Why the faiths are conservative regarding new ideas
Regular readers know that I am always watching the news or looking up topics of personal interest to me with one ear and one eye ready to receive an idea of an important topic or “case study” to discuss with you. Yesterday I got an idea of how to pull together and explain something that many find puzzling and that, as a result, has led them away from the orthodoxy of the Abrahamic faiths (Jewish, Catholic, Muslim). It is one of the primary reasons for the freefall that humans are in right now, one that must stop.
Many feel that, for example, the Catholic Church refuses to move with the times regarding ideas of science, also known as “progress,” and “spirituality,” also known as, well, heresy. Using the Catholic Church as an example it is alternately ridiculed, with the poster child for that being its condemnation of Galileo, and outright hated, for its perceived opposition to “medical procedures,” such as cloning, euthanasia, abortion, embryonic research. These same modern people who don’t understand and who criticize or at the very least have their faith diluted would also feel the same way about Islam and Orthodox Judaism and their equivalent conservatism, except of course the critics come from Christian heritage and thus marginalize the faith of the Muslims and Orthodox Jews (and certainly because of political correctness would think twice about taking on either group). So the Catholic Church is not only “fair game” to moderns who genuinely misunderstand and thus mock and hate, but it is also the last bulwark for western society against humans continuing their freefall and grave error.
When one asks the Catholic Church why yes to something and why no to something they cite scripture, doctrine and tradition. It is at that point that moderns shut their ears, roll their eyes and say, “Well, that is all out of date.” If the critics are kind they allow that maybe such rules and restrictions were “once valid” but are no longer. But here is the problem and I’ll give it to you in a series of specific examples so you can best understand. The problem is that humans never make the right decision when they first encounter a new idea or a new discovery and sometimes that error lasts with terrible results for decades and even centuries.
I want to first address myself to the most extreme of the liberals and peace activists who might be reading this. You and your cause for peace are the primary example I can cite. How many of you think that humans have ever made a good decision as the result of a new discovery in weapons? I think you would be the first to agree, due to your positions, that no great humanitarian breakthrough was ever achieved by the invention of the spear, sword, gun, cannon, bomb or missile. Put aside for the moment what conservatives will reply, which is that guns allowed people to hunt game and thus feed more people because one can equally argue in theory that this resulted in quick extinction of wild species and did not aid either agriculture or domestic animal husbandry. One can argue that weapons allowed defense against aggressors. But who had the weapons first? The aggressors are always the first to use weapons; not the defenders.
This is why the Bible states that humans must look forward to the time when metal is not used in swords, but in plows and pruning hooks. This is an example of where if anyone had gone to the Church for guidance as weapons are being developed, the Church would have been the first to question it and cite scripture. Notice how even in the bloody times of the Old Testament, the faithful fought with primitive weapons and no where are technology advances praised, even in the cause of conquering Canaan. Rather, the faithful won by their faith in God, their determination and zeal, and also through clever leadership and tactics. Yet they fell to the stronger Babylon, a military might, in time. So because the powers that be that develop weaponry never came to the Catholic Church for their “blessing,” we lack what would have been a shining example of what I am talking about, which is to see that the Church resists “progress” that it thinks will slip out of the control of human hands.
It is now easier to understand why the Church resisted-but no where near as much as they have been demonized-new understandings of the solar system. In fact it was a Catholic deacon Copernicus who was primary in this understanding and he was never censored. But the Galileo example is used to the point of nausea and so let me address it head on. If you read the Bible from front to end-the whole text-you will see that it is filled with praise and glory regarding the heavenly bodies, the stars, the moon, the sun, the sky itself and planets that moved (though at that time they did not understand that was what they were). However, there is a vast difference between the praise the Bible heaps on the planets and what humans are tempted to do. In the Bible it is understood that the heavens are not only the glory of God’s creation and to only be praised accordingly, but they are also practical gifts. All three of the faiths used a lunar based calendar and the moon is praised in the Bible and the Qur’an for its giving of light and a timetable for humans. Thus the scriptures, written in pastoral and agricultural times, are the first to admire the practicality of the warmth and light of the sun, the light and clock of the moon, and the beauty of the stars in determining the seasons by which humans live.
However, right in the scripture next to the praise of the heavenly bodies is stern warning not to use them for occult purposes, for fortunetelling and witchcraft. This is because it is God’s word, obviously, but why is it God’s word and why would God have such a warning? Again, it is the reason that humans never use such “discoveries” for the correct purposes. The Church was fine with people looking through these new optics called telescopes and as I said, Copernicus himself was of the Church. The problem is that during centuries that was rife with astrology and occult beliefs, the Church is very cautious about new “discoveries” that seem to challenge humanity’s responsibilities and purview and God’s realm. So long as the earth remained the center of the solar system and all the rest was put there due to God’s mercy in creation and his gift of practical goodness of light, heat and time management for humans, God’s word was easier to understand and follow. However, once people started talking about the sun being the “center” of everything, the Church as a body understood to its core what it has known about humans since the beginning: “Oh, oh.” The Church realized that human nature being what it is, new discoveries are never chalked up to even more glory and understanding of God; they are seized upon by power brokers, both occult and secular.
This is why the knee jerk reflexive position of the Church is to deny and stall with certain scientific discoveries. Astronomy is a particularly important example through the centuries because it not only seemed to make confusing what the Bible teaches (not that the Bible is a science text but the idea the sun is put there for the benefit of humans by God) but there is always the occult temptation of astrology: to actually benefit and harm people according to godless “rules.” This is also why the Church is rightfully cautious about new sources of "spirituality." For example, the Freemason organization was at one point in good standing and acceptable to the Church. However, it was easy to see where a fraternal interest in mysteries such as numbers, the universe, architecture and other solid interests took a turn to the arcane and the occult. That is the problem: when humans succumb to the subtle temptation of ego, where they view themselves as mini-wizards because like Saurman in the "Lord of the Rings" they get to close to the objects of their study. They stop being students and admirers of God's creation and start thinking they are the one who "really" understand and "wield" the power. When organizations cross that line that is why and when you see the Church disapprove of the faithfuls' participation... they see it not in terms as a "rival" to their "old fashioned" ways but recognize another of the countless times humans fall into the temptation of their own discoveries into harmful usage for both the faithful and everyone else.
So in this generation we have the great crisis of eroding value of life by humans versus what is life affirming doctrine by the Catholic Church. This battlefield is called “medicine.” The Catholic Church is portrayed as being unkind opponents to “medical advances” to “save lives.” (Though obviously an abortion never saved the life of the aborted baby), but I will confine my comments to embryonic research and so forth. Let’s look at how great human history in the ethical use of new discoveries of “medicine” by looking at three examples. The first example is the discovery of tobacco. Native Americans cultivated tobacco for ritual use, not for habitual smoking in recreation. Humans quickly latched onto tobacco for recreational use and became addicted for generations. That would not be a good example of a bad use of a medical discovery in and of itself except for one little detail. As recently as the 1940s and 1950s humans marketed cigarette smoking to the public as “healthy,” as a health improving and promoting activity. Three hundred years after the discovery of tobacco as a product for smoking humans were increasing their pushing of it as a health remedy, rather than recognizing at all its dangers. Those of you old enough to remember can recall along side me how many years of battle it has taken to get public recognition that no only were cigarettes not adding to one’s health but they were the source of much of the illness in the population at large and cutting lives drastically short. So tobacco is an obvious example of why humans never seem to get the big “discoveries” right.
The second is one that is less well known by young people today, but it involves radioactivity. When radioactivity was discovered, it was actually viewed as, yes, you guessed it, a medical advance, and I don’t mean its use in diagnostic x-rays and so forth. Look back in the history and you will find that humans quickly decided that radiating each other promoted good health. People were given doses of radiation as tonics, not for the targeted use that it now has, with the greater safety controls. Just like tobacco people immediately thought that radiating each other with radioactive particles would somehow give them “better health” and “cure illnesses.”
How could people be so stupid? Well, consider this. During the time of the discovery of radioactivity there were people, mostly British, who flocked to Egypt because they were fascinated with the culture and discoveries and mystique. And what did they do? They decided to dig up the bodies of mummified people, grind it up into dust, and take it as-you guessed it-health tonics. Yes, at the turn of the century wealthy people ground up and ate the remains of mummies. It’s not like someone told them, “Hey, mummies have a lot of vitamin Xyz so it is good for you.” Humans all on their own make the most terrible and scarily occult decisions imaginable. All of it comes back to the temptation, just as in the Garden of Eden, to “become like God” and control life. It is not so long after this that a few decades later someone had a close encounter of the wrong type, probably as bush meat, with monkeys or apes in Africa and HIV/Aids made the jump from the simian blood stream to humans. That is why the Bible has such a long list of unclean animals. Look at the example of the prohibition from eating birds of prey such as falcons and eagles. Look at the worry today about avian flu jumping from birds to humans from wild bird populations, just as HIV/Aids did from simians. Everyone knows that is the reason pork is prohibited, because of the dangers of poorly cooked pork and the disease (remember swine flu?)
Thus the holy scriptures are far from being naive or backwards and if anything HIV/Aids, swine, avian flu and "mad cow disease" demonstrate why God prohibited certain foods and food preparation practices. As another example, one point of pride of the Qur’an is that it reveals the existence of atomic matter, for example, over a thousand years before atoms were “discovered” by humans. Scripture is neither ignorant of science or naive. Today we have astronomers studying “what kind of sun is needed to support planets that could support life.” Yet the Church is mocked and demonized because the Bible teaches that the sun is a gift from God to humans to do what? I can’t hear you? The sun is a gift by God to humans to support human life.
Here is another example of how humans just can’t seem to get it right. How good did humans do when they “discovered” electroshock therapy for use in psychiatry? I mean, does anyone want to watch a rerun of “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest?” I know what I am talking about because my former father in law was, way before I met him, given electroshock therapy. It was brutal, it was scarring and while it supposedly “cured” one ailment to use the expression “the operation succeeded but the patient died” would be quite appropriate. I’m told that nowadays they call it something different and that it “really works” for “certain patients,” and I knew one such patient in the hospital where I interned. But let me tell you, if there is not an early warning poster child of a horrible misuse of a medical “breakthrough” I don’t know what a better one is.
Look at how ridiculous humans are at even trying to identify the great “curative foods.” One year coffee is bad and the next year coffee is good. We can all list the “good foods” and “good vitamins” and the “bad foods” and the “bad additives,” but wait a minute, can we? Can we really do that? Is not vitamin C the greatest thing one year, then discovered to cause heart problems if taken over a certain dose the next year, and then the year after that it is great again with no mention of the heart problems? And do we not see headlines “Vitamin C does not cure cancer” as if anyone with a brain ever thought that it did? But humans, like eating the mummy dust a mere one hundred years ago, want to make themselves gods and goddesses. They think that there are magic answers (found in science, of course) to all medical and spiritual “problems.” And now we find that we don’t even mind pushing around the cells of a human embryo in a laboratory and call that being “advanced” and “kind” and “being a humanitarian.” Yet those who discover ways to accomplish the same without being ethically challenged are marginalized, unfunded, not given publicity, and told “Well, yes, but your cure won’t be in time to save that celebrity with Parkinson's disease.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_J_Fox
That, my friends, as my end of year message for what has been another year of the downfall of humanity, is the reason the Orthodox Jews, the Muslims and the Catholic Church are the bastions of caution about “discoveries” and “breakthroughs” in “medicine” and “spirituality.”
Showing posts with label human capacity for destruction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label human capacity for destruction. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Monday, June 9, 2008
Urgent that you understand humanity crisis
I, like all decent people, go crazy with grief and rage when I read yet another story about the horrible torture and murder of babies or children, often by their own parents or "care givers." Since all of you read the news you realize that we could fill a blog day and night every day with listing each incident. Here is another, just to set the context for what I need to explain to you in this post.
http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/blotter/entries/2008/06/09/parents_of_dead_georgetown_boy.html
snip
GEORGETOWN — The parents of a 21-month-old boy who died after welfare workers placed him back in the parents’ custody have been charged with injury to a child, police said Monday.
Christopher Barcenas died May 30 at Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin after he suffered a fractured skull, according to investigators.
Officers arrested Sergio Barcenas, Jr., 22, and Elizabeth Arellano, 21, Sunday night. Both were in the Williamson County Jail on Monday. Bond for Sergio Barcenas was set at $250,000.Arellano was being held on a $150,000 bond.
Injury to a child is a first-degree felony punishable by five years to life in prison and a fine up to $10,000.
State child protection officials had taken the boy and two siblings from the parents in February 2007, but returned them to the custody of Barcenas and Arellano in December 2007 after the couple had undergone counseling, according to court records.
Here is what you need to understand. This is a trend. It is not example after example of people with "bad parenting skills," "in need of counseling," "they were abused as children," "has anger management issues," "was impaired," "was under stress," or "has a mental disorder." The public at large tends to rationalize this unmistakable tidal wave of depravity and inhumanity as being "just another sad case caused by xyz" or "these things have always happened, we are just reporting them more now."
This is not true. What is true is that humans have declined in their humanity as a whole, and are descending into some sort of inhuman monsters. I know this is unpleasant to hear, but no one will change this unless people start getting real.
Let's start with science and biology. Despite what people think there is not a "maternal," "paternal" or "nurturing" instinct in humans. There is that instinct in animals. Animals have varying degrees of instinctive nurturing, ranging from very little to huge according to the species. The way they express nurturing is in the care of the young and in the way mates (for those animals who mate for life) react to the loss of their mate. So one could call that "love" or "affection," but it is not love in the sense that only humans have it. That's not a knock on animals. What I'm explaining is that animals don't know they are "feeling" nurturing, affection or love. Animals, even the smartest of them, have genuine emotions but they are not aware that they have something called emotions. That is because they are not self aware in that sense. Here is an example so you can be comfortable understanding what I am saying and agree with me before we continue talking about humans. Animals don't have a "bad day" and then have a deliberate change in mood (withholding affection, for example). Only humans are aware not only that they are have feelings and capacity (or not) for love, affection and nurturing but also are aware that they can manipulate those feelings. Animals do not manipulate their feelings toward their young, for example. The smallest nestling may not get enough food but it's not because the parents "decide" to favor the others. The neglect of a nestling comes about because of physical, not mental or emotional, processing.
So humans are born aware that they have feelings, but they are not born with the instinct to nurture. In other words, animals who have offspring will, in general, have pre-programming in their genes and instincts to immediately nurture their young to the extent that their species tends to their offspring at all, or until what age or stage of development. (There are exceptions where a parent may reject an offspring, but since that is a self destructive anomaly those genes are not transmitted in the reject offspring since they do not survive to adulthood).
Humans and animals have a complete opposite orientation, therefore. Animals have instinct which provides nearly one hundred percent reliable nurturing and affection, with feelings felt but feelings not being conscious and manipulable. Humans do not have an instinct to nurturing and affection, but they have the capacity and the deep need to both do so and to receive it. Because humans are conscious of their own feelings, and thus fully self aware, they need to learn how to love, how to be affectionate, and how to nurture.
Happy families seem to have members who refute what I just said, since they seem to have kids and parents who instinctively nurture and love. But that's just because they are all in harmony from the very beginning about their mutual exposure to love and nurturing. In other words, they do it all right from the very start. So the "classroom" of learning to nurture and love is always positive and always giving from the very start, as the baby is born. Babies are born needing love, nurturing and contact, and they receive it immediately and fully from their parents. Likewise the parents receive joy and gratification from their love of their babies and throughout as they grow into children. Normal well adjusted families seem "instinctive" but that is just because they have a perfected feedback loop of love and nurturing.
Now, here is the problem. The "classroom" of love and nurturing give and take has been totally dirtied and disrupted by the societal issues that have developed in the past forty years or so. First of all, single parents cannot feel the love of giving birth without it being tainted by stress from the very beginning. One reason marriage and the core family is by definition a man and a woman who marry is that it creates as stress free an infrastructure for the having of children as possible. Every single parent I know spends a lot of their time bitching about how hard it is to be a single parent. Duh. Single parents are under stress during pregnancy, say nothing of when the child actually arrives. This is a stress different from the natural stress of becoming a parent. It is an additional stress and the baby feels it. The baby does not have two caregivers who both provide and model affection giving and receiving. The baby has to share, or not receive at all, this give and take in competition with the single parent's availability. So the perfect classroom of the father and mother in the feedback loop with the baby from day one is disrupted by definition in single parent households. This is not a judgment; it is a fact that people need to recognize and stop smothering with lies about the nobility of single parenthood.
Second, this society is too sexualized. It would never have occurred to anyone who was a parent fifty years ago to look at their nude baby and think of anything except whether poo or pee is going to come out before one gets a diaper ready. It is a terrible thing to say but not only are babies at risk from their "mother's boyfriends" viewing them as a warm sex toy, but parents have to exercise monumental and virtuous mind control themselves in this day and age. Every adult is enticed to view sexual orifices of every age person, and that's a horrible fact that people better wake up to recognizing. It would never occur to a parent to "finger" their child or pose them for pictures on the Internet, but now one has to repel those intrusive thoughts and suggestions with as much vigor as if one was combating Satan himself (who is not the cause of this problem). Yes, there have always been occasional perverts and incestuous family members throughout human history. But the pressure was never ON them to be that way as it is now. Further, even they would not beat an infant or abuse a baby because parents at the very least needed breadwinners and heirs, working by their side in the fields, being proud of their only "riches," a son or daughter. So people who abused children were genuine maniacs, awful and few. In terrible battles in ancient history some armies slaughtered infants, spitting them on swords to wound and terrorize the populace. But it would never occur to even the worse berserker to rape a baby and post the video on the Internet.
Third, there is a disconnect between people today and reality. We all know why that is, since people live in a life that is increasingly divorced from living off the land and being realistic about what one needs in life and what one does not. It started with TV, when parents would put babies and small children in front of the TV set as the "babysitter." Babies do not have brains that understand rapid motions and fake images. From the very beginning for the past forty years humans have raised children to be exposed to artificial events and beings before they are able to discern between fiction and reality. The past two generations of humans have been exposed to something other than reality in too high doses far too soon. This has horribly disrupted the feedback loop of the nurturing and love "classroom." One quick child psychology explanation to make this plainer. Baby's "job" for the first two years of life is simply to learn that he or she is a living being who is separate from but dependent upon loving and trustworthy parents. There is huge amounts of academic literature on this. The classic breakthrough in learning is when baby learns that if the parent leaves the room that he or she will come back. Now, as the baby's brain is learning that, can you imagine how even "harmless" cartoons disrupt this learning? Madly dashing bright color objects that the baby cannot even comprehend flash in front of his or her eyes, in and out of view in seconds, with thousands of images doing incomprehensible things per hour. You have to be insane to let a baby even glimpse TV for the first two years of its life. But now babies, and their erstwhile parents and "caregivers" immerse themselves and their young children in TV, video games, and other fragmented and highly over stimulating artificial activities. These all siphon off time and genuine slow progress toward true depths of human nurturing and love. And everyone wonders why every child is ADD or borderline or whatever?
When humans stopped being agricultural or small merchant oriented children were deprived of their natural classroom of life and the comforts that come with it. There is nothing more healing than the outdoors, especially when it is a routine part of a family's life. It also provides children with a better understanding of life and loss, as they learn about where food comes from and help with tending a garden or the home, for example. But what do kids see now? Ho's and pimps shooting it up in the street to rap videos. And when someone dies, just shut off the TV, and they will pop back up in the reruns. The violence of the culture is unbelievable. Now I am no wuss; I'm not running around saying kids should not play cops and robbers with toy guns. Sheesh, I wish we could go back to that. And I'm no leftist who wants to ban kids from playing soldier. But that's the whole point: it was play in the playground with friends. It wasn't a constant overstimulated freak show and orgy of violence that is artificial (and real in a bad way) presented over the TV, video games, and back yards of dangerous neighborhoods every day. Kids learned about the world in the "old days" in a much more realistic and gentler context. They saw and understood life all around them, often on a farm or small town, and when tragedy occurred it was an accident or illness, or the occasional "bad apple" criminal who impacted their family or neighborhood. But they could absorb that and become wiser because it was in the context of a reliable and constantly self validating positive world view and family context. In a nutshell, kids are exposed to a barrage of the anti-love and anti-nurturing messages from the earliest ages. Remember, humans do not have an "instinct;" they have to learn in the feedback loop love and nurturing. And that includes "manly" nurturing from a protective and providing dad. Not mom's boyfriend who is smoking weed and trying to figure out if he can poke the child.
Fourth, too many children are raised without God as a "real person" in their lives from their earliest age. You can take the God out of a child but you can't put the God back into the adult. Here is what I mean. God serves different purposes through a human's life. God serves one purpose for a baby and small child, and a different one to the young adult. If you deny your child knowledge of God and trust in God, they miss out totally on the service that God gives to the child completely, because you did not let God "be there" for the child. Even if the child grows to an adult and finds God on his or her own, the years of the childhood are genuinely lost, for no adult can relive their childhood years, obviously. Knowing about God from when the child is very young is essential for two reasons. One is that God is part of what I explained above, which is the trust that someone who loves you is REALLY there even if you cannot see them. Children learn that when dad goes to work, or mom leaves the room, that they will be back. At the SAME time they learn that they are never really alone, because God is there, even though they never see God. I grew up in the generation that understood that. Even the dumbest parent raised their kids to know about God and pray to him as soon as they could put their hands together. This is so the child is helped to understand trust and love in both the human and spiritual forms. The second reason that God is important for a young child is that God has an influence on the formation of their character. Children understand choices at a very early age. When they also understand God's "viewpoint" and God's teachings about choices, children do take this into account. If a child grows up and rejects God they still have the benefit of having the years where they would take God's teachings into account when they made behavior choices. They NEVER lose the benefit of that, even if they become very indifferent to God later, because when they were young it was another moral yardstick that helped a child with impulse control and with making wise choices. If you let your kid grow up Godless you are robbing them of so much in life that I cannot begin to describe it except to say that it is one of the great failings of being a parent or a "caregiver." Like I said, God serves a different role throughout a person's life, so even if your child grows up and turns to God as an adult, you deprived God of the chance to be part of the stability and foundation of your child's learning to love and be loved, nurture and be nurtured, make wise choices or not so good choices when they are young and being formed by life. So there is monumental missed opportunity and negativism in children's upbringing since the 1960's when "cool" asshole parents decided not to raise their children with conventional love and knowledge of God. God can work many wonders and be the fine companion to your child if he or she turns to God as an adult, of course. But the basic programming of your child in his or her total humanitarian birthright was cheated and shortchanged by a parent who omitted God from their child's life or worse, forced their children into anti-God activities.
A fifth problem is the unbelievable societal rage and nihilism that exists as a whole and in many individual people. Who can beat a three month old baby boy to death while torturing him sodomizing him with an object until his anus is torn? Where does that come from? I listed some of the places that rage comes from a few paragraphs earlier. However, that is not the entire picture. In many ways humans have become much better than they were. They don't run around in lynch mobs, for example, although there are always terrible exceptions. And people have become tolerant of diversity and other people to a remarkable extent. However, being tolerant is not one's purpose in life. People need to have a purpose in life that is meaningful, so we cannot measure the success of families and societies by how tolerant they are, or by their wealth, or by their "generosity." People evolved through millions of years to be high energy survivors in demanding living conditions. It is only recently that a huge segment of the world's population does not have to "fight for their next meal." Humans are programmed through evolution to be high energy hunters and gatherers, builders of homes and fighters of obstacles. When people lose their purpose in life, or have it taken from them, this high energy exists in the form of sublimated predator rage. Again, I'm not talking all "peacenik" here. Actually, I'm explaining that all people have a robustness and aggressiveness that is not only a survival trait but it is highly desirable and necessary. The problem is that the society has become so fractured that there is no organized way to harness this inbuilt productivity potential and need to be "someone with a purpose." When humans see this potential in little boys they scream "AD/HD" and give them drugs! Humans are killing themselves. The very instincts and energy that enabled you to create and maintain, for a while, six thousand years of civilization is now being wasted, denied, misdirected and drugged out of yourselves. What remains is smouldering and self destructive rage. Women have time and energy on their hands but instead of having babies or improving society, they "climb the corporate ladder" and have abortions. Men have time and energy on their hands but instead of expanding their providing of fatherly skills to the larger community they retreat to a fantasy world with video games and porn. I'm drawing a characterization here, but one that is applicable to millions of people, so don't dismiss it so quickly.
Look at traditional communities such as the Quakers. When they built their own homes they go on to build their neighbor's homes and their barns. They put their energy and vigor and zeal for life to work on a daily basis. They don't let it fester and get strange inside of them. If little boys have a lot of energy they run around in vigorous play, work in the fields, or help the adults, not sit behind a desk hour after hour trying to be docile humanoids. (Who then have to imagine they are superheroes on the Internet while watching porn). People are biologically evolved to be energetic and active, and to have a purpose in life (and that purpose is modest, not grandiose and inflated imaginings of intersteller combat). When people become purposeless yet at the same time fanticize about unreal scenarios based on sublimated rage, they end up taking a baby into a bathroom and torturing her to death. Women run around thinking it's a great idea to cut the baby from another mother's womb because "they want a baby." A Japanese man who is not socially on top of his game gets "tired of life" and runs over people before stabbing them to death. Men cruise looking for younger and younger boys and girls to pose with on the Internet. Slavery, which was defeated in this country, comes back as sex "industry" where hundreds of thousands of children, not adults, but children are enslaved to provide kicks for adults. Trust me, a hundred years ago these jackasses would never even thought of molesting a child because they'd be too tired at the end of the day working in the field, being cannon fodder in some army, or working for pennies in a factory to think of anything but being grateful for getting home to their wife and kids. Excess energy without purpose is turning many humans into raging monsters. Denying that humans have genuine gender differences (male and female) and that boys have certain skills and energy levels while girls have different ones is insane and counter productive. There were no porn addicts back when men and boys were busy with other things related to real life. Women didn't have multiple abortions and pop anti-depressives back when they kept busy, whether at home or on a job. (I'm not saying Ozzie and Harriet for everyone here).
To summarize, all of the things I listed above have created a blackened ruin with pitfalls everywhere that everyone is stuck living in and trying to do the right thing. But with the increase fakeness of society people have forgotten what any idiot knew about raising children a mere fifty years ago (with a few freak notable exceptions). It is important to understand that culture and society must support families and the ability to nurture and love their children so that children learn what they do not have instinctively, for only the animals have instinctive knowledge to raise their young with the correct amount of bonding. Humans need to be taught it by word and example, and most of all by experience. It deeply scares me how depraved and negative the "classroom" of humanity has become, and I don't mean teaching kids to worry about the polar bears. The challenge of single parenting would have been enough to create a societal crisis that is quite severe. Abortion as birth control has also broken the spirit and humanity of much of society. But when you place those problems within the context of the rage filled, unreal "reality show" of this society, it is alarming to the maximum. When decent adults have to fight to retain "custody of their eyes" to view even infants in an decent way, it's unbelievable how far humans have already fallen from where they were and where they could have been. I know first hand that there seems to be nothing too awful that someone will not think of it and do it to someone else and better yet, find a way to make money and commoditize it. Trust me, even Satan has been cringing for years now; this is all humanity's doing.
I only hope and pray that this generation of young people, who I have spent much time speaking in the direction of (since they don't respond to me yet, sigh) will be the vanguard to recognize what is really going on and defy the morbid laisse faire of their parents and society and change it again for the better. I hope this helps, especially the part about the need to be proactive in the creation of the fully emotional and thinking baby and human, since there seems to be the assumption that instinct is there, when it most assuredly is not (as all previous societies knew, which was why there was such family and faith based enculturation). Far from being narrow minded and oppressive, previous generations were providing the best and safest cradles for all infants and children as best they could and as they had learned was necessary to their full development.
http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/blotter/entries/2008/06/09/parents_of_dead_georgetown_boy.html
snip
GEORGETOWN — The parents of a 21-month-old boy who died after welfare workers placed him back in the parents’ custody have been charged with injury to a child, police said Monday.
Christopher Barcenas died May 30 at Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin after he suffered a fractured skull, according to investigators.
Officers arrested Sergio Barcenas, Jr., 22, and Elizabeth Arellano, 21, Sunday night. Both were in the Williamson County Jail on Monday. Bond for Sergio Barcenas was set at $250,000.Arellano was being held on a $150,000 bond.
Injury to a child is a first-degree felony punishable by five years to life in prison and a fine up to $10,000.
State child protection officials had taken the boy and two siblings from the parents in February 2007, but returned them to the custody of Barcenas and Arellano in December 2007 after the couple had undergone counseling, according to court records.
Here is what you need to understand. This is a trend. It is not example after example of people with "bad parenting skills," "in need of counseling," "they were abused as children," "has anger management issues," "was impaired," "was under stress," or "has a mental disorder." The public at large tends to rationalize this unmistakable tidal wave of depravity and inhumanity as being "just another sad case caused by xyz" or "these things have always happened, we are just reporting them more now."
This is not true. What is true is that humans have declined in their humanity as a whole, and are descending into some sort of inhuman monsters. I know this is unpleasant to hear, but no one will change this unless people start getting real.
Let's start with science and biology. Despite what people think there is not a "maternal," "paternal" or "nurturing" instinct in humans. There is that instinct in animals. Animals have varying degrees of instinctive nurturing, ranging from very little to huge according to the species. The way they express nurturing is in the care of the young and in the way mates (for those animals who mate for life) react to the loss of their mate. So one could call that "love" or "affection," but it is not love in the sense that only humans have it. That's not a knock on animals. What I'm explaining is that animals don't know they are "feeling" nurturing, affection or love. Animals, even the smartest of them, have genuine emotions but they are not aware that they have something called emotions. That is because they are not self aware in that sense. Here is an example so you can be comfortable understanding what I am saying and agree with me before we continue talking about humans. Animals don't have a "bad day" and then have a deliberate change in mood (withholding affection, for example). Only humans are aware not only that they are have feelings and capacity (or not) for love, affection and nurturing but also are aware that they can manipulate those feelings. Animals do not manipulate their feelings toward their young, for example. The smallest nestling may not get enough food but it's not because the parents "decide" to favor the others. The neglect of a nestling comes about because of physical, not mental or emotional, processing.
So humans are born aware that they have feelings, but they are not born with the instinct to nurture. In other words, animals who have offspring will, in general, have pre-programming in their genes and instincts to immediately nurture their young to the extent that their species tends to their offspring at all, or until what age or stage of development. (There are exceptions where a parent may reject an offspring, but since that is a self destructive anomaly those genes are not transmitted in the reject offspring since they do not survive to adulthood).
Humans and animals have a complete opposite orientation, therefore. Animals have instinct which provides nearly one hundred percent reliable nurturing and affection, with feelings felt but feelings not being conscious and manipulable. Humans do not have an instinct to nurturing and affection, but they have the capacity and the deep need to both do so and to receive it. Because humans are conscious of their own feelings, and thus fully self aware, they need to learn how to love, how to be affectionate, and how to nurture.
Happy families seem to have members who refute what I just said, since they seem to have kids and parents who instinctively nurture and love. But that's just because they are all in harmony from the very beginning about their mutual exposure to love and nurturing. In other words, they do it all right from the very start. So the "classroom" of learning to nurture and love is always positive and always giving from the very start, as the baby is born. Babies are born needing love, nurturing and contact, and they receive it immediately and fully from their parents. Likewise the parents receive joy and gratification from their love of their babies and throughout as they grow into children. Normal well adjusted families seem "instinctive" but that is just because they have a perfected feedback loop of love and nurturing.
Now, here is the problem. The "classroom" of love and nurturing give and take has been totally dirtied and disrupted by the societal issues that have developed in the past forty years or so. First of all, single parents cannot feel the love of giving birth without it being tainted by stress from the very beginning. One reason marriage and the core family is by definition a man and a woman who marry is that it creates as stress free an infrastructure for the having of children as possible. Every single parent I know spends a lot of their time bitching about how hard it is to be a single parent. Duh. Single parents are under stress during pregnancy, say nothing of when the child actually arrives. This is a stress different from the natural stress of becoming a parent. It is an additional stress and the baby feels it. The baby does not have two caregivers who both provide and model affection giving and receiving. The baby has to share, or not receive at all, this give and take in competition with the single parent's availability. So the perfect classroom of the father and mother in the feedback loop with the baby from day one is disrupted by definition in single parent households. This is not a judgment; it is a fact that people need to recognize and stop smothering with lies about the nobility of single parenthood.
Second, this society is too sexualized. It would never have occurred to anyone who was a parent fifty years ago to look at their nude baby and think of anything except whether poo or pee is going to come out before one gets a diaper ready. It is a terrible thing to say but not only are babies at risk from their "mother's boyfriends" viewing them as a warm sex toy, but parents have to exercise monumental and virtuous mind control themselves in this day and age. Every adult is enticed to view sexual orifices of every age person, and that's a horrible fact that people better wake up to recognizing. It would never occur to a parent to "finger" their child or pose them for pictures on the Internet, but now one has to repel those intrusive thoughts and suggestions with as much vigor as if one was combating Satan himself (who is not the cause of this problem). Yes, there have always been occasional perverts and incestuous family members throughout human history. But the pressure was never ON them to be that way as it is now. Further, even they would not beat an infant or abuse a baby because parents at the very least needed breadwinners and heirs, working by their side in the fields, being proud of their only "riches," a son or daughter. So people who abused children were genuine maniacs, awful and few. In terrible battles in ancient history some armies slaughtered infants, spitting them on swords to wound and terrorize the populace. But it would never occur to even the worse berserker to rape a baby and post the video on the Internet.
Third, there is a disconnect between people today and reality. We all know why that is, since people live in a life that is increasingly divorced from living off the land and being realistic about what one needs in life and what one does not. It started with TV, when parents would put babies and small children in front of the TV set as the "babysitter." Babies do not have brains that understand rapid motions and fake images. From the very beginning for the past forty years humans have raised children to be exposed to artificial events and beings before they are able to discern between fiction and reality. The past two generations of humans have been exposed to something other than reality in too high doses far too soon. This has horribly disrupted the feedback loop of the nurturing and love "classroom." One quick child psychology explanation to make this plainer. Baby's "job" for the first two years of life is simply to learn that he or she is a living being who is separate from but dependent upon loving and trustworthy parents. There is huge amounts of academic literature on this. The classic breakthrough in learning is when baby learns that if the parent leaves the room that he or she will come back. Now, as the baby's brain is learning that, can you imagine how even "harmless" cartoons disrupt this learning? Madly dashing bright color objects that the baby cannot even comprehend flash in front of his or her eyes, in and out of view in seconds, with thousands of images doing incomprehensible things per hour. You have to be insane to let a baby even glimpse TV for the first two years of its life. But now babies, and their erstwhile parents and "caregivers" immerse themselves and their young children in TV, video games, and other fragmented and highly over stimulating artificial activities. These all siphon off time and genuine slow progress toward true depths of human nurturing and love. And everyone wonders why every child is ADD or borderline or whatever?
When humans stopped being agricultural or small merchant oriented children were deprived of their natural classroom of life and the comforts that come with it. There is nothing more healing than the outdoors, especially when it is a routine part of a family's life. It also provides children with a better understanding of life and loss, as they learn about where food comes from and help with tending a garden or the home, for example. But what do kids see now? Ho's and pimps shooting it up in the street to rap videos. And when someone dies, just shut off the TV, and they will pop back up in the reruns. The violence of the culture is unbelievable. Now I am no wuss; I'm not running around saying kids should not play cops and robbers with toy guns. Sheesh, I wish we could go back to that. And I'm no leftist who wants to ban kids from playing soldier. But that's the whole point: it was play in the playground with friends. It wasn't a constant overstimulated freak show and orgy of violence that is artificial (and real in a bad way) presented over the TV, video games, and back yards of dangerous neighborhoods every day. Kids learned about the world in the "old days" in a much more realistic and gentler context. They saw and understood life all around them, often on a farm or small town, and when tragedy occurred it was an accident or illness, or the occasional "bad apple" criminal who impacted their family or neighborhood. But they could absorb that and become wiser because it was in the context of a reliable and constantly self validating positive world view and family context. In a nutshell, kids are exposed to a barrage of the anti-love and anti-nurturing messages from the earliest ages. Remember, humans do not have an "instinct;" they have to learn in the feedback loop love and nurturing. And that includes "manly" nurturing from a protective and providing dad. Not mom's boyfriend who is smoking weed and trying to figure out if he can poke the child.
Fourth, too many children are raised without God as a "real person" in their lives from their earliest age. You can take the God out of a child but you can't put the God back into the adult. Here is what I mean. God serves different purposes through a human's life. God serves one purpose for a baby and small child, and a different one to the young adult. If you deny your child knowledge of God and trust in God, they miss out totally on the service that God gives to the child completely, because you did not let God "be there" for the child. Even if the child grows to an adult and finds God on his or her own, the years of the childhood are genuinely lost, for no adult can relive their childhood years, obviously. Knowing about God from when the child is very young is essential for two reasons. One is that God is part of what I explained above, which is the trust that someone who loves you is REALLY there even if you cannot see them. Children learn that when dad goes to work, or mom leaves the room, that they will be back. At the SAME time they learn that they are never really alone, because God is there, even though they never see God. I grew up in the generation that understood that. Even the dumbest parent raised their kids to know about God and pray to him as soon as they could put their hands together. This is so the child is helped to understand trust and love in both the human and spiritual forms. The second reason that God is important for a young child is that God has an influence on the formation of their character. Children understand choices at a very early age. When they also understand God's "viewpoint" and God's teachings about choices, children do take this into account. If a child grows up and rejects God they still have the benefit of having the years where they would take God's teachings into account when they made behavior choices. They NEVER lose the benefit of that, even if they become very indifferent to God later, because when they were young it was another moral yardstick that helped a child with impulse control and with making wise choices. If you let your kid grow up Godless you are robbing them of so much in life that I cannot begin to describe it except to say that it is one of the great failings of being a parent or a "caregiver." Like I said, God serves a different role throughout a person's life, so even if your child grows up and turns to God as an adult, you deprived God of the chance to be part of the stability and foundation of your child's learning to love and be loved, nurture and be nurtured, make wise choices or not so good choices when they are young and being formed by life. So there is monumental missed opportunity and negativism in children's upbringing since the 1960's when "cool" asshole parents decided not to raise their children with conventional love and knowledge of God. God can work many wonders and be the fine companion to your child if he or she turns to God as an adult, of course. But the basic programming of your child in his or her total humanitarian birthright was cheated and shortchanged by a parent who omitted God from their child's life or worse, forced their children into anti-God activities.
A fifth problem is the unbelievable societal rage and nihilism that exists as a whole and in many individual people. Who can beat a three month old baby boy to death while torturing him sodomizing him with an object until his anus is torn? Where does that come from? I listed some of the places that rage comes from a few paragraphs earlier. However, that is not the entire picture. In many ways humans have become much better than they were. They don't run around in lynch mobs, for example, although there are always terrible exceptions. And people have become tolerant of diversity and other people to a remarkable extent. However, being tolerant is not one's purpose in life. People need to have a purpose in life that is meaningful, so we cannot measure the success of families and societies by how tolerant they are, or by their wealth, or by their "generosity." People evolved through millions of years to be high energy survivors in demanding living conditions. It is only recently that a huge segment of the world's population does not have to "fight for their next meal." Humans are programmed through evolution to be high energy hunters and gatherers, builders of homes and fighters of obstacles. When people lose their purpose in life, or have it taken from them, this high energy exists in the form of sublimated predator rage. Again, I'm not talking all "peacenik" here. Actually, I'm explaining that all people have a robustness and aggressiveness that is not only a survival trait but it is highly desirable and necessary. The problem is that the society has become so fractured that there is no organized way to harness this inbuilt productivity potential and need to be "someone with a purpose." When humans see this potential in little boys they scream "AD/HD" and give them drugs! Humans are killing themselves. The very instincts and energy that enabled you to create and maintain, for a while, six thousand years of civilization is now being wasted, denied, misdirected and drugged out of yourselves. What remains is smouldering and self destructive rage. Women have time and energy on their hands but instead of having babies or improving society, they "climb the corporate ladder" and have abortions. Men have time and energy on their hands but instead of expanding their providing of fatherly skills to the larger community they retreat to a fantasy world with video games and porn. I'm drawing a characterization here, but one that is applicable to millions of people, so don't dismiss it so quickly.
Look at traditional communities such as the Quakers. When they built their own homes they go on to build their neighbor's homes and their barns. They put their energy and vigor and zeal for life to work on a daily basis. They don't let it fester and get strange inside of them. If little boys have a lot of energy they run around in vigorous play, work in the fields, or help the adults, not sit behind a desk hour after hour trying to be docile humanoids. (Who then have to imagine they are superheroes on the Internet while watching porn). People are biologically evolved to be energetic and active, and to have a purpose in life (and that purpose is modest, not grandiose and inflated imaginings of intersteller combat). When people become purposeless yet at the same time fanticize about unreal scenarios based on sublimated rage, they end up taking a baby into a bathroom and torturing her to death. Women run around thinking it's a great idea to cut the baby from another mother's womb because "they want a baby." A Japanese man who is not socially on top of his game gets "tired of life" and runs over people before stabbing them to death. Men cruise looking for younger and younger boys and girls to pose with on the Internet. Slavery, which was defeated in this country, comes back as sex "industry" where hundreds of thousands of children, not adults, but children are enslaved to provide kicks for adults. Trust me, a hundred years ago these jackasses would never even thought of molesting a child because they'd be too tired at the end of the day working in the field, being cannon fodder in some army, or working for pennies in a factory to think of anything but being grateful for getting home to their wife and kids. Excess energy without purpose is turning many humans into raging monsters. Denying that humans have genuine gender differences (male and female) and that boys have certain skills and energy levels while girls have different ones is insane and counter productive. There were no porn addicts back when men and boys were busy with other things related to real life. Women didn't have multiple abortions and pop anti-depressives back when they kept busy, whether at home or on a job. (I'm not saying Ozzie and Harriet for everyone here).
To summarize, all of the things I listed above have created a blackened ruin with pitfalls everywhere that everyone is stuck living in and trying to do the right thing. But with the increase fakeness of society people have forgotten what any idiot knew about raising children a mere fifty years ago (with a few freak notable exceptions). It is important to understand that culture and society must support families and the ability to nurture and love their children so that children learn what they do not have instinctively, for only the animals have instinctive knowledge to raise their young with the correct amount of bonding. Humans need to be taught it by word and example, and most of all by experience. It deeply scares me how depraved and negative the "classroom" of humanity has become, and I don't mean teaching kids to worry about the polar bears. The challenge of single parenting would have been enough to create a societal crisis that is quite severe. Abortion as birth control has also broken the spirit and humanity of much of society. But when you place those problems within the context of the rage filled, unreal "reality show" of this society, it is alarming to the maximum. When decent adults have to fight to retain "custody of their eyes" to view even infants in an decent way, it's unbelievable how far humans have already fallen from where they were and where they could have been. I know first hand that there seems to be nothing too awful that someone will not think of it and do it to someone else and better yet, find a way to make money and commoditize it. Trust me, even Satan has been cringing for years now; this is all humanity's doing.
I only hope and pray that this generation of young people, who I have spent much time speaking in the direction of (since they don't respond to me yet, sigh) will be the vanguard to recognize what is really going on and defy the morbid laisse faire of their parents and society and change it again for the better. I hope this helps, especially the part about the need to be proactive in the creation of the fully emotional and thinking baby and human, since there seems to be the assumption that instinct is there, when it most assuredly is not (as all previous societies knew, which was why there was such family and faith based enculturation). Far from being narrow minded and oppressive, previous generations were providing the best and safest cradles for all infants and children as best they could and as they had learned was necessary to their full development.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
A pause to remember Warsaw ghetto
http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2008/04/20/last_survivor_honors_warsaw_ghetto_fighters/
WARSAW - The last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising paid silent tribute yesterday to the young Jews who launched the doomed revolt against Nazi troops 65 years ago.
Marek Edelman, 89, handed yellow tulips and daffodils to his grandchildren, Liza and Tomek. He watched as they placed them at the foot of the gray-and-black Monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto, located in a barren square at the heart of the former ghetto.
snip
The uprising was the first act of large-scale armed civilian resistance against the Germans in occupied Poland during World War II. The Nazis walled off the ghetto in November 1940, cramming 400,000 Jews from across Poland into it, under inhuman conditions.
On April 19, 1943, German troops started to liquidate the ghetto by sending tens of thousands of its residents to death camps. In the face of imminent death, several hundred young Jews took up arms in defense of the civilians.
They held off German troops for three weeks with homemade explosives and a cache of smuggled weapons. The uprising ended when its main leaders - rounded up by the Nazis - committed suicide on May 8, 1943. The Nazis then razed the ghetto, street by street.
***
Just a personal observation. My father was an American soldier during World War II, an Army paratrooper in the 101st and the 82nd Airborne Division. As a child I remember well two books we have in the family that he had obtained and kept. (This is very significant because we did not have a home library; to this day I only have two books, historical romantic novels, that he read for pleasure. Poor people used the library and only had the Bible as their personal book at home). But we had these books because they had photographs taken by the soldiers as they liberated the concentration camps, but they were not rescue photos. They were photos of the skeletal bodies they found, piled up to be dumped into open pits. These photos showed evidence of the physical hell on earth that humans had created for themselves. My brother, who was born in Germany during WWII and adopted by our dad, has custody of those two books. It is important that we continue to bear witness by listening to those who were there, who saw what happened, and who lived through it. My dad fell in love with and married a German lady (my mother), but he had no love lost for the Nazis, fighting and killing them into the heart of the Nazi empire. (My father was wounded by gun fire, shot through his left arm, but he returned to action with a cast on his arm. He also had his front teeth knocked out by a Nazi soldier's rifle butt, but my dad returned to action with dentures! ;-) As a small child I wondered why my dad had dentures, until I was old enough to understand the combat story.
My admiration for the man, Mr. Edelmen, profiled in the above article, who fought and survived, bearing witness.
One of the perfect components of the perfect address that Pope Benedict gave yesterday to youth and seminarians is his witness to what Nazis did, and what humans continue to have the capacity to do, both physically and spiritually:
My own years as a teenager were marred by a sinister regime that thought it had all the answers; its influence grew – infiltrating schools and civic bodies, as well as politics and even religion – before it was fully recognized for the monster it was. It banished God and thus became impervious to anything true and good. Many of your grandparents and great-grandparents will have recounted the horror of the destruction that ensued. Indeed, some of them came to America precisely to escape such terror.
Let us thank God that today many people of your generation are able to enjoy the liberties which have arisen through the extension of democracy and respect for human rights. Let us thank God for all those who strive to ensure that you can grow up in an environment that nurtures what is beautiful, good, and true: your parents and grandparents, your teachers and priests, those civic leaders who seek what is right and just.
The power to destroy does, however, remain. To pretend otherwise would be to fool ourselves. Yet, it never triumphs; it is defeated. This is the essence of the hope that defines us as Christians...
WARSAW - The last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising paid silent tribute yesterday to the young Jews who launched the doomed revolt against Nazi troops 65 years ago.
Marek Edelman, 89, handed yellow tulips and daffodils to his grandchildren, Liza and Tomek. He watched as they placed them at the foot of the gray-and-black Monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto, located in a barren square at the heart of the former ghetto.
snip
The uprising was the first act of large-scale armed civilian resistance against the Germans in occupied Poland during World War II. The Nazis walled off the ghetto in November 1940, cramming 400,000 Jews from across Poland into it, under inhuman conditions.
On April 19, 1943, German troops started to liquidate the ghetto by sending tens of thousands of its residents to death camps. In the face of imminent death, several hundred young Jews took up arms in defense of the civilians.
They held off German troops for three weeks with homemade explosives and a cache of smuggled weapons. The uprising ended when its main leaders - rounded up by the Nazis - committed suicide on May 8, 1943. The Nazis then razed the ghetto, street by street.
***
Just a personal observation. My father was an American soldier during World War II, an Army paratrooper in the 101st and the 82nd Airborne Division. As a child I remember well two books we have in the family that he had obtained and kept. (This is very significant because we did not have a home library; to this day I only have two books, historical romantic novels, that he read for pleasure. Poor people used the library and only had the Bible as their personal book at home). But we had these books because they had photographs taken by the soldiers as they liberated the concentration camps, but they were not rescue photos. They were photos of the skeletal bodies they found, piled up to be dumped into open pits. These photos showed evidence of the physical hell on earth that humans had created for themselves. My brother, who was born in Germany during WWII and adopted by our dad, has custody of those two books. It is important that we continue to bear witness by listening to those who were there, who saw what happened, and who lived through it. My dad fell in love with and married a German lady (my mother), but he had no love lost for the Nazis, fighting and killing them into the heart of the Nazi empire. (My father was wounded by gun fire, shot through his left arm, but he returned to action with a cast on his arm. He also had his front teeth knocked out by a Nazi soldier's rifle butt, but my dad returned to action with dentures! ;-) As a small child I wondered why my dad had dentures, until I was old enough to understand the combat story.
My admiration for the man, Mr. Edelmen, profiled in the above article, who fought and survived, bearing witness.
One of the perfect components of the perfect address that Pope Benedict gave yesterday to youth and seminarians is his witness to what Nazis did, and what humans continue to have the capacity to do, both physically and spiritually:
My own years as a teenager were marred by a sinister regime that thought it had all the answers; its influence grew – infiltrating schools and civic bodies, as well as politics and even religion – before it was fully recognized for the monster it was. It banished God and thus became impervious to anything true and good. Many of your grandparents and great-grandparents will have recounted the horror of the destruction that ensued. Indeed, some of them came to America precisely to escape such terror.
Let us thank God that today many people of your generation are able to enjoy the liberties which have arisen through the extension of democracy and respect for human rights. Let us thank God for all those who strive to ensure that you can grow up in an environment that nurtures what is beautiful, good, and true: your parents and grandparents, your teachers and priests, those civic leaders who seek what is right and just.
The power to destroy does, however, remain. To pretend otherwise would be to fool ourselves. Yet, it never triumphs; it is defeated. This is the essence of the hope that defines us as Christians...
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