Broke my Heart...

[Gilgamesh]

It's this little thing I like to do where I flavor a comment or a post by utilizing figures of speech. You'll get used to it.

Now, to be entirely honest, I am a weird person who has it in his head that lying to my child would not be a good way to establish a terrific relationship wherein they grow up to realize that regardless of the rest of the world, they will be able to trust me, their father, as it should be. And I have this strange mentality where the idea of telling my children that there's a fat red-coated man in the arctic bringing everyone presents one day of the year might kind of contradict that whole thing. Knowingly telling my son or daughter something that I know to be false is bad enough. Telling them something that I personally have no proof of for myself and I believe it "just because," is disingenuous, a word I seem to finding very useful lately. "This is truth, son/daughter! I mean granted here's no way to prove it but since I believe it so very very intensely, I want to ensure that you, impressionably-young as you are, will grow up to believe just like me!" It is, essentially, like a child grew up never being shown that Santa Claus was not real...or that the story was engineered so well that so many grew up never knowing the truth, unless told the truth by others, or having to dig into the story to realize its falsehoods. The child grows up, still thinks Santa Claus exists, and because he thinks it is an immutable fact and something that has meant so much in bringing him joy and happiness, that his children need to be told the story as if it were true, because, hey, if it works for you, it works for your children, right?

Thus do the seeds of gullibility end up planted. With a mentality of "someone told me something so it MUST be true" being something ingrained in a child's psyche that he grows up to always have, what's the WORST that could happen? Other than never really living his life for himself, for example?

THAT is why I feel sad for a religious child. They're being told a very very carefully engineered Santa Claus story, one that is too complex for their age to be able to analyze and learn to be false, and so by the time they ARE old enough to analyze this story, it's become ingrained in their mind as truth. This is indoctrination, pure and simple. If they really want to believe in it, then wait til they are old enough of mind to make up their own mind. If you are really so confident in the truth and veracity your religious story tells, then when introduced at an age of independent reasoning it will still hold up as fact to them.

Unless, of course, as a I strongly suspect, this is not the case and there's some subconscious aspect of your mind that didn't get fully indoctrinated, nagging at you that something just isn't quite right, and that should you pass up the opportunity to get at the children now, they'll grow up to see what a load of shenanigans your supposedly infallible stories are, and thus ensuring the shrinking relevance of your beliefs in the world.

Solipsism.