Apart from the fact that a lot of people here are former xtians, muslims etc, your hot stove analogy fails to encompass the situation.
Unless it's a particularly dense or sheltered child, s/he is going to have a working knowledge of what "hot" means by the age at which verbal cautions are meaningful. Also by that age, they are likely to have developed a trust in their parents, not merely because of their authority but because what they will have said in the past has been reliable. So an injunction against touching a hot surface isn't necessarily the conflict between innocence, experience and authority that you purport.
However, if the child is as blank a slate as the one in your example, s/he will undoubtedly pick up on the concern in their parent's voice and be wary even when they do put their hand on the hot surface. But then, they will feel the heat well before they can burn themselves. In other words, unlike the example you chose to illustrate the choice between accepting authority and knowing what the alternative feels like, we have no way of knowing in reality if this authority of yours has our best interests at heart, if the things this authority wants us not to do are as harmful as its mouthpieces claim, or even if this authority is actually there at all.
A more accurate analogy would be along the lines of a child being told not to do something for no real reason other than arbitrary ones and if they still do the thing, or even think about doing it, Mummy is going to throw them into the hot stove and keep them burning in there forever.
Unless it's a particularly dense or sheltered child, s/he is going to have a working knowledge of what "hot" means by the age at which verbal cautions are meaningful. Also by that age, they are likely to have developed a trust in their parents, not merely because of their authority but because what they will have said in the past has been reliable. So an injunction against touching a hot surface isn't necessarily the conflict between innocence, experience and authority that you purport.
However, if the child is as blank a slate as the one in your example, s/he will undoubtedly pick up on the concern in their parent's voice and be wary even when they do put their hand on the hot surface. But then, they will feel the heat well before they can burn themselves. In other words, unlike the example you chose to illustrate the choice between accepting authority and knowing what the alternative feels like, we have no way of knowing in reality if this authority of yours has our best interests at heart, if the things this authority wants us not to do are as harmful as its mouthpieces claim, or even if this authority is actually there at all.
A more accurate analogy would be along the lines of a child being told not to do something for no real reason other than arbitrary ones and if they still do the thing, or even think about doing it, Mummy is going to throw them into the hot stove and keep them burning in there forever.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
