On 16 September 2022, a 22-year-old Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini died in hospital in Tehran, Iran, under suspicious circumstances, due to police brutality according to witnesses.
The Guidance Patrol, the morality police of Iran’s Law Enforcement Command, arrested Amini for not wearing the hijab in accordance with government standards. Eyewitnesses, including women who were detained with Amini, said she was severely beaten. These assertions, in addition to leaked medical scans,led independent observers to believe Amini had had a cerebral hemorrhage or stroke.
Amini’s death resulted in a series of large-scale protests across the country which garnered international attention, including a statement from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, putting a focus on violence against women in the Islamic Republic of Iran. (Wiki)
You know, for instance, in math, you should be able to explain your thinking. So, it’s not enough to “know” 3X2=6, but you need to illustrate it, perhaps with manipulatives: you make groups of three with blocks, select two of those groups, and you get six total things.
Is it a problem that this child preacher can quote the bible but can’t explain what it means in his own words?
It’s amazing how often people can have a lot of knowledge/information about a topic without being wise about the topic. The ancient Greeks said philosophy is the love of wisdom.
“Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.” (Aristotle)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO6Yw5WiUYI
Has this above child been brainwashed into conservative fundamentalist Christianity?
Is difference between this above child and the more mild cases of religious upbringing of children we see one of degree, or of kind. Picture a child who is not vocal like this one, but holds similar or more mild conservative Christian views.
Here is a helpful analogy video on religious child grooming: inundating a child with just one kind of religion, excluding others and secularism:
How do the thought experiment analogies in the video above help us see religious upbringing in a different light?
BONUS: Thinking about logic and humor – have you ever noticed the connection between logical errors and humor? Picture a reductio ad absurdum: a method of proving the falsity of a premise by showing that its logical consequence is absurd or contradictory. So: “The Earth cannot be flat; otherwise, we would find people falling off the edge.” That people are not falling off the edge makes Flat Earth proponents false/wrong, seem silly, which is to say hilarious! Question: Is the video of the conservative Christian preacher child above in the first video (i) not something we should care about, (ii) horrific, (iii) hilarious, or (iv) profoundly true?
“Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this. (Esther 4:14).”
As was usually come to pass at the end of the day, Darth Harley walked down the Angus Path, particularly pleasant and orange on a autumn eve such as this, and reflected on the day at school. His teacher had taught on “6 +1 Traits of good writing,” and specifically writing with Word Choice that reflected 5 senses and emotion words.
“Paint a picture in your readers’ minds,” she had said.
Angus Path, or more precisely Angus Trail, was a pleasant way that accompanied sparkling Golden Brook in Harley’s hometown. The Angus the trail had in mind was Angus Og MacDonald, an ancient Scottish leader who may have fought along the Templar Knights soldiers hundreds of years ago.
“What if it’s all true?” Harley’s imaginary friend “Daemon” asked as the two crunched auburn leaves along the dusty path.
“You mean like Jesus really was God’s son and accepting him gives you eternal life in blessedness?”
“Sure,” Daemon said, “or if any religion is actually right?”
Harley took a deep breath of the crisp autumn air and, being contrary as always, offered this:
“Do you know what the first thing the Abrahamic religions teach? It’s that when God created humans he made the caretakers of the world. And do you know what most people take away from these religions? They think they’re about the individual person and how they can be rewarded in this life and/or the next life. The problem is that if it is all about me, it’s hard to see how it’s all about taking care of the earth and its creatures. We may be authoring our own extinction with things like climate change by approaching life in such a way that personal self-realization and achievement is put first, and the world comes second, if at all.”
Daemon thought for a moment and said:
“You really see this in how we treat other creatures. There’s no real difference between cats, dogs, pigs, and chickens, and yet most people have no problem eating the latter, even though they love and cherish the former.”
The young Sith and his imaginary friend rambled along into the evening, a path that went down and down, round and round, as children’s author James Thurber described in The White Deer. Daemon wondered if perhaps the question isn’t whether religion was true or not, but rather even if it was true it was dangerous, and so perhaps was better left behind on the path of life.
One thing you sometimes hear is that without God there could be no objective morality (the oughts), because if moral rules/principles don’t get their authority from God, where could their authority come from?
Of course, this way of thinking is wrong. Children from a very young age understand what being a “friend” means without God having anything to do with the knowledge. So, kids can extrapolate from this understanding of friendship principles like “you’re being a better friend if you play the game your friend wants to play than if you selfishly demand to play your favorite game” or “you are being a bad friend ifyou steal your friend’s toy car.”
Another important point here is that the key elements of morality such as altruism are present widely in the animal kingdom, and so aren’t simply implanted in humans as the unique and special pinnacle of God’s creation. One article on this topic makes such points as:
“Since altruism, empathy, and gratitude all underpin moral behavior, finding them in our fellow mammals suggests that they run deep in our brain biology and did not come about because of moral reasoning or religion.In fact, probably the opposite is true—religion developed because of our innate capacities for caring.“
“[I]n our attempts to study our animal brethren and avoid anthropomorphizing them we sometimes miss their very real similarities to us. According to the scientists Morell interviews, birds are capable of complex communication, elephants have long memories and strong social networks, and dolphins will act altruistically. These scientists are convinced that many higher order cognitive abilities are not limited to humans, and that we only need look a bit further to discover them in animals.“
ARTICLE: Finding Morality in Animals Two new books explore research on animals to better understand the roots of human morality and challenge human specialness.
One of the traditional “proofs” of the existence of God is the beauty of the world. The claim is: surely as the beauty of a painting suggests an artist, so too does the beauty of a sunset suggest a divine artist.
One problem with this way of thinking is that beauty is a highly personal thing, not a feature of the world. Just as someone may not like the colors red and orange, and so not care for sunsets, someone who does not like the taste of wine may not care for a $1000.00 bottle of “fine wine.”
Singling out humans is an issue here too. Does a spider experience the beauty of the “fine painting?”
I hope the kids continue to have those sorts of conversations. I want them to think deeply about the world, to ponder big ideas, like truth, justice, and God. But the research suggests that those conversations are likely to trail off as they age. Little kids (age 3-8) often raise philosophical questions on their own (“Why does the world exist?” “What is it like to be dead?” “Am I dreaming my entire life?”). They’re puzzled by the world—and they’re trying to puzzle it out.
But as they age, kids start to worry about what others think of them. They don’t want to seem silly or risk being wrong. And they notice that the adults in their lives don’t discuss questions like, “Why does the world exist?” or “Am I dreaming my entire life?” Over time, they lose some of their curiosity and courage as thinkers.
I think that’s a shame. The world could use more deep and discerning thinkers. We’re flooded with disinformation, and too many people are too easily duped by it. Our society values hot takes and tweets more than sustained thought.
The good news is: we can push back on that. If we support our kids’ philosophical adventures, they’re more likely to continue them. In fact, we can raise philosophers.
This post is the last in this miniseries looking at the problem of evil. The previous posts are linked below. This last post begins below the linked posts:
This interpretation offered over the above previous posts in the miniseries regarding God as evil/stupid is related to what we find in the ancient Gnostic interpretation of Christianity. What did the Gnostics teach? One commentator explains:
In the arch-dualist ideology of the various Gnostic systems, the material universe is evil, while the non-material world is good. According to some strains of Gnosticism, the demiurge is malevolent, as it is linked to the material world. In others, including the teaching of Valentinus, the demiurge is simply ignorant or misguided. Gnosticism attributed falsehood or evil to the concept of the Demiurge or creator, though in some Gnostic traditions the creator is from a fallen, ignorant, or lesser—rather than evil—perspective, such as that of Valentinius. Whereas Plato’s Demiurge is good wishing good on his creation, Gnosticism contends that the Demiurge is not only the originator of evil but is evil as well.
How can we summarize this for ourself? Another commentator suggests:
The demiurge (Greek demiurgos, “craftsman”) is the being who created the world in Gnosticism. The Gnostics identified him with the god of the Old Testament. The Gnostic scriptures portray him as ignorant, malicious, and utterly inferior to the true God who sent Christ to earth to save humankind from the demiurge’s evil world.
So, in agreement with this ancient Gnostic interpretation, the interpretation being put forth in this mini series of posts is God sent Jesus to awaken the divine Law written on our hearts through dis-closing (“a-letheia,” truth) our hidden vileness so as to inspire repentance. This Law written on our hearts that Paul describes (Romans 2:15) is what the Gnostics called the divine spark.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 declares that God has “set eternity in the hearts of men.” In Luke 17:21, Jesus proclaims, “The kingdom of God is within you.” The New Testament teaches that every human being possesses an immaterial soul-spirit, and it is this part of us that connects with God (Hebrews 4:12).
The dual function of the cross was this awakening as a path to redemption for humans, as well as God punishing himself for the mess he created. God planned the horrific torture and execution of his beloved Son because God was eternal and hence unable to torture and execute Himself for the monstrous world he created. In the terrible death of his beloved son Jesus, God the Father experienced an event worse than death – as any father would at the death of their beloved son.
When people realized what they did to God’s chosen one Jesus, this was the catalyst for the divine spark within to awaken and inspire repentance (Truly this was the son of God/an Innocent man, Mark 15:30, Luke 23:47). This allows us to understand Christ is understood as fulfilling the prophesy of Jeremiah 31:31-33:
31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. (Jer. 31:31-33)
