
You don't just sort of ramble about saying, well, there's good and bad in everything, and there's pluses and minuses.
All that does is an appeal to the middle to say, well, yes, religious extremism is bad, but then atheistic extremism is also bad, and the truth lies somewhere in between.
We just run around in circles and bury your brain in the sand, right?
Dead and rotting.
And this is really quite a wonderful article from that, just in the way it pendulums itself into complete inconsequentiality.
And let's have a look at just one last, or maybe two, one or two last arguments in this article.
Again, quite wonderful and quite instructive if you get a chance to look at it online.
I would certainly recommend it.
It's phrased just at the end here.
He's quoting one of the writers here, the writer of the article.
He says, raising children to think that they're part of a religious group is a ludicrous obscenity, says one writer.
Raising children to think they're part of a religious group is a ludicrous obscenity, says one writer.
That of course is not a very accurate way of characterizing how religion is taught to children.
Lying to children for the sake of enhancing and extending your own bigotries, frightening children with threats of hell and a withdrawal of parental affection and the divine affections of some sort of deities, instilling your own bigotries in children is a ludicrous obscenity, says one writer. Raising children to think they're part of a religious group, part of the group.
They're just thinking they're part of a group.
Of course, raising children to think is the complete opposite of what religious people want to do.
But it's in these kinds of ways that we really do get a strong sense of what kind of, quote, thinking is going on in the circles of debates.
And there's a gentleman who wrote to me, and I might do a little bit on this tomorrow during the show.
Actually, no, I'll do it another time.
He wrote about a dinner party where a woman was saying, well, we need to achieve spiritual oneness.
That's what my guru says. And he says, well, that's very interesting.
Can you tell me what scientific proof or logical understanding you have to maintain this relationship with your guru or to tell us about moral instructions?
You really must have thought this stuff through.
You must have very good reasons for what it is that you're saying.
And of course, the whole dinner party erupted into tension and fear and anger and upset and so on.
Because everybody can spout all of the most errant nonsense in the world, but the moment somebody asks them for logical and scientific proof, everybody gets really upset.
Don't stifle me. Don't criticize me.
Everyone's allowed to have their own beliefs and so on.
But of course, people don't put it forward as beliefs.
It's a very sort of fundamental thing, I think, to understand about religion.
People do not put forth the religious beliefs in the way that is always characterized.
It's not what people do.
People don't say to children, you are part of this group.
They don't say to children, we are Christians and we believe in this fantasy, this fairy tale, this story.
This is not what they say to children.
This is not how religion reproduces itself from generation to generation.
Religion reproduces itself from generation to generation by parents telling impressionable young dependent children that sky ghosts exist, are watching them night and day, will punish them for transgressions, and that they can't have any direct relationship with this, but must merely rely.
On the instructions of their parents and so on and so on and so on.
They are told complete destructive lies.
They're not told lies like, you know, China is square.
China is shaped like a square.
Or that... Mermaids exist.
And all of these things would be false, but they wouldn't have any direct emotional or psychological traumatic consequences.
But the idea that you are perpetually being watched by a being that is going to judge you for any disobedience with regards to your parents' instructions or the priest's instructions is abusive.
It's completely and totally abusive.
Abusive. It basically is a totalitarian technique, which is that you are going to be constantly watched, which is the idea behind the NKVD or the secret police and so on.
You're going to be continually watched.
You cannot question any of the edicts of your leaders and vast and eternal and ever destructive punishment will accrue to you, will be inflicted upon you, should you not obey even the slightest whim of those who are in control of you, right?
So religion plus parenting equals totalitarian principles.
You are told lies, you are subjected to endless propaganda, threats, punishments, withdrawals, emotional abuse of every kind, and of course sometimes physical abuse, all for the sake of a false ideology.
It's fundamentally fascistic, communistic, totalitarian in its approach to the communication of truth.
So, when you talk to somebody who was raised as a Christian and so on, and you say, well, what is it that your parents told you?
What they always hear back is God is real, God exists, the Bible is true, or at least the parts of the Bible we tell you about and subscribe to ourselves are true, that God loves you, that Jesus died for your sins, that he watches over you, then they may or may not have hell and all of that.
But they tell these things to their children As if these things are true.
And of course, they're completely false and complete fantasies.
But they tell this mad, destructive fairy tale as if it is completely and totally true.
So they lie to their children in order to frighten their children into surrendering autonomy, independence, thought, integrity, personality, and power to their parents.
We don't allow, and people get upset about falsehood in advertising, right?
So you can't even say that a car gets 50 miles to the gallon if it only gets 48 miles to the gallon.
We will put people in jail who make claims that prove to be false.
Yet, we are morally neutral towards people who tell children destructive, soul-destroying, so to speak, lies about the nature of the universe and the ever-watchfulness of a paranoid and violent deity that will never, ever give up on scanning them for any kind of internal or external moral transgressions, always of which are defined as disobedience to the priests or the teachers or, in particular, of course, the parents.
If somebody says, well, the car gets 50 miles to the gallon, or it gets 48 miles to the gallon, we consider that to be an egregious moral transgression.
If somebody says, I will buy something from you, And I will pay you later a $20 figurine from eBay or something.
And they then accept the receipt of the $20 figurine, but they don't send the $20.
We consider this to be fraud, right?
To be something that should be rejected or either dealt with in a legal manner or dealt with through ostracism and bad ratings or whatever.
But we have these standards of truth that are very important.
If a teacher teaches children that 2 plus 2 is 5, that teacher will lose their job.
If a geography teacher tells people that the world is shaped like a kumquat crossed with a banana, that teacher will lose his job.
If a physicist say, if a physics teacher tells children that the escape velocity of the earth is something x number that's not the correct number and continues to do it, they will lose their job.
We have a degree Of hostility, and I think rightly so, or at least sanctioned towards those who lie about things for the sake of their own self-interest.
Somebody sells you a computer and it's supposed to be, I don't know, 2.4 gigahertz, and then you run a test and it's only 1.8 gigahertz, then you feel that you have been ripped off, taken advantage of, and you have the right to restitution of some kind and so on.
So when people lie to us for their own self-advantage, for their own self-aggrandizement, and to, in particular, and especially to the degree with which those lies are destructive, we have a negative attitude towards such people, a fraud and so on, incompetence. If a doctor lies to you about a diagnosis, then would you consider that to be morally neutral?
No. I mean, these people get sued all the time.
And so when it comes to lying to children about the existence of paranoid, violent, murderous, judgmental sky ghosts that never, ever stop watching them, that's enormously destructive because, of course, it's completely false, wholly invasive, and...
Creates an enormous amount of instability and paranoia and aggression and humiliation in the child and does not give the child the ability to develop his or her own cognitive faculties in a relaxed and rational and scientific manner.
Is this not far worse than the problem of a $20 figurine or a math teacher who tells children that 2 plus 2 is 5?
Or we get upset.
And the funny thing is we get upset.
If you watch the Dr. Phil show, occasionally he'll have a father on who is teaching the children to swear.
And we are shocked and appalled that...
A parent would teach a child to swear as a funsy-funsy, right?
It would be a terrible thing for the parent to do.
But naturally, teaching a child that a paranoid, violent, judgmental, and eternally, being with the capacity to eternally damn the child to hellfire, It's constantly watching the child and evaluating his every move, and you must, of course, continue to obey the parents, obey the parents, obey the parents at all times.
All of this is something that is something far worse than what is provided in other areas of life in terms of falsehood, but it's not something that we generally have a problem with, and I think that we should try and close that off.
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